|
|
hegel_phenomenology_of_spirit_preface_part_3_.mp3
26. Pure self-knowledge in absolute otherness, this ether as such, is the very ground and
soil of science, that is, knowledge in its universality. The beginning of philosophy
presupposes or demands that consciousness feel at home in this element. However, this
element itself has its culmination and its transparency only through the movement of its
coming-to-be. It is pure spirituality, that is, the universal in the mode of simple
immediacy. Because it is the immediacy of spirit, because it is the substance of spirit, it
is transfigured essentiality, reflection that is itself simple, that is, is immediacy; it is
being that is a reflective turn into itself. For its part, science requires that self-
consciousness shall have elevated itself into this ether in order to be able to live with
science and to live in science, and, for that matter, to be able to live at all. Conversely,
the individual has the right to demand that science provide him at least with the ladder to
reach this standpoint. The individual's right is based on his absolute self-sufficiency,
which he knows he possesses in every shape of his knowledge, for in every shape,
whether recognized by science or not, and no matter what the content might be, the
individual is at the same time the absolute form, that is, he possesses immediate self-
certainty; and, if one were to prefer this expression, he thereby has an unconditioned
being. If the standpoint of consciousness, which is to say, the standpoint of knowing
objective things to be opposed to itself and knowing itself to be opposed to them, counts
as the other to science - if it is that the point where consciousness is at one with itself is
where it counts to an even greater degree as the loss of spirit - then in comparison the
element of science possesses for consciousness an other-worldly remoteness in which
consciousness is no longer in possession of itself. Each of these two parts seems to the
other to be a topsy-turvy inversion of the truth. For the natural consciousness to entrust
itself immediately to science would be to make an attempt, induced by it knows not what,
to walk upside down all of a sudden. The compulsion to accept this unaccustomed
attitude and to transport oneself in that way would be, so it would seem, a violence
imposed on it with neither any advance preparation nor with any necessity. - Science
may be in itself what it will, but in its relationship to immediate self-consciousness, it
presents itself as a topsy-turvy inversion of the latter, or, because immediate self-
consciousness is the principle of actuality, and since, for itself, immediate self-
consciousness exists outside of science, science takes the form of non-actuality.
Accordingly, science has to unite that element with itself or to a greater degree to show
both that such an element belongs to itself and how it belongs to it. Lacking actuality,
science is the in-itself, the purpose, which at the start is still something inner, at first not
as spirit but only as spiritual substance. It has to express itself and become for itself, and
this means nothing else than that it has to posit self-consciousness as being at one with
itself.
27. This coming-to-be of science itself, that is, of knowledge, is what is presented in this
phenomenology of spirit as the first part of the system of science. Knowledge, as it is at
first, that is, as immediate spirit, is devoid of spirit, is sensuous consciousness. In order
to become genuine knowledge, or in order to beget the element of science which is its
pure concept, immediate spirit must laboriously travel down a long path. - As it is
established in its content and in the shapes that appear within it, this coming-to-be
appears a bit differently from the way a set of instructions on how to take unscientific
consciousness up to and into science would appear; it also appears somewhat differently
from the way laying the foundations for science would appear. - In any case, it is
something very different from the inspiration which begins immediately, like a shot from
a pistol, with absolute knowledge, and which has already finished with all the other
standpoints simply by declaring that it will take no notice of them.
28. However, the task of leading the individual from his culturally immature standpoint
up to and into science had to be taken in its universal sense, and the universal individual,
the world spirit, had to be examined in the development of its cultural education. - With
regard to the relationship between these two, each moment, as it achieves concrete form
and its own shaping, appears in the universal individual. However, the particular
individual is an incomplete spirit, a concrete shape whose entire existence falls into one
determinateness and in which the other features are only present as intermingled traits. In
any spirit that stands higher than another, the lower concrete existence has descended to
the status of an insignificant moment; what was formerly at stake is now only a trace; its
shape has been covered over and has become a simple shading of itself. The individual
whose substance is spirit standing at the higher level runs through these past forms in the
way that a person who takes up a higher science goes through those preparatory studies
which he has long ago internalized in order to make their content present before him; he
calls them to mind without having his interest linger upon them. Each individual also
runs through the culturally formative stages of the universal spirit, but he runs through
them as shapes which spirit has already laid aside, as stages on a path that has been
worked out and leveled out in the same way that we see fragments of knowledge, which
in earlier ages occupied men of mature minds, now sink to the level of exercises, and
even to that of games for children, and in this pedagogical progression, we recognize the
history of the cultural maturation of the world sketched in silhouette. This past existence
has already become an acquired possession of the universal spirit; it constitutes the
substance of the individual, that is, his inorganic nature. - In this respect, the cultural
maturation of the individual regarded from his own point of view consists in his acquiring
all of this which is available, in his living off that inorganic nature and in his taking
possession of it for himself. Likewise, this is nothing but the universal spirit itself, that
is, substance giving itself its self-consciousness, that is, its coming-to-be and its reflective
turn into itself.
29. Science is the exposition of this culturally educative movement in its shaping, both in
terms of its detail and its necessity, as what has been diminished into a moment and a
possession of spirit. Even though the end is spirit's insight into what knowledge is,
impatience demands the impossible, namely, to achieve the end without the means. On
the one hand, the length of the path has to be endured, for each moment is necessary - but
on the other hand, one must linger at every stage on the way, for each stage is itself an
entire individual shape, and it is viewed absolutely only insofar as its determinateness is
viewed as a whole, that is, as concrete, or insofar as the whole is viewed in terms of the
distinctiveness of this determination. - Both because the substance of the individual, the
world spirit, has possessed the patience to pass through these forms over a long stretch of
time and to take upon itself the prodigious labor of world history, and because it could
not have reached consciousness about itself in any lesser way, the individual spirit itself
cannot comprehend its own substance with anything less. At the same time, it has less
trouble in doing so because in the meantime it has accomplished this in itself - the
content is already actuality reduced to possibility, immediacy which has been mastered.
That content, which is already what has been thought, is the possession of individuality.
It is no longer existence which is to be converted into being-in-itself. Rather, it is just the
in-itself which is to be converted into the form of being-for-itself. The way this is done is
now to be more precisely determined.
30. In this movement, although the individual is spared the sublation of existence, what
still remains is the representation of and the familiarity with the forms. The existence
taken back into the substance is by virtue of that first negation at first only immediately
transferred into the element of self. The element thus still has the same character of
uncomprehended immediacy, that is, of unmoved indifference as existence itself, that is,
it has only passed over into representational thought. - By virtue of that, it is at the
same time familiar to us, that is, it is the sort of thing that spirit has finished with, in
which spirit has no more activity, and, as a result, in which spirit has no further interest.
If the activity, which is finished with existence, is itself the immediate, or if it is the
existing mediation and thereby the movement merely of the particular spirit which is not
comprehending itself, then in contrast knowledge is both directed against the
representational thought which has come about through this immediacy and is directed
against this familiarity, and it is thus the activity of the universal self and the interest of
thought.
31. What is familiar and well-known as such is not really known for the very reason
that it is familiar and well-known. In the case of cognition, the most common form of
self-deception and deception of others is when one presupposes something as well-known
and then makes one's peace with it. In that kind of back-and-forth chatter about various
pros and cons, such knowledge, without knowing how it happens to it, never really gets
anywhere. Subject and object, God, nature, understanding, sensibility, etc., are, as well-
known, all unquestioningly laid as foundation stones which constitute fixed points from
which to start and to which to return. The movement proceeds here and there between
those points, which themselves remain unmoved, and it thereby operates merely upon the
surface. Thus, for a person to apprehend and to examine matters consists merely in
seeing whether he finds everything said by everybody else to match up with his own
idea about the matter, that is, with whether it seems that way to him and whether or not
it is something with which he is familiar.
32. As it used to be carried out, the analysis of a representation was indeed nothing but
the sublation of the form of its familiarity. To break up a representation into its original
elements is to return to its moments, which at least do not have the form of a
representation which one has simply stumbled across, but which instead constitute the
immediate possession of the self. To be sure, this analysis would only arrive at thoughts
which are themselves familiar and fixed, that is, it would arrive at motionless
determinations. However, what is separated, the non-actual itself, is itself an essential
moment, for the concrete is self-moving only because it divides itself and turns itself into
the non-actual. The act of separating is the force and labor of the understanding, the
most astonishing and the greatest of all the powers or, rather, which is the absolute
power. The circle, which, enclosed within itself, is at rest and which, as substance,
sustains its moments, is the immediate and is, for that reason, an unsurprising
relationship. However, the accidental, separated from its surroundings, attains an isolated
freedom and its own proper existence only in its being bound to other actualities and only
as existing in their context; as such, it is the tremendous power of the negative; it is the
energy of thought, of the pure I. Death, if that is what we wish to call that non-actuality,
is the most fearful thing of all, and to keep and hold fast to what is dead requires only the
greatest force. Powerless beauty detests the understanding because the understanding
expects of her what she cannot do. However, the life of spirit is not a life afraid of death
and austerely saving itself from ruin; rather, it bears death calmly, and in death, it sustains
itself. Spirit only wins its truth when it finds its feet within its absolute disruption. Spirit
is not this power which, as the positive, avoids looking at the negative, as is the case
when we say of something that it is nothing or that it is false, and then, being done with
it, go off on our own way on to something else. No, spirit is this power only when it
looks the negative in the face and lingers with it. This lingering is the magical power that
converts it into being. - This power is the same as what in the preceding was called the
subject, which, by virtue of giving existence to determinateness in its own element,
sublates abstract immediacy, that is, merely existing immediacy, and, by doing so, is
itself the true substance, is being, that is, is the immediacy which does not have mediation
external to itself but is itself this mediation.
33. That what is represented becomes a possession of pure self-consciousness, namely,
this elevation to universality itself, is only one aspect of cultural maturation and is not yet
fully perfected cultural maturation. - The course of studies of the ancient world is distinct
from that of modern times in that the ancient course of studies consisted in a
thoroughgoing cultivation of natural consciousness. Experimenting particularly with
each part of its existence and philosophizing about everything it came across, the ancient
course of studies fashioned itself into an altogether active universality. In contrast, in
modern times, the individual finds the abstract form ready-made. The strenuous effort to
grasp it and make it his own is more of an unmediated drive to bring the inner to the light
of day; it is the truncated creation of the universal rather than the emergence of the
universal from out of the concrete, from out of the diversity found within existence.
Nowadays the task before us consists not so much in purifying the individual of the
sensuously immediate and in making him into a thinking substance which has itself been
subjected to thought; it consists to an even greater degree in doing the very opposite. It
consists in actualizing and spiritually animating the universal by means of the sublation
of fixed and determinate thoughts. However, it is much more difficult to set fixed
thoughts into fluid motion than it is to bring sensuous existence into such fluidity. The
reason for this lies in what was said before. The former determinations have the I, the
power of the negative, that is, pure actuality, as their substance and as the element of their
existence, whereas sensuous determinations have their substance only in impotent
abstract immediacy, that is, in being as such. Thoughts become fluid when pure thinking,
this inner immediacy, takes cognizance of itself as a moment, that is, when pure self-
certainty abstracts from itself - it does not consist in merely omitting itself, or setting
itself off to one side. Rather, it consists in giving up the fixity of its self-positing as well
as the fixity of the purely concrete, which is the I itself in contrast to the distinctions of its
content - as the fixity of distinctions which, posited as existing within the element of pure
thought, share that unconditionedness of the I. By virtue of this movement, pure thoughts
become concepts, and are for the first time what they are in truth: Self-moving
movements, circles, which are what their substance is, namely, spiritual essentialities.
34. This movement of pure essentialities constitutes the nature of scientific rigor per se.
As the connectedness of its content, this movement is both the necessity of that content
and its growth into an organic whole. By way of this movement, the path along which
this concept of knowledge is attained likewise itself becomes a necessary and complete
coming-to-be. In that way, this preparation ceases to be a contingent philosophizing
which just happens to fasten onto this and those objects, relations, or thoughts which arise
from an imperfect consciousness and which have all the contingency such a
consciousness brings in its train. That is, it ceases to be the type of philosophizing which
seeks to ground the truth in merely clever argumentation about pros and cons or in
inferences based on fully determinate thoughts and the consequences following from
them. Instead, by virtue of the movement of the concept, this path will encompass the
complete worldliness of consciousness in its necessity.
35. Furthermore, such an account constitutes the first part of science, since the existence
of spirit as primary is nothing else but the immediate itself, that is, the beginning, which
is not yet its return into itself. Hence, the element of immediate existence is the
determinateness though which this part of science renders itself distinct from the other
parts. - Further specification of this distinction leads directly to the discussion of a few of
those idée fixe that usually turn up in these discussions.
36. The immediate existence of spirit, consciousness, has two moments, namely,
knowledge and the objectivity which is negative to knowledge. Since spirit develops
itself within this element and explicates its moments therein, this opposition corresponds
to these moments, and they all come on the scene as shapes of consciousness. The
science of this path is the science of the experience consciousness goes through.
Substance is considered in the way that it and its movement are the object of
consciousness. Consciousness knows and comprehends nothing but what is in its
experience, for what is in experience is just spiritual substance, to be precise, as the
object of its own self. However, spirit becomes the object, for it is this movement of
becoming an other to itself, which is to say, of becoming an object to its own self and of
sublating this otherness. And experience is exactly the name of this movement within
which the immediate, the non-experienced, i.e., the abstract (whether the abstract is that
of sensuous being or of "a simple" which has only been thought about) alienates itself
and then comes round to itself from out of this alienation. It is only at that point that, as a
property of consciousness, the immediate is exhibited in its actuality and in its truth.
37. The disparity which takes place in consciousness between the I and the substance
which is its object is their distinction, the negative itself. It can be viewed as the defect of
the two, but it is their very soul, that is, is what moves them. This is why certain ancients
conceived of the void as what moved things since they conceived of what moves things
as the negative, but they did not yet grasp this negative as the self. - If this negative now
initially appears as the disparity between the I and the object, then it is equally as much
the disparity of the substance with itself. What seems to take place outside of the
substance, to be an activity directed against it, is its own doing, and substance shows that
it is essentially subject. Since substance has completely shown this, spirit has brought its
existence into parity with its essence. Spirit is an object to itself in the way that it exists,
and the abstract element of immediacy and the separation between knowledge and truth is
overcome. Being is absolutely mediated - it is a substantial content which is equally
immediately the possession of the I, is self-like, that is, is the concept. With that, the
phenomenology of spirit brings itself to its conclusion. What spirit prepares for itself
within its phenomenology is the element of knowledge. Within this element, the
moments of spirit unfold themselves into the form of simplicity which knows its object to
be itself. They no longer fall apart into the opposition of being and knowing but instead
remain within the simplicity of knowing itself, and they are the truth in the form of the
truth, and their diversity is merely a diversity of content. Their movement, which
organizes itself within this element into a whole, is logic, that is, speculative philosophy.
本文於 修改第 2 次
|
本城市首頁
等級：5
