808

[R Srivatsan]

808.  In 805, Hegel dealt with the boundary of the Logic with the Phenomenology. In 806 and 807 he dealt with the boundary of the PhS with his Philosophy of Nature, (Part II of the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences).  Here in this last paragraph, he deals with the border of the Phenomenology that abuts history (as in his Philosophy of History).

Spirit's becoming in its incoming direction was nature -- life becomes spirit and the movement is in spirit's direction.  The other side, the outgoing side is spirit becoming history.  It is the way in which spirit is estranged into time, the way in which it leaves an objective trace behind in its striving to become more comprehensive/comprehending/comprehensible. It is a negation, an entäußerung (an externalization) of its subjectivity.  

History presents itself as a mardi gras parade of spirit -- a gallery of images endowed with the riches of what spirit generates of itself.  A slow procession because the content of this unconscious fecundity has to be digested.  To know what it is, spirit has to withdraw into itself, into thought, abandoning what it has produced (e.g., Greek substance, or the Reign of Terror) and withdrawing into its "night of self-consciousness".  It is in this darkness of forgotten recollection that its erased being-there is preserved as it moves forward.  What is reborn, is what remains imprinted, embodied in spirit through this experience and knowing, as the new being-there, the new shape of spirit.

This new spirit has to begin again, anew, with its immediate self-certainty and sense-certainty as before, and expand into maturity as if, it would seem, all its earlier education were lost.  But it is not lost, its new structure embodies the learning and it is built of a substance of a higher order.  Each actuality of spirit consumes its predecessor and takes over that world.  What spirit seeks is the absolute concept -- comprehensive self-knowledge. 

This revelation of the absolute concept is the sublation of the depth of the concept, its expansion, and this occurs through the negation of the I and the withdrawal into itself as it expels substance from its thinking.  But this deepening of the I is also the time of the concept -- it is the process that deepens the I in its logical dialectical accumulation of time -- that gives the I (as the Hegelian synthetic unity of apperception) its depth in the self.

This goal of absolute knowiedge is spirit that comprehends itself as spirit:  It is the I that is a We that fully knows itself. And its path is the recollection of the sublated spirits and their organization.  On the unconscious side, as free being-there they are the material of history, as contingent occurrence.  On the side of their conceptual organization, and full comprehension, they form the science of appearing knowledge.  It is this intertwined coupled progression that forms comprehended history -- where the I that is the We came from and what its goal is -- that forms the calvary absolute spirit.  It is the path to death and resurrection of spirit as Christ died on the Cross at Golgotha and was resurrected. Spirit is Bone.  It is this that leads spirit to its self-certainty and its actuality, truth, throne, without which Spirit would be lifeless solitude.

Only - from the chalice of this realm of spirits

foams forth for Him his own infinitude.

Thank you all for your patience

Love

Srivats

--

R Srivatsan
Flat 101, Block C, Saincher Palace Apartments
10-3-152, Street No 2
East Marredpally
Secunderabad

Telangana 500026
Mobile: +91 77027 11656, +91 94404 80762
(No Landline)

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