802

[R Srivatsan]

802.  Because of the subject object divide, and the structure of knowledge as the subjective certainty regarding the objective truth, "nothing is known that is not in experience". (317)  But the subject object divide Hegel refers to here is not only empirical, but also "felt truth", the "Eternal inwardly revealed", "a sacred article of faith" In other words, experience is the undigested content of substance, which is nothing but spirit in potential, and this substance is spiritual in its movement to come forth into comprehension. 

Spirit is the movement which is cognition, i.e., the process of knowing.  It is the transformation of the undigested, substantive in-itself, into a for-itself, it is the transformation of substance into subject, of the object of consciousness (of something objective) into the object of self-consciousness (of the subject itself), or the object as such into a sublated one, a concept.

However, Hegel suggests, this movement is not a one-way street.  The movement does not begin at the object and terminate in the concept.  Rather, this is the closing of the circle, where the concept comes back to the object of sense-certainty.  "The circle presupposes its beginning and reaches this beginning only in the end".(317)

The reference to time in following paragraph is difficult:

quote

Hence, insofar as spirit is necessarily this differentiation within itself, its intuited whole confronts its simple self-consciousness, and since, then, this whole is what is differentiated, it is differentiated into its intuited pure concept, into time, and into the content or into the in-itself; the substance has within it, as subject, the at first inner necessity of presenting itself within itself as what it is in itself, as spirit.
end quote (Inwood 318)

Allegra De Laurentis, who has the most comprehensive exegesis of Absolute Knowing, demurs giving an explanation of this sentence in her chapter saying it goes beyond the scope!

But, here it foolishly goes (where angels fear to tread...):  "insofar as spirit is this differentiation within itself" means insofar as the motor of spirit commences as the amoebic fission, as the beginning of the subject object divide.  Insofar as this divide occurs, there is a subject and an object:  On the one hand, the subject is its pure concept, i.e., its own self, and it experiences itself as time (the time of experience of all reality) -- this is the Kantian position, which Husserl will explore in the twentieth century.  This experience of itself as time is nothing but seeing itself as an opaque substantive being which is only open to experience -- this subject as time does not comprehend itself.  The object on the other hand is pure substance that is intuited.  The substance (i.e., the spiritually driven object), has within it an inner necessity, a drive, to present or display  or articulate what it is in itself (i.e, what it is implicitly) as what it is actually, i.e., spirit in full articulation.

It is only when the object has articulated itself fully, makes itself fully and explicitly present to the self, does it become an aspect of the self, (which is a tautology, because the articulation of substance means becoming (an aspect of) the subject).  Because of this, until the world spirit has completed itself in itself, until it has reached the ultimate limits of its substantive potential, it cannot consummate itself as spirit as self-consciousness. 

It is for this reason that religion first crows on about what spirit is, earlier than the phenomenological science does:  the in-itself of spirit has to develop, and has to inarticulately (through religion) blurt its flawed truth before science comes along and gets it right.

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