-
Self-consciousness knows duty to be the absolute
essence. It is bound only by duty, and this substance is its own
pure consciousness, for which duty cannot receive the form of
something alien. However, as thus locked up within itself, moral
self-consciousness is not yet posited and considered as conscious-
ness. The object is immediate knowledge, and, being thus per-
meated purely by the self is not an object. But because self-con-
sciousness is, essentially a mediation and negativity, its Notion
implies relation to an otherness and [thus] is consciousness. This
otherness, because duty constitutes the sole aim and object of
consciousness, is, on the one hand, a reality completely without
significance for consciousness. But because this consciousness is
so completely locked up within itself, it behaves with perfect
freedom and indifference towards this otherness; and therefore
the existence of this otherness, on the other hand, is left com-
pletely free by self-consciousness, an existence that similarly is
related only to itself. The freer self-consciousness becomes, the
freer also is the negative object of its consciousness. The object
has thus become a complete world within itself with an indivi-
duation of its own, a self-subsistent whole of laws peculiar to
itself,as wen as an independent operation of those laws, and
a free realization of them-in general, a Nature whose laws like
its actions belong to itself as a being which is indifferent to moral
self… consciousness, just as the latter is indifferent to it. -
From this determination is developed a moral view of
the world which consists in the relation between the absoluteness
of morality and the absoluteness of Nature. This relation is
based, on the one hand, on the complete indifference. and in-
dependence of Nature towards moral purposes and activity,
and, on the other hand, on the consciousness of duty alone as
the essential fact, and of Nature as completely devoid of inde-
pendence and essential being. The moral view of the world con-
tains the development of the moments which are present in this
relation of such completely conflicting presuppositions. -
To begin with, then, the moral consciousness as such
is presupposed; duty is the essence for this consciousness which
is actual and active, and in its actuality and action fulfills its
duty. But this moral consciousness is at the same time. faced
with the presupposed freedom of Nature; in other words, it
learns from experience that Nature is not concerned with giving
the moral consciousness a sense of the unity of its reality with
that of Nature, and hence that Nature perhaps may let it
become happy, or perhaps may not. The non-moral conscious-
ness, on the other hand, finds, perhaps by chance, its realization
where the moral consciousness sees only an occasion for acting,
but doesn’t see itself obtaining, through its action, the happi-
ness of performance and the enjoyment of achievement. There-
fore, it finds rather cause for complaint about such a state of
incompatibility between itself and existence, and about the in-
justice which restricts it to having its object merely as a pure
duty, but refuses to let it see the object and itself realized. -
The moral consciousness cannot forego happiness and
leave this element out of its absolute purpose. The purpose,
which is expressed as pure duty, essentially implies this individual
self-consciousness; individual conviction and the knowledge of it
constitute an absolute element in morality. This element in the
objectified purpose, in the fulfilled duty, is the individual conscious-
ness that beholds itself as realized; in other words, it is
enjoyment, which is thus implied in the Notion of morality, not
indeed immediately, in morality regarded as sentiment or dis-
position, but only in the Notion of its actualization. This, how-
ever, means that enjoyment is also implied in morality as dis-
position, for this does not remain disposition in contrast to
action, but proceeds to act of to realize itself. Thus the purpose,
expressed as the whole with the consciousness of its moments,
is that the fulfilled duty is just as much a moral action as a real-
ized individuality, and that Nature, the aspect of individuality
in contrast to the abstract purpose, is one with this purpose.
Necessary as is the experience of the disharmony of the two
sides, because Nature is free, even so, what is essential is duty
alone, and Nature contrasted with it is devoid of a self. 'That
purpose in its entirety which the harmony of the two constitutes,
contains within it actuality itself. It is at the same time the
thought of actuality. The harmony of morality and Nature-or,
since Nature comes into account only in so far as consciousness
experiences its unity with it-the harmony of morality and
happiness, is thought of as something that necessarily is, i.e. it
is postulated. For to say that something is demanded, means that
something is thought of in the form of being that ·is not yet
actual-a necessity not of the Notion qua Notion, but of being.
But necessity is at the same time essentially relation based on
the Notion. The being that is demanded, then, is not the ima-
gined being of a contingent consciousness, but is implied in the
Notion of morality itself, whose true content is the unity- of the
pure and the individual consciousness; it is for the latter to see
that this unity be, or it, an actuality: in the content of the purpose
this is happiness, but in its form, is existence in general. The
existence thus demanded, i.e. the unity of both, is therefore not
a wish nor, regarded as purpose, one whose attainment were
still uncertain it is rather a demand of Reason, or an immediate
certainty and presupposition of Reason.
If you want people to actually read it, you should put the thing into actual sentences and actual paragraphs instead of chopping it all up like that.
Just a suggestion.
I’m sorry you have a problem reading. I wonder what you are doing here.
I didn’t “chop up” anything.
Just. Wow. Average ILP moments.
Atoms are divisible.
But essence is not divisible.
If self is essential, it is not the product of division.
Division releases energy.
The fuel a person uses, is similar to what he is made of.
Perhaps the fuel of the mind is similar to the mind.
What i quoted is what i read of this, so far…
I’ll read more later, maybe.
This kind of stuff is foreign to me,
so i have to process it a little bit.
Hegel’s problem was not that he didn’t write to be understood by retards, but that he simply did not go nearly far enough. Imagine if scientists managed, after a lot of work, to decode 5% of the human genome, then they just stopped and were like “Yep, all good here.” Reading Hegel is like that, getting pure 100% truth on 5% of reality. But compared to getting maybe 75% pure truth at best anywhere else on any scope of reality, it’s something at least.
Anyone who would understand that philosophy no longer exists, themselves would be a statistical impossibility to exist in today’s world. Truth has hidden itself away. Why? If I had to guess, because something very terrible is coming to make war against the truth itself. Truth buries itself deeper into the metaphysical layers in order to weather the coming storm.
Thanks, those are useful points that you bring to the discussion.
Whether or not something is ‘divisible’ seems a matter for science. Take an idea. Is an idea, any idea, divisible? What would that even mean to divide an idea?
It would be some kind of categorical error to try and apply physical properties to non-physical things. And yet the universe of ideas does exist. What does that mean? We could read mountains of Plato to try and find out, lol. But in the end, metaphysics simply exists, it is and it is what it is. Probably to be understood properly only on its own terms, which would also mean by a larger more comprehensive perspective which takes it into account as well as a whole lot more.
“The fuel of the mind is similar to the mind.”
Yes, I think so. I think the mind is made out of itself, or said more precisely: consciousness is made out of its own contents (of consciousness). The mind, over time, accumulates “mental moments”, ideas/images/etc and these become constitutive of that mentality itself, in time. After all just think about what it means to be conscious: to be aware of something, to comprehend or at least apprehend. The notion of consciousness immediately and necessarily implies the what of consciousness, what is the object of consciousness in that moment? If consciousness had no objects at all then in what sense could we even say it even exists?
As far as i see right now,
Hegel is trying to talk about the moral compared to the natural.
I think nature is many, not One.
Likewise, morals are many, not One.
Objects appear to be individuals,
but they are not One, they are many
[chemistry, combinations].
How the world works, is different
than how our body and mind works.
Likewise, the world is nature,
but the individual is moral/valuating.
Not sure what else to say.
Maybe later ill come up with something.
(I read the rest of the OP now)
Spectrum. Self=other is one/whole, but there are many child wholes within the parent whole, as with graded absolutism.
Phenomenology is the only higher path to truth, but to get there you must first walk the other lower paths such as metaphysics, existentialism, epistemology, political philosophy, philosophy of science, logic, ethics, ontology. Get to know these paths intimately, they will show you their unique truths. Then eventually you’ll find your way onto the phenomenological path, if indeed you are still and always have been a truth-seeker.
Not to say that Hegel is the best example of phenomenology, but he is pretty good. Still the best phenomenological thinker and truth-discoverer will always be… you yourself. And if you don’t understand that then you still have more walking down lower paths to do. And there’s nothing wrong with that.
-
But the world is not merely this Spirit cast out and dis-
persed into the fulness [of natural existence] and its external
ordering; for since Spirit is essentially the simple Self, this Self
is equally presenting the world: it is the existent Spirit, which
is the individual Self which has consciousness and distinguishes
itself as ‘other’, or as world, from itself. This individual Self as
at first thus immediately posited, is not yet Spirit for itself; it
does not exist as Spirit; it can be called ‘innocent’ but hardly
‘good’. Before it can in fact be Self and Spirit it must first
become an ‘other’ to its own self, just as the eternal Being
exhibits itself as the movement of being self-identical in its oth-
erness. Since this Spirit is determined as at first an immediate
existence, or as dispersed into the multifariousness of its con-
sciousness, its othering of itself is the withdrawal into itself, or
self-centredness, of knowing as such. Immediate existence sud-
denly turns into thought, or mere sense-consciousness into
consciousness of thought; and , moreover, because the thought
stems from immediacy or is conditioned thought, it is not pure
knowledge, but thought that is charged with otherness and is,
therefore, the self-opposed thought of Good and Evil. Man is
pictorially thought of in this way: that it once happened, without
any necessity, that he lost the form of being at one with himself
through plucking the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of Good
and Evil, and was expelled from the state of innocence, from
Nature which yielded its fruits without toil, and from Paradise,
from the garden with its creatures. -
Since this withdrawal into itself or self-centredness of
the existent consciousness immediately makes it self-discordant,
Evil appears as the primary existence of the inwardly-turned
consciousness; and because the thoughts of Good and Evil are
utterly opposed and this antithesis is not yet resolved, this con-
sciousness is essentially only evil. But at the same time, on
account of this antithesis, there is also present the good con-
sciousness opposing it, and their relation to each other. In so
far as immediate existence suddenly changes into Thought, and
the being-within-self is on the one hand itself a thinking, while
on the other hand the moment of the othering of essence is more
precisely determined by it–[because of this double aspect] the
becoming of Evil can be shifted further back out of the existent
world even into the primary realm of Thought. It can therefore
be said that it is the very first-born Son of Light [Lucifer] him-
self who fell because he withdrew into himself or became self-
centered, but that in his place another was at once created. Such
a form of expression as ‘fallen’ which, like the expression ‘Son’,
belongs, moreover, to picture-thinking and not to the Notion,
degrades the moments of the Notion to the level of picture-
thinking or carries picture-thinking over into the realm of
thought. Likewise it makes no difference if we co-ordinate a
multiplicity of other shapes with the simple thought of otherness
in the eternal Being and transfer the self-centredness into them.
In fact, this co-ordination must be approved, since by means
of it this moment of otherness also expresses diversity, as it should;
and, moreover, not as plurality in general, but also as a specific
diversity, so that one part, the Son, is that which is simple and
knows itself to be essential Being, while the other part is the
alienation, the externalization of being-for-self which lives only
to praise that Being; to this part, then, can be assigned the tak-
ing back again of the externalized being-for-self and the with-
drawal into self of the evil principle. In so far as the otherness
falls into two parts, Spirit might, as regards its moments–if
these are to be counted–be more exactly expressed as a qua-
ternity in unity or, because the quantity itself again falls into
two parts, viz. one part which has remained good and the other
which has become evil, might even be expressed as a five-in-
one. But to count the moments can be reckoned’ as altogether
useless, since in the first place what is differentiated is itself just
as much only one thing–viz. the thought of the difference which
is only one thought as it [the differentiated] is this differenti-
ated element, the second relatively to the first. And, secondly,
it is useless to count because the thought which grasps the Many
in a One must be dissolved out of its universality and differenti-
ated into more than three or four distinct components; and this
universality appears, in contrast to the absolute determinate-
ness of the abstract unit, the principle of number, as indeter-
minateness with respect to number as such, so that we could
speak only of numbers in general, i.e. not of a specific number
of differences. Here, therefore, it is quite superfluous to think
of numbers and counting at all, Just as in other respects the
mere difference of quantity and amount has no notional signifi-
cance and makes no difference. -
Good and Evil were the specific differences yielded by
the thought of Spirit as immediately existent. Since their anti-
thesis has not yet been resolved and they are conceived of as
the essence of thought, each of them having an independent
existence of its own, man is a self lacking any essential being
and is the synthetic ground of their existence and their conflict.
But these universal powers just as much belong to the self, or
the self is their actuality. In accordance with this moment, it
therefore comes to pass that, just as Evil is nothing other than
the self-centredness of the natural existence of Spirit, so, con-
versely, Good enters into actuality and appears as an existent
self-consciousness. That which in the pure thought of Spirit is
in general merely hinted at as the othering of the divine Being,
here comes nearer to its realization for picture-thinking: this
realization consists for picture-thinking in the self-abasement
of the divine Being who renounces his abstract and non-actual
nature. Picture-thinking takes the other aspect, evil, to be a
happening alien to the divine Being; to grasp it in the divine
Being itself as the wrath of God, this demands from picture-think-
ing, struggling against its limitations, its supreme and most
strenuous effort, an effort which, since it lacks the Notion,
remains fruitless.