Part 28

Political power, which is developed similarly, but earlier than philosophy, from religion, exhibits the onesidedness, which in the actual world may infect its _implicitly_ true Idea, as demoralisation. Plato, in common with all his thinking contemporaries, perceived this demoralisation of democracy and the defectiveness even of its principle; he set in relief accordingly the underlying principle of the state, but could not work into his idea of it the infinite form of subjectivity, which still escaped his intelligence. His state is therefore, on its own showing, wanting in subjective liberty (§ 503 note, § 513, &c.). The truth which should be immanent in the state, should knit it together and control it, he, for these reasons, got hold of only the form of thought-out truth, of philosophy; and hence he makes that utterance that “so long as philosophers do not rule in the states, or those who are now called kings and rulers do not soundly and comprehensively philosophise, so long neither the state nor the race of men can be liberated from evils,—so long will the idea of the political constitution fall short of possibility and not see the light of the sun.” It was not vouchsafed to Plato to go on so far as to say that so long as true religion did not spring up in the world and hold sway in political life, so long the genuine principle of the state had not come into actuality. But so long too this principle could not emerge even in thought, nor could thought lay hold of the genuine idea of the state,—the idea of the substantial moral life, with which is identical the liberty of an independent self-consciousness. Only in the principle of mind, which is aware of its own essence, is implicitly in absolute liberty, and has its actuality in the act of self-liberation, does the absolute possibility and necessity exist for political power, religion, and the principles of philosophy coinciding in one, and for accomplishing the reconciliation of actuality in general with the mind, of the state with the religious conscience as well as with the philosophical consciousness. Self-realising subjectivity is in this case absolutely identical with substantial universality. Hence religion as such, and the state as such,—both as forms in which the principle exists—each contain the absolute truth: so that the truth, in its philosophic phase, is after all only in one of its forms. But even religion, as it grows and expands, lets other aspects of the Idea of humanity grow and expand also (§ 500 sqq.). As it is left therefore behind, in its first immediate, and so also one-sided phase, Religion may, or rather _must_, appear in its existence degraded to sensuous externality, and thus in the sequel become an influence to oppress liberty of spirit and to deprave political life. Still the principle has in it the infinite “elasticity” of the “absolute” form, so as to overcome this depraving of the form-determination (and of the content by these means), and to bring about the reconciliation of the spirit in itself. Thus ultimately, in the Protestant conscience the principles of the religious and of the ethical conscience come to be one and the same: the free spirit learning to see itself in its reasonableness and truth. In the Protestant state, the constitution and the code, as well as their several applications, embody the principle and the development of the moral life, which proceeds and can only proceed from the truth of religion, when reinstated in its original principle and in that way as such first become actual. The moral life of the state and the religious spirituality of the state are thus reciprocal guarantees of strength.

SECTION III. ABSOLUTE MIND(171).

§ 553. The _notion_ of mind has its _reality_ in the mind. If this reality in identity with that notion is to exist as the consciousness of the absolute Idea, then the necessary aspect is that the _implicitly_ free intelligence be in its actuality liberated to its notion, if that actuality is to be a vehicle worthy of it. The subjective and the objective spirit are to be looked on as the road on which this aspect of _reality_ or existence rises to maturity.

§ 554. The absolute mind, while it is self-centred _identity_, is always also identity returning and ever returned into itself: if it is the one and universal _substance_ it is so as a spirit, discerning itself into a self and a consciousness, for which it is as substance. _Religion_, as this supreme sphere may be in general designated, if it has on one hand to be studied as issuing from the subject and having its home in the subject, must no less be regarded as objectively issuing from the absolute spirit which as spirit is in its community.

That here, as always, belief or faith is not opposite to consciousness or knowledge, but rather to a sort of knowledge, and that belief is only a particular form of the latter, has been remarked already (§ 63 note). If nowadays there is so little consciousness of God, and his objective essence is so little dwelt upon, while people speak so much more of the subjective side of religion, i.e. of God’s indwelling in us, and if that and not the truth as such is called for,—in this there is at least the correct principle that God must be apprehended as spirit in his community.

§ 555. The subjective consciousness of the absolute spirit is essentially and intrinsically a process, the immediate and substantial unity of which is the _Belief_ in the witness of the spirit as the _certainty_ of objective truth. Belief, at once this immediate unity and containing it as a reciprocal dependence of these different terms, has in _devotion_—the implicit or more explicit act of worship (_cultus_)—passed over into the process of superseding the contrast till it becomes spiritual liberation, the process of authenticating that first certainty by this intermediation, and of gaining its concrete determination, viz. reconciliation, the actuality of the spirit.

Sub-Section A. Art.

§ 556. As this consciousness of the Absolute first takes shape, its immediacy produces the factor of finitude in Art. On one hand that is, it breaks up into a work of external common existence, into the subject which produces that work, and the subject which contemplates and worships it. But, on the other hand, it is the concrete _contemplation_ and mental picture of implicitly absolute spirit as the _Ideal_. In this ideal, or the concrete shape born of the subjective spirit, its natural immediacy, which is only a _sign_ of the Idea, is so transfigured by the informing spirit in order to express the Idea, that the figure shows it and it alone:—the shape or form of _Beauty_.

§ 557. The sensuous externality attaching to the beautiful,—the _form of immediacy_ as such,—at the same time _qualifies_ what it _embodies_: and the God (of art) has with his spirituality at the same time the stamp upon him of a natural medium or natural phase of existence—He contains the so-called _unity_ of nature and spirit—i.e. the immediate unity in sensuously intuitional form—hence not the spiritual unity, in which the natural would be put only as “ideal,” as superseded in spirit, and the spiritual content would be only in self-relation. It is not the absolute spirit which enters this consciousness. On the subjective side the community has of course an ethical life, aware, as it is, of the spirituality of its essence: and its self-consciousness and actuality are in it elevated to substantial liberty. But with the stigma of immediacy upon it, the subject’s liberty is only a _manner of life_, without the infinite self-reflection and the subjective inwardness of _conscience_. These considerations govern in their further developments the devotion and the worship in the religion of fine art.

§ 558. For the objects of contemplation it has to produce, Art requires not only an external given material—(under which are also included subjective images and ideas), but—for the expression of spiritual truth—must use the given forms of nature with a significance which art must divine and possess (cf. § 411). Of all such forms the human is the highest and the true, because only in it can the spirit have its corporeity and thus its visible expression.

This disposes of the principle of the _imitation of nature_ in art: a point on which it is impossible to come to an understanding while a distinction is left thus abstract,—in other words, so long as the natural is only taken in its externality, not as the “characteristic” meaningful nature-form which is significant of spirit.

§ 559. In such single shapes the “absolute” mind cannot be made explicit: in and to art therefore the spirit is a limited natural spirit whose implicit universality, when steps are taken to specify its fullness in detail, breaks up into an indeterminate polytheism. With the essential restrictedness of its content, Beauty in general goes no further than a penetration of the vision or image by the spiritual principle,—something formal, so that the thought embodied, or the idea, can, like the material which it uses to work in, be of the most diverse and unessential kind, and still the work be something beautiful and a work of art.

§ 560. The one-sidedness of _immediacy_ on the part of the Ideal involves the opposite one-sidedness (§ 556) that it is something _made_ by the artist. The subject or agent is the mere technical activity: and the work of art is only then an expression of the God, when there is no sign of subjective particularity in it, and the net power of the indwelling spirit is conceived and born into the world, without admixture and unspotted from its contingency. But as liberty only goes as far as there is thought, the action inspired with the fullness of this indwelling power, the artist’s _enthusiasm_, is like a foreign force under which he is bound and passive; the artistic _production_ has on its part the form of natural immediacy, it belongs to the _genius_ or particular endowment of the artist,—and is at the same time a labour concerned with technical cleverness and mechanical externalities. The work of art therefore is just as much a work due to free option, and the artist is the master of the God.

§ 561. In work so inspired the reconciliation appears so obvious in its initial stage that it is without more ado accomplished in the subjective self-consciousness, which is thus self-confident and of good cheer, without the depth and without the sense of its antithesis to the absolute essence. On the further side of the perfection (which is reached in such reconciliation, in the beauty of _classical art_) lies the art of sublimity,—_symbolic art_, in which the figuration suitable to the Idea is not yet found, and the thought as going forth and wrestling with the figure is exhibited as a negative attitude to it, and yet all the while toiling to work itself into it. The meaning or theme thus shows it has not yet reached the infinite form, is not yet known, not yet conscious of itself, as free spirit. The artist’s theme only is as the abstract God of pure thought, or an effort towards him,—a restless and unappeased effort which throws itself into shape after shape as it vainly tries to find its goal.

§ 562. In another way the Idea and the sensuous figure it appears in are incompatible; and that is where the infinite form, subjectivity, is not as in the first extreme a mere superficial personality, but its inmost depth, and God is known not as only seeking his form or satisfying himself in an external form, but as only finding himself in himself, and thus giving himself his adequate figure in the spiritual world alone. _Romantic art_ gives up the task of showing him as such in external form and by means of beauty: it presents him as only condescending to appearance, and the divine as the heart of hearts in an externality from which it always disengages itself. Thus the external can here appear as contingent towards its significance.

The Philosophy of Religion has to discover the logical necessity in the progress by which the Being, known as the Absolute, assumes fuller and firmer features; it has to note to what particular feature the kind of cultus corresponds,—and then to see how the secular self-consciousness, the consciousness of what is the supreme vocation of man,—in short how the nature of a nation’s moral life, the principle of its law, of its actual liberty, and of its constitution, as well as of its art and science, corresponds to the principle which constitutes the substance of a religion. That all these elements of a nation’s actuality constitute one systematic totality, that one spirit creates and informs them, is a truth on which follows the further truth that the history of religions coincides with the world-history.

As regards the close connexion of art with the various religions it may be specially noted that _beautiful_ art can only belong to those religions in which the spiritual principle, though concrete and intrinsically free, is not yet absolute. In religions where the Idea has not yet been revealed and known in its free character, though the craving for art is felt in order to bring in imaginative visibility to consciousness the idea of the supreme being, and though art is the sole organ in which the abstract and radically indistinct content,—a mixture from natural and spiritual sources,—can try to bring itself to consciousness;—still this art is defective; its form is defective because its subject-matter and theme is so,—for the defect in subject-matter comes from the form not being immanent in it. The representations of this symbolic art keep a certain tastelessness and stolidity—for the principle it embodies is itself stolid and dull, and hence has not the power freely to transmute the external to significance and shape. Beautiful art, on the contrary, has for its condition the self-consciousness of the free spirit,—the consciousness that compared with it the natural and sensuous has no standing of its own: it makes the natural wholly into the mere expression of spirit, which is thus the inner form that gives utterance to itself alone.

But with a further and deeper study, we see that the advent of art, in a religion still in the bonds of sensuous externality, shows that such religion is on the decline. At the very time it seems to give religion the supreme glorification, expression and brilliancy, it has lifted the religion away over its limitation. In the sublime divinity to which the work of art succeeds in giving expression the artistic genius and the spectator find themselves at home, with their personal sense and feeling, satisfied and liberated: to them the vision and the consciousness of free spirit has been vouchsafed and attained. Beautiful art, from its side, has thus performed the same service as philosophy: it has purified the spirit from its thraldom. The older religion in which the need of fine art, and just for that reason, is first generated, looks up in its principle to an other-world which is sensuous and unmeaning: the images adored by its devotees are hideous idols regarded as wonder-working talismans, which point to the unspiritual objectivity of that other world,—and bones perform a similar or even a better service than such images. But even fine art is only a grade of liberation, not the supreme liberation itself.—The genuine objectivity, which is only in the medium of thought,—the medium in which alone the pure spirit is for the spirit, and where the liberation is accompanied with reverence,—is still absent in the sensuous beauty of the work of art, still more in that external, unbeautiful sensuousness.

§ 563. Beautiful Art, like the religion peculiar to it, has its future in true religion. The restricted value of the Idea passes utterly and naturally into the universality identical with the infinite form;—the vision in which consciousness has to depend upon the senses passes into a self-mediating knowledge, into an existence which is itself knowledge,—into _revelation_. Thus the principle which gives the Idea its content is that it embody free intelligence, and as “absolute” _spirit it is for the spirit_.

Sub-Section B. Revealed Religion(172).

§ 564. It lies essentially in the notion of religion,—the religion i.e. whose content is absolute mind—that it be _revealed_, and, what is more, revealed _by God_. Knowledge (the principle by which the substance is mind) is a self-determining principle, as infinite self-realising form,—it therefore is manifestation out and out. The spirit is only spirit in so far as it is for the spirit, and in the absolute religion it is the absolute spirit which manifests no longer abstract elements of its being but itself.

The old conception—due to a one-sided survey of human life—of Nemesis, which made the divinity and its action in the world only a levelling power, dashing to pieces everything high and great,—was confronted by Plato and Aristotle with the doctrine that God is not _envious_. The same answer may be given to the modern assertions that man cannot ascertain God. These assertions (and more than assertions they are not) are the more illogical, because made within a religion which is expressly called the revealed; for according to them it would rather be the religion in which nothing of God was revealed, in which he had not revealed himself, and those belonging to it would be the heathen “who know not God.” If the word of God is taken in earnest in religion at all, it is from Him, the theme and centre of religion, that the method of divine knowledge may and must begin: and if self-revelation is refused Him, then the only thing left to constitute His nature would be to ascribe envy to Him. But clearly if the word Mind is to have a meaning, it implies the revelation of Him.

If we recollect how intricate is the knowledge of the divine Mind for those who are not content with the homely pictures of faith but proceed to thought,—at first only “rationalising” reflection, but afterwards, as in duty bound, to speculative comprehension, it may almost create surprise that so many, and especially theologians whose vocation it is to deal with these Ideas, have tried to get off their task by gladly accepting anything offered them for this behoof. And nothing serves better to shirk it than to adopt the conclusion that man knows nothing of God. To know what God as spirit is—to apprehend this accurately and distinctly in thoughts—requires careful and thorough speculation. It includes, in its fore-front, the propositions: God is God only so far as he knows himself: his self-knowledge is, further, his self-consciousness in man, and man’s knowledge _of_ God, which proceeds to man’s self-knowledge in God.—See the profound elucidation of these propositions in the work from which they are taken: _Aphorisms on Knowing and Not-knowing, &c._, by C. F. G—l.: Berlin 1829.

§ 565. When the immediacy and sensuousness of shape and knowledge is superseded, God is, in point of content, the essential and actual spirit of nature and spirit, while in point of form he is, first of all, presented to consciousness as a mental representation. This quasi-pictorial representation gives to the elements of his content, on one hand, a separate being, making them presuppositions towards each other, and phenomena which succeed each other; their relationship it makes a series of events according to finite reflective categories. But, on the other hand, such a form of finite representationalism is also overcome and superseded in the faith which realises one spirit and in the devotion of worship.

§ 566. In this separating, the form parts from the content: and in the form the different functions of the notion part off into special spheres or media, in each of which the absolute spirit exhibits itself; (α) as eternal content, abiding self-centred, even in its manifestation; (β) as distinction of the eternal essence from its manifestation, which by this difference becomes the phenomenal world into which the content enters; (γ) as infinite return, and reconciliation with the eternal being, of the world it gave away—the withdrawal of the eternal from the phenomenal into the unity of its fullness.

§ 567. (α) Under the “moment” of _Universality_,—the sphere of pure thought or the abstract medium of essence,—it is therefore the absolute spirit, which is at first the presupposed principle, not however staying aloof and inert, but (as underlying and essential power under the reflective category of causality) creator of heaven and earth: but yet in this eternal sphere rather only begetting himself as his _son_, with whom, though different, he still remains in original identity,—just as, again, this differentiation of him from the universal essence eternally supersedes itself, and, though this mediating of a self-superseding mediation, the first substance is essentially as _concrete individuality_ and subjectivity,—is the _Spirit_.

§ 568. (β) Under the “moment” of _particularity_, or of judgment, it is this concrete eternal being which is presupposed: its movement is the creation of the phenomenal world. The eternal “moment” of mediation—of the only Son—divides itself to become the antithesis of two separate worlds. On one hand is heaven and earth, the elemental and the concrete nature,—on the other hand, standing in action and reaction with such nature, the spirit, which therefore is finite. That spirit, as the extreme of inherent negativity, completes its independence till it becomes wickedness, and is that extreme through its connexion with a confronting nature and through its own naturalness thereby investing it. Yet, amid that naturalness, it is, when it thinks, directed towards the Eternal, though, for that reason, only standing to it in an external connexion.

§ 569. (γ) Under the “moment” of _individuality_ as such,—of subjectivity and the notion itself, in which the contrast of universal and particular has sunk to its identical ground, the place of presupposition (1) is taken by the _universal_ substance, as actualised out of its abstraction into an _individual_ self-consciousness. This individual, who as such is identified with the essence,—(in the Eternal sphere he is called the Son)—is transplanted into the world of time, and in him wickedness is implicitly overcome. Further, this immediate, and thus sensuous, existence of the absolutely concrete is represented as putting himself in judgment and expiring in the pain of _negativity_, in which he, as infinite subjectivity, keeps himself unchanged, and thus, as absolute return from that negativity and as universal unity of universal and individual essentiality, has realised his being as the Idea of the spirit, eternal, but alive and present in the world.

§ 570. (2) This objective totality of the divine man who is the Idea of the spirit is the implicit presupposition for the _finite_ immediacy of the single subject. For such subject therefore it is at first an Other, an object of contemplating vision,—but the vision of implicit truth, through which witness of the spirit in him, he, on account of his immediate nature, at first characterised himself as nought and wicked. But, secondly, after the example of his truth, by means of the faith on the unity (in that example implicitly accomplished) of universal and individual essence, he is also the movement to throw off his immediacy, his natural man and self-will, to close himself in unity with that example (who is his implicit life) in the pain of negativity, and thus to know himself made one with the essential Being. Thus the Being of Beings (3) through this mediation brings about its own indwelling in self-consciousness, and is the actual presence of the essential and self-subsisting spirit who is all in all.