VI.B. Enlightenment

The peculiar object on which pure insight directs the active force of the notion is belief, this being a form of pure consciousness like itself and yet opposed to it in that element. But at the same time pure insight has a relation to the actual world, for, like belief, it is a return from the actual world into pure consciousness. We have first of all to see how its activity is constituted, as contrasted with the impure intentions and the perverted forms of insight found in the actual world.

We have touched already on the placid type of conscious life, which stands in contrast to this turmoil of alternate self-dissolution and self-evolution; it constitutes the aspect of pure insight and intention. This unperturbed consciousness, however, as we saw, has no special insight regarding the sphere of culture. The latter has itself rather the most painful feeling, and the truest insight about itself—the feeling that everything made secure crumbles to pieces, that every element of its existence is shattered to atoms, and every bone broken: moreover, it consciously expresses this feeling in words, pronounces judgment and gives luminous utterance concerning all aspects of its condition. Pure insight, therefore, can have here no activity and content of its own, and thus can only take up the formal attitude of truly apprehending this ingenious insight proper to the world and the language it adopts. Since this language is a scattered and broken utterance and the pronouncement a fickle mood of the moment, which is again quickly forgotten, and is only known to be a whole by a third consciousness, this latter can be distinguished as pure insight only if it gathers those several scattered traces into a universal picture, and then makes them the insight of all.

By this simple means pure insight will resolve the confusion of this world. For we have found that the fragments and determinate conceptions and individualities are not the essential nature of this actuality, but that it finds its substance and support alone in the spirit which exists qua judging and discussing, and that the interest of having a content for this ratiocination and parleying to deal with alone preserves the whole and the fragments into which it falls. In this language which insight adopts, its self-consciousness is still particular, a self existing for its own sake; but the emptiness of its content is at the same time emptiness of the self knowing that content to be vain and empty. Now, since the consciousness placidly apprehending all these sparkling utterances of vanity makes a collection of the most striking and penetrating phrases, the soul that still preserves the whole, the vanity of witty criticism, goes to ruin with the other form of vanity, the previous vanity of existence. The collection shows most people a better wit, or at least shows every one a more varied wit than their own, and shows that better knowledge and judging in general are something universal and are now universally familiar. Thereby the single and only interest which was still found is done away with; and individual light is resolved into universal insight.

Still, however, knowledge of essential reality stands secure above vain and empty knowledge; and pure insight, to begin with, appears in genuinely active form in so far as it enters into conflict with belief.

The various negative forms which consciousness adopts, the attitude of scepticism, and that of theoretical and practical idealism, are inferior attitudes compared with that of pure insight and the expansion of pure insight—enlightenment; for pure insight is born of the substance of spirit, it knows the pure self of consciousness to be absolute, and enters into conflict with the pure consciousness of the Absolute Being of all reality.

Since belief and insight are the same pure consciousness, but in form are opposed,—the reality in the case of belief being a thought, not a notion, and hence something absolutely opposed to self-consciousness, while the reality in the case of pure insight is the self—they are such that inter se the one is the absolute negative of the other.

As appearing the one against the other, all content falls to belief; for in its unperturbed element of thought each moment obtains definite subsistence. Pure insight, however, is in the first instance without any content; it involves rather the complete disappearance of content; but by its negative attitude towards what it excludes it will make itself real and give itself a content.

It knows belief to be opposed to insight, opposed to reason and truth. Just as, for it, belief is in general a tissue of superstitious prejudices and errors; so it further sees the consciousness embracing all this content organised into a realm of error, in which false insight is the general sphere of consciousness, immediate, naively unperturbed, and inherently unreflective. Yet all the while this false insight does have within it the moment of self-reflection, the moment of self-consciousness, separated from its simple naivete, and keeps this reflection in the background as an insight remaining by itself, and as an evil intention by which that that former conscious state is befooled. That mental sphere is the victim of the deception of a Priesthood, which carries out its envious vanity, jealous of being alone in possession of insight, and carries out its other selfish ends as well. At the same time this priesthood conspires with Despotism, which takes up the attitude of being the synthetic crude (begrifflos) unity of the real and this ideal kingdom—a singularly amorphous and inconsistent type of being,—and stands above the bad insight of the multitude, and the bad intention of the priests, and even combines both of these within itself. As the result of the stupidity and confusion produced amongst the people by the agency of priestly deception, despotism despises both and draws for itself the advantage of undisturbed control and the fulfilment of its desires, its humours, and its whims. Yet at the same time it is itself in this same state of murky insight, is equally superstition and error.

Enlightenment does not attack these three forms of the enemy without distinction. For since its essential nature is pure insight, which is per se universal, its true relation to the other extreme is that in which it is concerned with the common and identical element in both. The aspect of individual existence isolating itself from the universal naive consciousness is the antithesis of it, and cannot be directly affected by it. The will of a deceiving priesthood and an oppressive despot is, therefore, not primarily the object on which it directs its activity; its object is the insight that is without will and without individualised isolated self-existence, the notion (Begriff) of rational self-consciousness, which has its existence in the total mental sphere, but is not yet there in the fullness of its true meaning (Begriff). Since, however, pure insight rescues this genuinely honest form of insight, with its naive simplicity of nature, from prejudices and errors, it wrests from the hands of bad intention the effective realisation of its powers of deception, for the exercise of which the incoherent and undeveloped (begrifflos) consciousness of the general sphere provides the basis and raw material, while isolated self-existence finds its substance in the simple consciousness as a whole.

The relation of pure insight to the naive consciousness of absolute Reality has now a double aspect. On one side pure insight is inherently one and the same with it. On the other side, however, this naive consciousness lets absolute Reality as well as its parts dispose themselves at will in the simple element of its thought, and subsist there, and lets them hold only as its inherent nature and hence hold good in objective form. In this immanent being it disowns, however, independent existence for its own sake. In so far as, according to the first aspect, this belief is for pure insight inherently and essentially pure self-consciousness, and has to become so expressly] merely for itself, pure insight finds in this constitutive notion of belief the element in which, instead of false insight, it realises itself.

Since, from this point of view, both are essentially the same, and the relation of pure insight takes effect through and in the same element, the communication between them is direct and immediate, and their give and take an unbroken interfusion. Whatever pins and bolts may be otherwise driven into consciousness, it is in itself this simplicity of nature in which everything is resolved, forgotten and unconstrained, and which, therefore, is absolutely amenable to the activity of the notion. The communication of pure insight is on that account comparable to a silent extension or the expansion, say, of vapour in the unresisting atmosphere. It is a penetrating infection, which did not previously make itself noticeable as something distinct from and opposed to the indifferent medium into which it insinuates its way, and hence cannot be averted. Only when the infection has become widespread is that consciousness alive to it, which unconcernedly yielded to its influence. For what this consciousness received into itself was doubtless something simple, homogeneous, and uniform throughout it, but was at the same time the simplicity of self-reflected negativity, which later on also develops by its nature into something opposed, and thereby reminds consciousness of its previous state. This simple uniformity is the notion, which is simple knowledge that knows both itself and its opposite, this opposite being, however, cancelled as opposite within the self-knowledge of the notion. In the condition, therefore, in which consciousness becomes aware of pure insight, this insight is already widespread. The struggle with it betrays the fact that the infection has done its work. The struggle is too late; and every means taken merely makes the disease worse; for the disease has seized the very marrow of spiritual life, viz. consciousness in its ultimate principle (Begriff), or its pure inmost nature itself. There is therefore no power left in conscious life to surmount the disease. Because it affects the very inmost being, whatever individual expressions remain, are repressed and allowed to subside and the superficial symptoms are smothered. This is immensely to its advantage; for it does not now squander its power in useless fashion, nor does it show itself unworthy of its true nature—which is the case when it breaks out into symptoms and particular eruptions antithetic to the content of belief and the connexion of its external reality. Rather, being now an invisible and unperceived spirit, it insinuates its way through and through the noble parts, and soon has got complete hold over all the vitals and members of the unconscious idol; and then “some fine morning it gives its comrade a shove with the elbow, when, bash! crash!—and the idol is lying on the floor.” On some “fine morning,” whose noon is not red with blood, if the infection has penetrated to every organ of spiritual life. It is then the memory alone that still preserves the dead form of the spirit’s previous state, as a vanished history, vanished men know not how. And the new serpent of wisdom, raised on high before bending worshippers, has in this manner painlessly stripped off merely a shrivelled skin.

But this silent steady working of the loom of spirit in the inner region of its substance, its own action hidden from itself, is merely one side of the realising of pure insight. Its expansion does not only consist in like going along with like; and its realisation is not merely an unresisted expansion. The action of the principle of negation is at the same time essentially a developed process of self-distinction, which, being a conscious action, must set forth its moments in a definitely manifested expression, and must make its appearance in the form of sheer noise, and a violent struggle with an opposite as such.

We have, therefore, to see how pure insight and pure intention maintains its negative attitude towards that other which it finds standing opposed to it.

Pure insight and intention, operating negatively, can only be,—since its very principle is all essentiality and there is nothing outside it—the negative of itself. As insight, therefore, it passes into the negative of pure insight, it becomes untruth and unreason; and as intention it passes into the negative of pure intention, becomes a lie and sordid impurity of purpose.

It involves itself in this contradiction by the fact that it engages in a strife and thinks to do battle with some alien external other. It merely imagines this, for its nature as absolute negativity lies in having that otherness within its own self. The absolute notion is the category; it is the principle that knowledge and the object of knowledge are the same. In consequence, what pure insight expresses as its other, what it pronounces to be an error or a lie, can be nothing else than its own self; it can only condemn what itself is. What is not rational has no truth, or what is not comprehended through a notion, conceptually determined, is not. When reason thus speaks of some other than itself is, it in fact speaks merely of itself; it does not therein go beyond itself.

This struggle with the opposite, therefore, combines in its meaning the significance of being its own actualisation. This consists just in the process of unfolding its moments and taking them back into itself. One part of this process is the making of the distinction in which the insight of reason opposes itself as object to itself; so long as it remains in this condition, it is at variance with itself. Qua pure insight it is without any content; the process of its realisation consists in itself becoming content to itself; for no other can be made its content, because it is the category become self-conscious. But since this insight in the first instance thinks of the content as in its opposite, and knows the content merely as a content, and does not as yet think of it as its own self, pure insight misconceives itself in it. The complete attainment of insight, therefore, has the sense of a process of coming to know that content as its own, which was to begin with opposed to itself. Its result, however, will be thereby neither the reestablishment of the errors it has fought, nor merely its original notion, but an insight which knows the absolute negation of itself to be its own proper reality, to be its self, or an insight which is its self-understanding notion.

This feature of the struggle of enlightenment with errors,—that of fighting itself in them, and of condemning that in them which it asserts,—this is something for us who observe the process, or is what enlightenment and its struggle are in themselves implicitly. The first aspect of this struggle, however,—the contamination and defilement of enlightenment through its pure self-identity accepting the attitude and function of destructive negation—this is how belief looks upon it; belief finds it simply lying unreason and malicious intent, just as enlightenment in the same way regards belief as error and prejudice.

As regards its content, it is in the first instance empty insight, whose content appears an external other to it. It meets this content, consequently, in the shape of something not yet its own, as something that exists quite independent of it, and is found in belief.

Enlightenment, then, conceives its object in the first instance and generally in such a way as to take it as pure insight, and failing to recognise itself there, interprets it as error. In insight as such consciousness apprehends an object in such a manner that it becomes the inner being of conscious life, or becomes an object which consciousness permeates, in which consciousness maintains itself, keeps within itself, and is present to itself, and, by its thus being the process of that object, brings the object into being. It is precisely this which enlightenment rightly declares belief to be, when enlightenment says that the Absolute Reality professed by belief is a being that comes from belief’s own consciousness, is its own thought, something produced from and by consciousness. Enlightenment, consequently, interprets and declares it to be error, to be a made-up invention about the very same thing as enlightenment itself is.

Enlightenment that seeks to teach belief this new wisdom does not, in doing so, tell it anything new. For the object of belief itself is just this too, viz. a pure essential reality of its own peculiar consciousness; so that this consciousness does not put itself down for lost and negated in that object, but rather puts trust in it; and this just means that it finds itself there as this particular consciousness, finds itself therein to be self-consciousness. If I put my trust in any one, his certitude of himself is for me the certitude of myself; I know my self-existence in him, I know that he acknowledges it, and that it is for him both his purpose and his real nature. Trust, however, is belief, because its consciousness has a direct relation to its object, and thus sees at once that it is one with the object, and in the object.

Further, since what is object for me is something in which I know myself, I am at the same time in that object really in the form of another self-consciousness, i.e. one which has become in that object alienated from its own particular individuation, from its natural and contingent existence, but which partly continues therein to be self-consciousness, and partly is there an essential consciousness just like pure insight.

In the notion of insight there lies not merely this, that consciousness knows itself in the object it looks at, and finds itself directly there, without first quitting the thought element and then returning into itself; the notion implies as well that consciousness is aware of itself as being also the mediating process, aware of itself as active, as the agency of production. Through this it gets the thought of this unity of self as self and object.

This very consciousness is also belief. Obedience and action make a necessary moment, through which the certainty of existence in Absolute Reality comes about. This action of belief does not indeed make it appear as if Absolute Reality is itself produced thereby. But the Absolute Reality for belief is essentially not the abstract reality that lies beyond the believing consciousness; it is the spirit of the religious communion, it is the unity of that abstract reality and self-consciousness. The action of the communion is an essential moment in bringing about that it is this spirit of the communion. That spirit is what it is by the productive activity of consciousness, or rather it does not exist without being produced by consciousness. For essential as this process of production is, it is as truly not the only basis of Absolute Reality; it is merely a moment. The Absolute Reality is at the same time self-complete and self-contained (an und für sich selbst).

From the other side the notion of pure insight is seen to be something else than its own object; for just this negative character constitutes the object. Thus from the other side it also expresses the ultimate Reality of belief as something foreign to self-consciousness, something that is not bone of its bone, but is surreptitiously foisted on it like a changeling child. But here enlightenment is entirely foolish; belief discovers it to be a way of speaking which does not know what it is saying, and does not understand the facts of the case when it talks about priestly deception, and deluding the people. It speaks about this as if by means of some hocus-pocus of conjuring priestcraft there were foisted on consciousness as true Reality something that is absolutely foreign, and absolutely alien to it; and yet says all the while that this is an essential reality for consciousness, that consciousness believes in it, trusts in it, and seeks to make it favourably disposed towards itself; i.e. that consciousness therein sees its pure ultimate Being just as much as its own particular and universal individuality, and creates by its own action this unity of itself with its essential reality. In other words, it directly declares that to be the very inmost nature of consciousness which it declares to be something alien to consciousness.

How, then, can it possibly speak about deception and delusion? By the fact that it directly expresses about belief the very opposite of what it asserts of belief, it ipso facto really reveals itself to be the transparent lie. How are deception and delusion to take place, where consciousness in its very truth has directly and immediately the certitude of itself, where it possesses itself in its object, since it just as much finds as produces itself there? The distinction no longer exists, even in words.

When the general question has been raised, whether it is permissible to delude a people, the answer, as a fact, had to be that the question is pointless, because it is impossible to deceive a people in this matter. Brass in place of gold, counterfeit instead of genuine coin may doubtless have been disposed of in many an instance; many a one has stuck to it that a battle lost was a battle won; and lies of all sorts about things of sense and particular events have been credited for a time; but in the knowledge of that inmost reality where consciousness finds the direct certainty of its own self, the idea of delusion is entirely baseless.

Let us see further how belief finds enlightenment in the case of the different moments of its own conscious experience, to which the view just noted referred in the first instance only in a general way. These moments are pure thought, or, qua object, absolute Being per se (an und für sich); then its relation, as a form of knowledge, to absolute Being, the ultimate basis of its belief; and finally its relation to absolute Being in its acts, i.e. its and “worship” service. Just as pure insight has misconceived itself in belief as a whole and denied its own nature, we shall find it taking up in these moments, too, an attitude similarly perverted and distorted.

Pure insight assumes towards the absolute Reality of the believing mind a negative attitude. This Being is pure thought, and pure thought is established within itself as object or as the true Being; in the believing consciousness this immanent and essential reality of thought preserves at the same time for the self-existent consciousness the form of objectivity, but merely the empty form; it exists in the character of something consciously “presented.” To pure insight, however, since it is pure consciousness in its aspect of self existing for itself, this other appears as something negative of self-consciousness. This might, again, be taken either as the pure essential reality of thought, or even as the being found in sense-experience, the object of sense-certainty. But since it is at the same time for the self, and this self, qua self which has an object, is an actual consciousness, for insight the peculiar object as such is an ordinary existing thing of sense. This its object appears before it when it examines the ideas found in belief. It condemns these ideas and in doing so condemns its own proper object. It really commits a wrong, however, against belief in so apprehending the object of belief as if it were its own object. According to this account it states regarding belief that its absolute Being is a piece of stone, a block of wood, having eyes and seeing not, or again some bread-paste, which is obtained from grain grown on the field and transformed by men and set aside for that purpose; or in whatever other ways belief anthropomorphises absolute Being, making it objective and representable.

Enlightenment, proclaiming itself as the pure and true, here turns what is held to be eternal life and holy spirit into a concrete passing thing of sense, and contaminates it with the inherent nothingness of sense-experience—with an aspect and point of view which is not to be found at all in the worshipping attitude of belief, so that enlightenment simply calumniates it by speaking of such an aspect. What belief reveres is for belief assuredly neither stone nor wood, nor bread-dough, nor any other sort of thing of time and sense. If enlightenment thinks it worth while to say its object all the same is this as well, or even that belief is this in its inherent nature and in truth, then belief also knows that something which it is “as well,” but for it this something lies outside its worship; on the other hand, however, belief does not in general look on such things as stones, etc., as having an inherent and essential being at all, the Absolute Reality of pure thought is for it alone something inherent.

The second moment is the relation of belief as a form of knowing consciousness to this ultimate Reality. As pure thinking consciousness belief has this Reality immediately within itself. But pure consciousness is just as much a mediate relation of conscious certainty to truth, a relation constituting the basis of belief. For enlightenment this ground comes at the same time to be regarded as a chance knowledge of chance occurrences. The ground of knowledge, however, is the conscious universal, and in its ultimate meaning is absolute spirit, which in abstract pure consciousness, or thought as such, is merely absolute Being, but qua self-consciousness is the knowledge of itself. Pure insight sets up this conscious universal, self-knowing spirit pure and simple, likewise as a negative element for self-consciousness. Doubtless this insight is itself pure mediate thought, i.e. thought mediating itself with itself, it is pure knowledge; but since it is pure insight, or pure knowledge, which does not yet know itself, i.e. for which as yet there is no awareness that it is this pure process of mediation, this process seems to insight, like everything else constituting it, to be something external, an other. When realising its inherent principle, then, it develops this moment essential to it; but that moment seems to it to belong to belief, and to be, in its character of an external other, a fortuitous knowledge of just such common historical actualities. It thus here charges religious belief with basing its certainty on some particular historical evidence, which, considered as historical evidence, would assuredly not even warrant that degree of certainty about the matter which we get regarding any event mentioned in the newspapers. It further makes the imputation that the certainty in the case of religious belief rests on the accidental fact of the preservation of all this evidence: on the preservation of this evidence partly by means of paper, and partly through the skill and honesty in transferring what is written from one paper to another, and lastly rests upon the accurate interpretation of the sense of dead words and letters. As a matter of fact, however, it never occurs to belief to make its certainty depend on such evidence and such fortuitous circumstances. Belief in its conscious assurance occupies a naive unsophisticated attitude towards its absolute object, knows it with a purity, which never mixes up letters, paper, or copyists with its consciousness of the Absolute Being, and does not make use of things of that sort to effect its union with the Absolute. On the contrary, this consciousness is the self-mediating, self-relating ground of its knowledge; it is spirit itself which bears witness of itself both in the inner heart of the individual consciousness, as well as through the presence everywhere and in all men of belief in it. If belief wants to appeal to historical evidences in order to get also that kind of foundation, or at least confirmation, for its content which enlightenment speaks of, and is really serious in thinking and acting as if that were an important matter, then it has eo ipso allowed itself to be corrupted and led astray by the insinuations of enlightenment; the efforts it makes to secure a basis or support in this way are merely indications that show how it has been affected and contaminated by enlightenment.

There still remains the third aspect, the active relation of consciousness to Absolute Being, its forms of service. This action consists in cancelling the particularity of the individual, or the natural form of its self-existence, whence arises its certainty of being pure self-consciousness, of being, as the result of its action, i.e. as a self-existing conscious individual, one with ultimate Reality.

Since in this action purposiveness and end get distinguished, and pure insight likewise takes up a negative attitude towards this action, and denies itself just as it did in the other moments, it must as regards purposiveness present the appearance of being stupid and unintelligent, since insight united with intention, accordance of end with means, appears to it as an other, as really the opposite of what insight is. As regards the end, however, it has to make badness, enjoyment, and possession, its purpose, and prove itself in consequence to be the impurest kind of intention, since pure intention, qua external, an other, is equally impure intention.

Accordingly we find that, so far as concerns purposiveness, enlightenment thinks it foolish when the believing individual seeks to obtain the higher consciousness,—where there is no entanglement with natural enjoyment and pleasure,—by positively denying itself natural enjoyment and pleasure, and proving through its acts that it makes no denial of its contempt for them, but rather that the contempt is quite genuine.

In the same way enlightenment finds it foolish for consciousness to absolve itself of its characteristic of being absolutely individual, excluding all others, and possessing property of its own, by itself demitting its own property, for thereby it shows in reality that this isolation is not really serious. It shows rather that itself is something that can rise above the natural necessity of isolating itself and of denying, in this absolute isolation of its own individual existence, that the others are one and the same with itself.

Pure insight finds both purposeless as well as wrong. It is purposeless to renounce a pleasure and give away a possession, in order to show oneself independent of pleasure and possession; hence, in the opposite case, insight will be obliged to proclaim the man a fool, who, in order to eat, employs the expedient of actually eating. Insight again thinks it wrong to deny oneself a meal, and give away butter and eggs not for money, nor money for butter and eggs, but just to give them away and get no return at all; it understands a meal, or the possession of things of that sort, to be a self’s proper object, an end of a self, and hence in fact understands itself to be a very impure intention which ascribes essential value to enjoyment and possessions of this kind. As pure insight it further maintains the necessity of rising above the condition of nature, above covetousness and its ways; it only finds it foolish and wrong that this supremacy should have to be demonstrated by action. In other words this pure intention is in reality a deception, which pretends to and demands an inner elevation, but declares that it is superfluous, foolish, and even wrong to be in earnest in the matter, to put this uplifting into concrete expression, into actual shape and form, and demonstrate its truth.

Pure insight thus denies itself both as pure insight,—for it abrogates directly purposive action, and as pure intention,—for it denies the intention of proving its independence of the ends of particular existence.

Thus, then, enlightenment makes belief learn what it means. It takes on this appearance of being bad, because just by the fact of relation to an external other it gives itself a negative reality, it presents itself as the opposite of itself. Pure insight and intention have to adopt this relational attitude, however, for that is their actualisation.

This realisation appeared, in the first instance, as a negative reality. Perhaps its positive reality is better constituted. Let us see how this stands.

When all prejudice and superstition have been banished, the question arises what next? What is the truth enlightenment has diffused in their stead? It has already given expression to this positive content in its process of exterminating error, for that alienation of itself is equally its positive reality.

In dealing with what for belief is Absolute Spirit, it interprets whatever sort of determination it discovers there as being wood, stone, etc., as particular concrete things of sense. Since in this way it conceives in general every characteristic, i.e. every content and filling, to be a finite fact, to be a human entity and a mental presentation, absolute Being on its view turns out to be a mere vacuum, to which can be attributed no characteristics, no predicates at all. In fact to marry such a vacuity with universal predicates would be essentially reprehensible; and it is just through such a union that the monstrosities of superstition have been produced. Reason, pure insight, is doubtless not empty itself, since the negative of itself is present consciously to it, and is its content; it is, on the contrary, rich in substance, but only in particularity and restrictions. The enlightened function of reason, of pure insight, consists in allowing nothing of that sort to appertain to Absolute Reality, nor attributing anything of that kind to it: this function well knows how to put itself and the wealth of finitude in their place, and deal with the Absolute in a worthy manner.

In contrast with this colourless empty Reality there stands, as a second aspect of the positive truth of enlightenment, the particularity in general of conscious life and of all that is:—a particularity excluded from an absolute Being, and standing by itself as something entirely self-contained. Consciousness, which in its very earliest expression is sense-certainty and mere “opining,” here comes back, after the whole course of its experience, to this same point, and is once again a knowledge of what is pure negative of itself, a knowledge of sense things, i.e. of existent entities which stand in indifference over against its own self-existence. But here it is not an immediate naive consciousness; it has become to itself immediate. While at first the prey to every sort of entanglement, into which it is plunged by its gradually unfolding, and now led back to its first form by pure insight, it has arrived at this first state as the result and outcome of the process. This sense-certainty, resting as it does on an insight into the nothingness of all other forms of consciousness, and hence the nothingness of whatever is beyond sense-experience,—this sense-certainty is no longer a mere “opining,” it is rather absolute truth. This nothingness of everything that transcends sense is doubtless merely a negative proof of this truth. But no other is admissible or possible, for the positive truth of sense-experience in itself is just the unmediated self-existence of the notion itself qua object and an object in the form of otherness—the positive truth is that it is absolutely certain to every consciousness that it is and that there are other real things outside it, and that in its naive existence it, as well as these things too, are in and for themselves or absolute.

Lastly, the third moment of the truth of enlightenment is the relation of the particular entities to Absolute Being, is the relation of the first two moments to one another. Insight, qua pure insight of what is identical or unrestricted, also transcends the unlike or diverse, i.e. transcends finite reality, or transcends itself qua mere otherness. The “beyond” of this otherness it takes to be the void, to which it thus relates the facts of sense. In determining this relation both the terms do not enter the relation as its content; for the one is the void, and thus a content is only to be had through the other, through sense reality. The form the relation assumes, however, to the determination of which the aspect of immanent and ultimate being (Ansich) contributes, can be shaped just as we please; for the form is something inherently and essentially negative, and therefore something self-opposed, being as well as nothing, inherent and ultimate (Ansich) as well as the opposite; or, what is the same thing, the relation of actuality to an inherent essential being qua something beyond, is as much a negating as a positing of that actuality. Finite actualities can, therefore, properly speaking, be taken just in the way people have need of them. Sense facts are thus related now positively to the Absolute qua something ultimate (Ansich), and sense reality is itself ultimate per se; the Absolute makes them, fosters and cherishes them. Then, again, they are related to it as an opposite, that is to their own non-being; in this case they are not something ultimate, they have being only for an other. Whereas in the preceding mode of consciousness the conceptions involved in the opposition took shape as good and bad, in the case of pure insight they pass into the more abstract forms of what is per se (Ansich) and what is for an other being.

Both ways of dealing with the positive as well as the negative relation of finitude to what is ultimate (Ansich) are, however, equally necessary as a matter of fact, and everything is thus as much something per se (an sich) as it is something for an other: in other words everything is “useful.”

Everything is now at the mercy of other things, lets itself now be used by others, and exists for them; and then again it, so to say, gets up on its hind legs, fights shy of the other, exists for itself on its own account, and on its side uses the other too.

From this, as a result, man, being the thing conscious of this relation, derives his true nature and place. As he is immediately, man is good, qua natural consciousness per se, absolute qua individual, and all else exists for him: and further,—since the moments have the significance of universality for him qua self-conscious animal,—everything exists to pleasure and delight him, and, as he first comes from the hand of God, he walks the earth as in a garden planted for him. He is bound also to pluck the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil; he claims to have a use for it which distinguishes him from every other being, for, as it happens, his inherently good nature is so constituted that the superfluity of delight does it harm, or rather his particularity contains as a factor in its constitution a principle that goes beyond it; his particularity can overreach itself and destroy itself. To prevent this, he finds reason a useful means for duly restraining this self-transcendence, or rather for preserving himself when he does go beyond determinate limits: for such is the force of consciousness. The enjoyment of this conscious and essentially universal being must, in manifold variety and duration, be itself universal and not something determinate. The principle of measure or proportion has, therefore, the determinate function of preventing pleasure in its variety and duration from being quite broken off: i.e. the “measure” is determined with respect to immoderation.

As everything is useful for man, man is likewise useful too, and his characteristic determination consists in making himself a member of the human herd, of use for the common good, and serviceable to all. The extent to which he looks after his own interests is the measure with which he must also serve the purpose of others, and so far as he serves their turn, he is taking care of himself: the one hand washes the other. But wherever he finds himself there he is in his right: he makes use of others and is himself made use of.

Different things are serviceable to one another in different ways. All things, however, have this reciprocity of utility by their very nature, by being related to the Absolute in the twofold manner, the one positive, whereby they have a being all their own, the other negative, and thereby exist for others. The relation to Absolute Reality, or Religion, is therefore of all forms of profitableness the most supremely profitable; for it is profiting pure and simple; it is that by which all things stand—by which they have a being all their own—and that by which all things fall—have an existence for something else.

Belief, of course, finds this positive outcome of enlightenment as much an abomination as its negative attitude towards belief. This enlightened insight into absolute Reality, that sees nothing in it but just absolute Reality, the être suprême, the great Void—this intention to find that everything in its immediate existence is inherently real (an sich) or good, and finally to find the relation of the particular conscious entity to the Absolute Being, Religion, exhaustively summed up in the conception of profitableness—all this is for belief utterly and simply revolting. This special and peculiar wisdom of enlightenment necessarily seems at the same time to the believing mind to be sheer insipidity and the confession of insipidity; because it consists in knowing nothing of absolute Being, or, what amounts to the same thing, in knowing this entirely accurate platitude regarding it,—that it is merely absolute Being, and, again, in knowing nothing but finitude, taking this, moreover, to be the truth, and thinking this knowledge about finitude qua truth to be the highest knowledge attainable.

Belief has a divine right as against enlightenment, the right of absolute self-identity or of pure thought; and it finds itself utterly wronged by enlightenment; for enlightenment distorts all its moments, and makes them something quite different from what they are in it. Enlightenment, on the other hand, has merely a human right as against belief, and can only put in a human claim for its own truth; for the wrong it commits is the right of disunion, of discordance, and consists in perverting and altering, a right that belongs to the nature of self-consciousness in opposition to the simple ultimate essence or thought. But since the right of enlightenment is the right of self-consciousness, it will not merely retain its own right, too, in such a way that two equally valid rights of spirit would be left standing in opposition to one another without either satisfying the claims of the other; it will maintain the absolute right, because self-consciousness is the negative function of the notion (Begriff), a function which does not merely operate on its own account, but also gets control over its opposite. And because belief is a mode of consciousness, it will not be able to balk enlightenment of that right.

For enlightenment does not operate against the believing mind with special principles of its own, but with those which belief itself implies and contains. Enlightenment merely brings together and presents to belief its own thoughts, the thoughts that lie scattered and apart within belief, all unknown to it. Enlightenment merely reminds belief, when one of its own forms is present, of others it also has, but which it is always forgetting when the one is there. Enlightenment shows itself to belief to be pure insight, by the fact that it, in a given determinate moment, sees the whole, brings forward the opposite element standing in direct relation to that moment and, converting the one into the other, brings out the principle operating negatively on both thoughts—the notion. It appears, therefore, to belief to be distortion and lies, because it shows up the other side in the moments of belief. Enlightenment seems, in consequence, directly to make something else out of them than they are in their own particularity; but this other is equally essential, and in reality is to be found in the believing mind itself, only the latter does not think about it, but keeps it somewhere else. Hence neither is the result foreign to belief nor can belief reject its truth.

Enlightenment itself, however, which reminds belief of the opposite of its various separate moments, is just as little enlightened regarding its own nature. It takes up a purely negative attitude to belief, so far as it excludes its own content from its own pure activity and takes that content to be negative of itself. Consequently, neither in this negative, in the content of belief, does it recognise itself, nor, for this reason, does it bring together the two thoughts, the one which it contributes and the one against which it brings the first. Since it does not know that what it condemns in the case of belief is directly its very own thought, it has its own being in the opposition of both moments, only one of which,—viz. in every case the one opposed to belief—it acknowledges, but cuts off the other from the first, just as belief does. Enlightenment, consequently, does not bring out the unity of both as their unity, i.e. the notion; but the notion arises before it and comes to light of its own accord, in other words, enlightenment finds the notion merely as something lying ready at hand. For in itself the process of realising pure insight is just this, that insight, whose essential nature is the notion, comes before itself to begin with in the shape of an absolute other, and repudiates itself (for the opposite of the notion is an absolute opposite), and then out of this otherness comes to itself or comes to its notion.

Enlightenment, however, is merely this process, it is the activity of the notion in still unconscious form, an activity which no doubt comes to itself qua object, but takes this object for an external other, and does not even know the nature of the notion, i.e. does not know that it is the undifferentiated element which absolutely divides itself.

As against belief, then, insight is the power of the notion in so far as this is the active process of relating the moments lying apart from one another in belief; a way of relating them in which the contradiction in them comes to light. Herein lies the absolute right of the power which insight exercises over belief; but the actuality which it gives this power lies just in the fact that the believing state of consciousness is itself the notion and thus itself recognises and accepts the opposite which insight produces and presents before it. Insight, therefore, has and retains right against belief, because it makes valid in belief what is necessary to belief itself, and what belief contains within it.

At first enlightenment asserts the moment of the notion to be an act of consciousness; it maintains in the face of belief that the absolute Reality belief accepts is a Reality of the believer’s consciousness qua a self, or that this absolute Reality is produced through consciousness. To the believing mind its absolute Being is just as it is in itself for the believer, at the same time not as a foreign thing, standing there no one knows how or whence it came there. The trust and confidence of belief consists just in finding itself in absolute Reality as a particular personal consciousness, and its obedience and service consist in acting so as to bring out that Reality as its own Absolute. Enlightenment, strictly speaking, only reminds belief of this, if belief goes beyond the action of consciousness and gives expression to the ultimate nature (Ansich) of absolute Being in abstracto.

But while enlightenment no doubt puts alongside the one-sidedness of belief the opposite moment, viz.:—the action of belief in contrast to being—and being is all belief thinks about here,—and yet does not itself in doing so bring those opposite thoughts together, enlightenment isolates the pure moment of action, and declares that what belief takes to be per se ultimate (Ansich) is merely a product of consciousness. The isolated separate act opposed to this ultimate Being (Ansich) is, however, a contingent action, and, qua presentative activity, is a creating of fictions,—presented figurative ideas that have no being in themselves. And this is how enlightenment regards the content of belief.

Conversely, however, pure insight equally says the very opposite. Since insight lays stress on the moment of otherness which the notion contains, it declares the essential Reality for belief to be one which is not in any way due to consciousness, is away beyond consciousness, foreign to it, and unknown. To belief, too, that Reality has the same character. On one side belief trusts in it, and gets, in doing so, the assurance of its own self, on the other side it is unsearchable in all its ways and unattainable in its being.

Further, enlightenment maintains against the believing mind a right which the latter concedes, when enlightenment treats the object of the believer’s veneration as stone and wood, or, in short, some finite anthropomorphic feature. For, since this consciousness is divided within itself in having a ‘beyond’ remote from actuality and an immediate present embodiment of that remote beyond, there is also found in it, as a matter of fact, the view that sense-things have a value and significance in and for themselves (an und für sich). But belief does not bring together these two ideas of what is “in and for itself,” viz. that at one time what is “in and for itself” is for belief pure essential Reality and at another time is an ordinary thing of sense. Even its own pure consciousness is affected by this last view; for the distinctions of its supersensuous world, because dispensing with the notion, are a series of independent shapes and forms, and their activity is a happening, i.e. they exist merely in idea, merely as presentations, and have the characteristic of sense-existence.

Enlightenment on its side isolates actuality in the same way, treating it as a reality abandoned by spirit; isolates specific determinateness as some fixed immovable finite element, as if it were not a moment in the spiritual process of the real itself, were neither nothing, nor something with a being all its own, but something evanescent and transitory.

It is clear that the same is the case with regard to the ground of knowledge. The believing mind recognises itself to be an accidental knowledge; for in belief the mind adopts an attitude towards contingencies, and absolute Reality itself comes before belief in the form of a presented idea of ordinary actual fact. Consequently belief is also a kind of certainty which does not carry the truth within it, and it confesses itself to be an unsubstantial consciousness of this kind, far short of being well assured of itself and authentically secure. This moment, however, belief forgets in its immediate spiritual knowledge of absolute Reality.

Enlightenment, however, which reminds belief of all this, thinks again merely of the contingency of the knowledge and forgets the other—thinks only of the mediating process which takes effect through an alien third term, and does not think on that process wherein the immediate is itself the third term, through which it mediates itself with the other, viz. with itself.

Finally, on the view enlightenment takes of the action of belief, the rejection of enjoyment and possessions is looked upon as wrong and purposeless.

As to the wrong thus done, enlightenment preserves the harmony of the believing attitude in this that belief acknowledges the actual reality of possessing property, keeping hold of it, and enjoying it. In insisting on its property, it behaves with all the more stubborn independence and exclusiveness, and in its enjoyment with all the more frank self-abandonment, since its religious act of giving up pleasure and property takes effect beyond the region of this actuality, and purchases for it freedom to do as it likes so far as that other sphere is concerned. This service, that consists in sacrificing natural impulses and enjoyments, in point of fact has no truth, owing to this opposition. The retention and the sacrifice subsist together side by side. The sacrifice is merely a “sign” which performs real sacrifice only as regards a small part, and hence in point of fact only representatively suggests sacrifice.

As for purposiveness, enlightenment finds it pointless and stupid to throw away a possession in order to feel and to prove oneself to be free from all possession, to renounce an enjoyment in order to think and demonstrate that one is rid of all enjoyment. The believing mind itself takes the absolute act for a universal one. Not only does the action of its absolute Reality as its object appear something universal, but the individual consciousness, too, has to prove itself detached entirely and altogether from its sensuous nature. But throwing away a particular possession, giving up and disclaiming a particular enjoyment, is not acting universally in this way. And since in the action it is essentially the purpose, which is a universal, and the performance, which is a particular process, that had to stand in all their incompatibility before consciousness, that action shows itself to be of a kind in which consciousness has no share, and consequently this way of acting is seen to be too naive to be an action at all. It is too naive to fast in order to prove oneself quite indifferent to the pleasures of the table; too naive to rid oneself, like Origen, of other bodily pleasure in order to show that pleasure is finished and done with. The act itself proves to be an external and a particular function. But desire is deeply rooted within the inner life, and is a universal element; its pleasure neither disappears with the instrument for getting pleasure nor by abstention from particular pleasures.

But enlightenment on its side here isolates the unrealised inwardness as against the concrete actuality; just as in the case of the devotion and direct intuition of belief, enlightenment holds fast to the externality of things of sense as against the inward attitude of belief. Enlightenment finds the main point in the intention, in the thought, and thereby finds no need for actually bringing about the liberation from natural ends. On the contrary, this inner sphere is itself the formal element that has its concrete fulfilment in natural impulses, which are justified simply by the fact that they fall within, that they belong to universal being, to nature.

Enlightenment, then, holds irresistible sway over belief by the fact that the latter finds in its own constitution the very moments to which enlightenment gives significance and validity. Looking more closely at the action exerted by this force, its operation on belief seems to rend asunder the unity and happy harmony of trustfulness and immediate confidence, to pollute its spiritual life with lower thoughts drawn from the sphere of sense, to destroy the feeling of calm security in its attitude of submission by introducing the vanity of understanding, of self-will, and self-fulfilment. But in point of fact, enlightenment really brings to pass the abolition of that state of unthinking, or rather uncomprehended (begrifflos) cleavage, which finds a place in the nature of belief. The believing mood weighs and measures by a twofold standard, it has two sorts of eyes and ears, uses two voices to express its meaning, it duplicates all ideas, without comparing and squaring the sense and meaning in the two forms used. Or we may say belief lives its life amidst two sorts of perceptions, the one the perceptions of thought which is asleep, purely uncritical and uncomprehending, the other those of waking consciousness living solely and simply in the world of sense; and in each of them it manages to carry on a household all its own.

Enlightenment illuminates that world of heaven with ideas drawn from the world of sense, pointing out there this element of finitude which belief cannot deny or repudiate, because it is self-consciousness, and in being so is the unity to which both kinds of ideas belong, and in which they do not fall apart from one another; for they belong to the same indivisible simple self into which belief has passed, and which constitutes its life.

Belief has by this means lost the content which furnished its filling, and collapses into an inarticulate state where the spirit works and weaves within itself. Belief is banished from its own kingdom; this kingdom is sacked and plundered, since every distinction and expansion of it has rent the waking consciousness in its innermost nature, 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 connected in other ways.

Belief in this manner has in fact become the same as enlightenment—the conscious attitude of relating a 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. It will 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 object; in passing beyond its individual nature to an unfulfilled beyond, the fleck appears as an act and a process; in the selflessness of what is “useful” it is seen in the form of an object fulfilled. Enlightenment will remove this stain: by considering more closely the positive result which constitutes the truth in its case, we shall find that the stain is implicitly removed already.

The spirit that sullenly works and weaves without further distinctions within itself has thus passed into itself away beyond consciousness, which, again, has arrived at clearness as to itself. The first moment of this clearness of mind is determined, in regard to its necessity and constitution, by the fact that pure insight, or insight that is implicitly and per se notion, actualises 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 dispenses with the aspect wherein abstractions or distinctions are kept apart, and hence becomes pure thought in the sense of a pure thing.

This, now, 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 external beyond. For, because this pure self-consciousness is a movement working with pure notions, with 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, know this identical nature constituting both sides,—the movement of self-consciousness and its absolute Reality,—does not know the identity of their nature, which, in point of fact gives them their very substance and subsistence. Since the notion is not aware of this insight, absolute Reality has significance and value 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 attention is directed. At the same time, however, the opposition has been lifted into the higher victorious element, where it is cleared up and set forth. 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 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, preserves 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, salt, and so on. Matter is really a 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.

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 distinguished as Nature and Spirit or God, the unconscious inner working and weaving would have nothing of the wealth of developed life required in order to be nature, while Spirit or God would have no self-distinguishing consciousness. Both, as we saw, are entirely the same notion; the distinction lies not in the objective fact, but purely in the diversity of starting-point adopted by the two thought-constructions, and in the fact that each keeps to a special point of view in the thought-process. If they rose above that, their thoughts would coincide, and they would find what to the one is, as it holds, a horror, and to the other a folly, is one and the same thing. For to the one, absolute Being, in its pure thought—or directly for pure consciousness—is outside finite consciousness, is the negative beyond of finite mind. If it would reflect that in part that simple immediacy of thought is nothing else than pure being, that in part, again, what is negative for consciousness is at the same time related to consciousness—that in the negative judgment the copula “is” also connects and holds together the two separated factors—it would come to see that this beyond, which the nature of an external existence implies, stands in a relation to consciousness, and that in so doing this means the same as what is called pure matter. The missing moment of the present would then be secured.

The other enlightenment starts from sense-existence; it then abstracts from the sensuous relation of tasting, seeing, etc., and turns sense-existence into purely inherent being (Ansich), absolute matter, something neither felt nor tasted. This being has in this way become the inner reality of pure consciousness, the ultimately simple without predicates; it is the pure notion, qua notion whose being is in itself, or it is pure thought within itself. This insight in its conscious activity does not go through the process of passing from being, which is purely being, to an opposite in thought, which is the same as mere being, or does not go from the pure positive to the opposite pure negative; since the positive is really pure simply and solely through negation, while the negative qua pure is self-identical and one within itself, and precisely on that account positive.

Or again, these two have not come to the notion found in Descartes’ metaphysics that in themselves being and thought are the same; they have not arrived at the thought that being, pure being, is not a concrete actual reality, but pure abstraction, and conversely that pure thought, self-identity or inner essence, is partly the negative of self-consciousness, and consequently is being, and partly, qua immediate simple entity, is likewise nothing else than being. Thought is thinghood, or thinghood is thought.

The real essence is here divided asunder in such a way that, to begin with, it appertains to two specifically distinct modes of thinking. In part, the real must hold distinction in itself; in part, just by so doing, both ways of considering it merge into one; for then the abstract moments, of pure being and the negative, by which their distinction is expressed, are united in the object with which these modes of treatment deal.

The universal common to both is the abstraction of pure self-thinking, of pure quivering within the self. This simple motion of rotating on its own axis is bound to resolve itself into separate moments, because it is itself only motion by distinguishing its own moments. This distinguishing of the moments leaves the unmoved [unity] behind as the empty shell of pure being, that is no longer actual thought, has no more life within it; for qua distinction this process is all the content. The process, which thus puts itself outside that unity thereby constitutes, however, the shifting change—a change that does not return into itself—of the moments of being-in-itself, of being-for-another, and of being-for-self—actual reality in the way this is object for the concrete consciousness of pure insight—constitutes Utility.

Bad as utility may look to belief or sentimentality or even to the abstraction that calls itself speculation, and takes to do with the ultimate, the inherent nature; yet it is that in which pure insight finds its realisation, and itself is the object for insight, an object which insight now no longer repudiates, and which, too, it does not put down as the void or the pure beyond. For pure insight, as we saw, is the living notion itself, the self-same pure personality, distinguishing itself within itself in such a way that each of the distinguished elements is itself pure notion, i.e. is eo ipso not distinct; it is simple undifferentiated pure self-consciousness, which is for itself as well as in itself within an immediate unity. Its inherent being, its being in itself, is therefore not fixed and permanent, but at once ceases, in its distinction, to be something distinctive. A being of that kind, however, which is immediately without support and cannot stand of itself, has no being in itself, no inherent existence, it is essentially for something else, which is the power that consumes and absorbs it. But this second moment, opposed to that first one, disappears immediately too, like the first; or, rather, qua being merely for some other, it is the very process of disappearing, and is definitely affirmed as being that has turned back into itself, as being for itself. This simple being-for-self, however, qua self-identity, is rather an objective being, or is thereby for an other.

This nature of pure insight in thus unfolding and making explicit its moments, in other words insight qua object, finds expression in the useful, the profitable. What is useful is a thing, something that subsists in itself; this being in itself is at the same time only a pure moment: it is in consequence absolutely for something else, but is equally for an other merely as it is in itself: these opposite moments return into the indivisible unity of being-for-self. While, however, the useful doubtless expresses the notion of pure insight, it is all the same not insight as such, but insight as conscious presentation, or as object for insight. It is merely the restless shifting change of those moments, of which one is indeed being returned into itself, but merely as being for itself, i.e. as abstract moment, appearing on one side over against the others. The useful itself does not consist in the negative fact of having these moments in their opposition at the same time undivided in one and the same respect, of having them as a form of thought per se in the way they are qua pure insight. The moment of being-for-self is doubtless a phase of usefulness, but not in the sense that it swamps the other moments, being-per-se and being-for-another; if so, it would be the whole self. In dealing with the useful, pure insight thus takes as object its own peculiar notion in the pure moments constituting its nature; it is the consciousness of this metaphysical principle, but not yet its conceptual comprehension, it has not yet itself got to the unity of being and notion. Because the useful still appears before insight in the form of an object, insight has a world, not indeed any longer a world all by itself and self-contained, but still a world all the same, which it distinguishes from itself. Only, since the opposites have come forth on the summit of the notion, the next step will be for them to collide with one another and for enlightenment to experience the fruits of their deeds.

When we look at the object reached in relation to this entire sphere of spiritual life, we found the actual world of culture summed up in the vanity of self-consciousness—in independent self-existence, whose content is drawn from the confusion characteristic of culture, and which is still the individual notion, not yet the self-conscious (für sich) universal notion. Returned into itself, however, that (individual) notion is pure insight—pure consciousness qua pure self or negativity, just as belief, too, is pure consciousness, qua pure thought or positivity. Belief finds in that self the moment that makes it complete;—but, perishing through being thus completed, it is in pure insight that we now see both moments as absolute Being, which is purely thought-constituted or is a negative entity, and as matter, which is the positive entity.

This completion still lacks that actual reality of self-consciousness, which belongs to the vain and empty type of consciousness—the world out of which thought raised itself up to itself. What is thus wanting is reached in the aspect of utility so far as pure insight secures positive objectivity there; pure insight is thereby a concrete actual consciousness satisfied within itself. This objectivity now constitutes its world, and is become the final and true outcome of the entire previous world, ideal as well as real. The first world of spirit is the expansive realm of spirit’s self-dispersed existence and of certainty of self in separate individual shapes and forms: just as nature disperses its life in an endless multiplicity of forms and shapes, without the generic principle of all the forms being present therein. The second world contains the generic principle, and is the realm of the ultimate inherent nature (Ansichseyns) or the essential truth, over against that individual certainty. The third world, however, that of the profitable or the useful, is the truth which is certainty of self as well. The realm of the truth of belief lacks the principle of concrete actuality, or of certainty of self in the sense of this individual self. But, again, concrete actuality, or certainty of self qua this individual, lacks the ultimate inherent nature (Ansich). In the object of pure insight both worlds are united. The useful is the object so far as self-consciousness sees through it and individual certainty of self finds its enjoyment (its self-existence) in it; self-consciousness sees into it in this manner, and this insight contains the true essence of the object (which consists in being something permeable to sight, something seen through, in other words, in being for an other). This insight is thus itself true knowledge; and self-consciousness directly finds in this attitude universal certainty of itself as well, has its pure consciousness in this attitude, in which truth as well as immediateness and actuality are united. Both worlds are reconciled and heaven is transplanted to the earth below.