eBook Hegel Philosophy of Mind

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form: the form is only found in subjective thinking, which in philosophy gives that universal truth and reality
an existence of its own. In man's case it is otherwise: his truth and reality is the free mind itself, and it comes
to existence in his self-consciousness. This absolute nucleus of man - mind intrinsically concrete - is just
this - to have the form (to have thinking) itself for a content. To the height of the thinking consciousness of
this principle Aristotle ascended in his notion of the entelechy of thought, thus surmounting the Platonic Idea
(the genus, or essential being). But thought always - and that on account of this very principle - contains the
immediate self-subsistence of subjectivity no less than it contains universality; the genuine Idea of the
intrinsically concrete mind is just as essentially under the one of its terms (subjective consciousness) as under
the other (universality): and in the one as in the other it is the same substantial content. Under the subjective
form, however, fall feeling, intuition, pictorial representation; and it is in fact necessary that in point of time
the consciousness of the absolute Idea should be first reached and apprehended in this form: in other words, it
must exist in its immediate reality as religion, earlier than it does as philosophy. Philosophy is a later
development from this basis (just as Greek philosophy itself is later than Greek religion), and in fact reaches
its completion by catching and comprehending in all its definite essentiality that principle of spirit which first
manifests itself in religion. But Greek philosophy could set itself up only in opposition to Greek religion: the
unity of thought and the substantiality of the Idea could take up none but a hostile attitude to an imaginative
polytheism, and to the gladsome and frivolous humours of its poetic creations. The form in its infinite truth,
the subjectivity of mind, broke forth at first only as a subjective free thinking, which was not yet identical
with the substantiality itself - and thus this underlying principle was not yet apprehended as absolute mind.
Thus religion might appear as first purified only through philosophy - through pure self-existent thought: but
the form pervading this underlying principle - the form which philosophy attacked - was that creative
imagination.
Political power, which is developed similarly, but earlier than philosophy, from religion. exhibits the
one-sidedness, which in the actual world may infect its implicitly true Idea, as demoralization. Plato, in
common with all his thinking contemporaries, perceived this demoralization of democracy and the
defectiveness even of its principle; he set in relief accordingly the underlying principle of the state, but could
not work into his idea of it the infinite form of subjectivity, which still escaped his intelligence. His state is
therefore, on its own showing, wanting in subjective liberty (� 503 note, � 513, etc.). The truth which should
be immanent in the state, should knit it together and control it, he, for these reasons, got hold of only in the
form of thought-out truth, of philosophy; and hence he makes that utterance that 'so long as philosophers do
not rule in the states, or those who are now called kings and rulers do not soundly and comprehensively
philosophize, so long neither the state nor the race of men can be liberated from evils - so long will the idea
of the political constitution fall short of possibility and not see the light of the sun'. It was not vouchsafed to
Plato to go on so far as to say that so long as true religion did not spring up in the world and hold away in
political life, so long the genuine principle of the state had not come into actuality. But so long too this
principle could not emerge even in thought, nor could thought lay hold of the genuine idea of the state - the
idea of the substantial moral life, with which is identical the liberty of an independent self-consciousness.
Only in the principle of mind, which is aware of its own essence, is implicitly in absolute liberty, and has its
actuality in the act of self-liberation, does the absolute possibility and necessity exist for political power,
religion, and the principles of philosophy coinciding in one, and for accomplishing the reconciliation of
actuality in general with the mind, of the state with the religious conscience as well as with the philosophical
consciousness. Self-realizing subjectivity is in this case absolutely identical with substantial universality.
C. THE MORAL LIFE, OR SOCIAL ETHICS(1) 65
PHILOSOPHY OF MIND
Hence religion as such, and the state as such - both as forms in which the principle exists - each contain the [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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