803

[R Srivatsan]

803.  Spirit's labour is to bring forth its self-knowledge and this is actual history.  In other words, this is the concept driving to a more logical self-comprehension, not a chronology or a random course of events.

The religious community is uncultivated consciousness.  It is the first substantive form of absolute spirit.  Its actuality is harsh and barbarous and the deeper (and more complex) its implicit spirit is, the harder its sluggish and stupid self-consciousness has to struggle with its essence or truth, i.e., with a content (the world, god) seen as alien.  Only when this struggle to comprehend this truth as a content of consciousness (i.e., as an object) does it turn inward.  This turning inward is a sublating of the alien object orientation of consciousness into a self-consciousness.  At this point, it is no longer looking at the past or the future for its salvation, but looking at its present actuality.   It is at this turn that it goes inward and observes the world rationally, articulating it as its own actuality. It now comprehends itself as actual (It thinks and therefore is) and also the actual as the outcome of its thought (this is the conversion of substance to matter, i.e., the spiritualizing of Nature).  

At the first stage of this reason, this pattern of consciousness asserts the unity of thinking and being: consciousness as substance -- the thought of Spinoza.  This form of thinking associates light substance with pure thinking, and in doing so, is like Zoroastrianism, the religion of light (the most primitive). Spirit reviews this and "recoils in horror" from this abstract unity of substance and thought which renders the self null in substance, and against it, affirms individuality (this refers to Liebniz's theory of monads).  

Next, through history the I is plunged into actuality and culture (Rameau's Nephew) making it actual and establishing it as being across the world, and it arrives at Enlightenment, at the thought of utility as opposed to faith, and at a pure insight that defeats faith completely through reason as a Trojan Horse virus infecting the latter as its defence against enlightenment.  It is only after this that the I sees and asserts itself as I = I the identity of the self with itself as individual (implicitly mapped on to the universal, the world).  

However, the I = I of Fichte is something that exists as pure difference from the objective world.  It is a difference that asserts the stability and perenniality of the subject against the object that is across the divide.  Now, because the world is seen as object (opposed to subjectivity, which is primary) the world appears to the subject in its consciousness as time.  With Spinoza the immediate identity was of thinking and substance (thought and extension, space).  With Kant and Fichte, it is thinking and time (internal time consciousness of the external world).  Without the organicity of spirit, time collapses into a mere representation of extension -- the inner picture of the outer, or the phenomenon that represents the noumenon.  This time is not the dynamic time of living things.  

Put another way, "the I is not merely the self, but the equality of the Self with itself" (318)  Since this equality is a kind of welded unity (unarticulated identity) it is substantive (opaque, incomprehensible unity).  This substance without any internal content is pure intuition without content, or rather, the content intuited as determinate would be accidental, random, not logically synthesised.  This I would be absolute substance in this completely exclusive unity with itself.  All content would fall outside into the objective world, and since this reflection of the substantive subject outward into the world is a dead object, this object is not spirit, and cannot be comprehended as spirit. The world is dead and delinked from the subject.

If a content were to be spoken of in this pattern of consciousness, this would be only to objectify, petrify it in a spiritless objectivity.  On the other hand, this dead object would be what is picked up by sense perception.  Thus what the I knows comes from an outside that is conceived as inaccessible to spirit and what we perceive as phenomena come from unknowable noumena.

Srivats

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R Srivatsan
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There is only one solution if old age is not to be an absurd parody of our former life, and that is to go on pursuing ends that give our existence a meaning – devotion to individuals, to groups or to causes, social, political, intellectual or creative work … in old age we should wish still to have passions strong enough to prevent us turning in on ourselves. One’s life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, indignation, compassion. - Simone de Beauvoir