Hegel's Lectures on the History of Philosophy: Volume 3 (of 3)
Georg Hegel · en
and that liberty and equality are what ought to be regarded; in this the
subject also has his real value, even in relation to actuality.
One form of this reconciliation is likewise this, that the subject is
satisfied with himself and in himself as he stands and moves, with
his thoughts, his desires, with his spirituality; and thus that his
knowledge, his thought, his conviction, has come to be the highest, and
has the determination of the divine, of what holds good as absolute.
The divine and spiritual is thus implanted in my subjective spirit,
is identical with me; I myself am the universal, and it has efficacy
for me only as I directly know it. This form of reconciliation is the
newest, but the most one-sided. For the spiritual is not there determined
as objective, but is only comprehended as it is in my subjectivity,
in my consciousness: my conviction as such is taken as ultimate, and
that is the formal reconciliation of subjectivity with itself. If the
reconciliation has this form, the point of view of which we spoke before
has no longer any interest; it is past and a mere matter of history. If
the conviction as it immediately reveals itself within every subject
is the true, the absolute, this process of mediation between God, as
the true and absolute, and mankind, is no longer in us a necessity.
The doctrines of the Christian religion have likewise the position of
something foreign, pertaining to a particular time, that with which
certain men have occupied themselves. The conception that the Idea is
absolutely concrete, and is as spirit in a relation of opposition to the
subject, has disappeared, and only shows itself as having passed away.
In so far that which I have said about the principle of the Christian
system, and shall still say of the scholastics, has interest only from
the standpoint which I have given, when the interest is in the Idea in
its concrete determination, and not from the standpoint of the immediate
reconciliation of the subject with himself.