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sacked and plundered, since the waking consciousness has forcibly taken to itself every distinction and
expansion of it and claimed every one of its parts for earth, and returned them to the earth that owns them.
Yet belief is not on that account satisfied, for this illumination has everywhere brought to light only what is
individual, with the result that only insubstantial realities and finitude forsaken of spirit make any appeal to
spirit.
Since belief is without content and cannot continue in this barren condition, or since, in getting beyond
finitude, which is the sole content, it finds merely the empty void, it is a sheer longing: its truth is an empty
beyond, for which there is no longer any appropriate content to be found, for everything is appropriated and
applied in other ways.
Belief in this manner has in fact become the same as enlightenment-the conscious attitude of relating finite
that inherently exists to an unknown and unknowable Absolute without predicates; the difference is merely
that the one is enlightenment satisfied, while belief is enlightenment unsatisfied.(9) It win yet be seen
whether enlightenment can continue in its state of satisfaction; that longing of the troubled, beshadowed
spirit, mourning over the loss of its spiritual world, lies in the background. Enlightenment has on it this stain
of unsatisfied longing:--in its empty Absolute Being we find this in the form of the pure abstract object; in
passing beyond its individual nature to an unfulfilled beyond, the stain appears as an act and a process; in the
selflessness of what is "useful" it is seen in the form of a sensuous concrete object. Enlightenment will
remove this stain: by considering more closely the positive result which constitutes the truth for it, we shall
find that the stain is implicitly removed already.
1. "We live in an age of enlightenment" (Kant). Cp. Hegel W. W. 15 introduction to "French Philosophy".
2. Rameau's Neffe.
3. In the life of "feeling" and "emotion".
4. Cp. the view of God held by Fichte: also Feuerbach:-Wesen der Religion.
5. Enlightenment attacks the object and the basis of belief, and the mode of worship.
a. THE STRUGGLE OF ENLIGHTENMENT WITH SUPERSTITION(1) 209
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6. The cult.
7. Cp. 1 Timothy iv. 8: "Godliness is profitable unto all things."
8. i.e. the life of feeling.
9. i.e. the contrast between belief and enlightenment becomes a contrast inside enlightenment itself.
b. THE TRUTH OF ENLIGHTENMENT(1)
THE spirit that sullenly works and weaves without further distinctions within itself has thus passed into itself
away beyond consciousness, which, on the other hand, has arrived at clearness as to itself. The first moment
of this clearness of mind is determined, in regard to its necessity and condition, by the fact that pure insight,
or insight that is implicitly and per se notion, actualizes itself; it does so when it gives otherness or
determinateness a place in its own nature. In this manner it is negative pure insight, i.e. the negation of the
notion; this negation is equally pure; and herewith has arisen the pure and simple "thing", the Absolute Being,
that has no further determination of any sort. If we define this more precisely, insight in the sense of absolute
notion is a distinguishing of distinctions that are not so any longer, of abstractions or pure notions that no
longer support themselves but find a fixed hold and a distinction only by means of the whole life of the
process. This distinguishing of what is not distinguished consists just in the fact that the absolute notion
makes itself its object, and as against that process asserts itself to be the essence. The essence hereby is
without the aspect wherein abstractions or distinctions are kept apart, and hence becomes pure thought in the
sense of a pure thing.
This, then, is just the dull, silent, unconscious working and weaving of the spirit at the loom of its own being,
to which belief, as we saw, sank back when it lost all distinction in its content. And this is at the same time
that movement of pure self-consciousness, in regard to which the essence is intended to be the absolutely
exter- nal beyond. For, because this pure self-consciousness is a movement working in pure notions, in
distinctions that are no distinctions, pure self-consciousness collapses in fact into that unconscious working
and weaving of spirit, i.e. into pure feeling, or pure thinghood.
The self-alienated notion--for the notion still stands here at the level of such alienation-does not, however,
recognize this identical nature constituting both sides, --the movement of self-consciousness and its
absolute Reality,-does not recognize the identity of their nature, which, in point of fact, is their very
substance and subsistence. Since the notion is not aware of this unity, absolute Reality has significance for it
merely in the form of an objective beyond, while the consciousness making these distinctions, and in this way
keeping the ultimate reality outside itself, is treated as a finite consciousness.
Regarding that Absolute Being, enlightenment itself falls out with itself in the same way as it did formerly
with belief, and is divided between the views of two parties. One party proves itself to be victorious by the
fact that it breaks up into two parties; for in that fact it shows it possesses within it the principle it combats,
and consequently shows it has abolished the one-sidedness with which it formerly made its appearance. The
interest which was divided between it and the other, now falls entirely within it, and forgets the other,
because that interest finds lying in it alone the opposition on which its attention is directed. At the same time,
however, the opposition has been lifted into the higher victorious element, where it manifests itself in a
clarified form. So that the schism that arises in one party, and seems a misfortune, demonstrates rather its
good fortune.
The pure essence itself has in it no distinction; consequently distinction is reached by two such pure essences
being put forward for consciousness to be aware of, or by a twofold consciousness of the pure reality. The
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pure absolute essence is only in pure thought, or rather it is pure thought itself, and thus absolutely beyond
the finite, beyond self-consciousness, and is merely the ultimate essence in a negative sense. But in this way
it is just being, the negative of self-consciousness. Being negative of self-consciousness, it is also related to
self-consciousness. It is external being, which, placed in relation to self-consciousness within which
distinctions and determinations fall, acquires within it the distinctions, of being tasted, seen, and so on; and
the relationship is that of sense-experience and perception.
Taking the point of departure from this sense-existence, into which that negative beyond necessarily passes,
but abstracting from those various ways in which consciousness is related to sense-existence, there is left
pure matter as that in which consciousness weaves and moves inarticulately within itself. In dealing with this,
the essential point to note is that pure matter is merely what remains over when we abstract from seeing,
feeling, tasting, etc., i.e. it is not what is seen, tasted, felt, and so on; it is not matter that is seen, felt, or tasted,
but colour, a stone, a salt, and so on. Matter is really pure abstraction; and, being so, we have here the pure
essential nature of thought, or pure thought itself, as the Absolute without predicates, undetermined, having
no distinctions within it.(2)
The one kind of enlightenment calls absolute Being that predicateless Absolute, which exists in thought
beyond the actual consciousness from which this enlightenment started; the other calls it matter. If they were [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]