Hegel's Philosophy of MindHegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
Philosophy
Hegel's Philosophy of Mind
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
Philosophy
Religion enters into its more adequate form when it ceases to appear in
the guise of Art and realises that the kingdom of God is within, that the
truth must be _felt_, the eternal _inwardly_ revealed, the holy one
apprehended by _faith_(18), not by outward vision. Eye hath not seen, nor
ear heard, the things of God. They cannot be presented, or delineated:
they come only in the witness of the spirit. The human soul itself is the
only worthy temple of the Most High, whom heaven, and the heaven of
heavens, cannot contain. Here in truth God has come down to dwell with
men; and the Son of Man, caught up in the effusion of the Spirit, can in
all assurance and all humility claim that he is divinified. Here
apparently Absolute Mind is reached: the soul knows no limitation, no
struggle: in time it is already eternal. Yet, there is, according to
Hegel, a flaw,—not in the essence and the matter, but in the manner and
mode in which the ordinary religious consciousness represents to itself,
or pictures that unification which it feels and experiences.
“In religion then this unification of ultimate Being with the Self is
implicitly reached. But the religious consciousness, if it has this
symbolic idea of its reconciliation, still has it as a mere symbol or
representation. It attains the satisfaction by tacking on to its pure
negativity, and that externally, the positive signification of its unity
with the ultimate Being: its satisfaction remains therefore tainted by the
antithesis of another world. Its own reconciliation, therefore, is
presented to its consciousness as something far away, something far away
in the future: just as the reconciliation which the other Self
accomplished appears as a far-away thing in the past. The one Divine Man
had but an implicit father and only an actual mother; conversely the
universal divine man, the community, has its own deed and knowledge for
its father, but for its mother only the eternal Love, which it only
_feels_, but does not _behold_ in its consciousness as an actual immediate
object. Its reconciliation therefore is in its heart, but still at
variance with its consciousness, and its actuality still has a flaw. In
its field of consciousness the place of implicit reality or side of pure
mediation is taken by the reconciliation that lies far away behind: the
place of the actually present, or the side of immediacy and existence, is
filled by the world which has still to wait for its transfiguration to
glory. Implicitly no doubt the world is reconciled with the eternal Being;
and that Being, it is well known, no longer looks upon the object as alien
to it, but in its love sees it as like itself. But for self-consciousness
this immediate presence is not yet set in the full light of mind. In its
immediate consciousness accordingly the spirit of the community is parted
from its religious: for while the religious consciousness declares that
they are implicitly not parted, this implicitness is not raised to reality
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