Pehnomenology of Spirit, by Hegel

I believe this book presents the most profound and intelligible philosophy of how to achieve absolute knowledge and self-actualization.

The Phenomenology of Spirit is about the stages in the mind’s necessary progress from immediate sense-consciousness to the position of a scientific philosophy. It is about classifying and explaining the phenomena of nature and mind.

Hegel condemns the hedonist to an endless, hollow search for new pleasures, which never provide a lasting content for self-consciousness.

The law of the family is a divine law. However, it at times must clash with the state law, which is a very profound source of disunity in ethical spiritual life. The state laws merely concern the ownership and transmission of property. Such an atomistic community, with an external relationship to the community, is quite void of anything like family depth and warmth. The removal of intimacy, of warmth or soul, from the mutual recognition of the community’s members, must, however, necessarily give rise to a sense of distance, of estrangement or alienation from the community.

The truly moral life to which we must advance will be as deep in its care for individual problems and circumstances as it is wide in its concern for anyone and everyone.

Hegel discusses alienated spirituality with two central focuses: the focus of Enlightenment, representing the abstract communal life of a mutual recognition and shared use of facilities which never becomes intimate, and the focus of Faith or Belief, which in a dim and confused way strives to overcome the abstraction which leads to alienation.

One must always be ready to progress further, to develop talents and possibilities.

A study of dutiful subjectivity, by which Hegel understands neither the personal cult of Virtue, a superseded form of egoistic Reasonableness, nor the blind obedience to the daylight or underground laws of the substantial ethical community, but rather a set of practically oriented attitudes representing the individual’s own deep reflection on conduct, balanced by a deep respect for the parallel reflections of others. The moral view of the world sees the fulfilment of duty not only as the whole task of man, but also as the whole purpose of nature.

We must posit a God to make endless moral progress possible, and who will complete the moral good of virtue with the natural good of happiness.

The cult of conscience is a religion, a religion at once lonely, yet at a higher level communal. My conscience in its absolute majesty legislates for me and for me alone, but its legislation for me is recognized as valid by all conscientious persons, and so in a sense becomes a law for all.

Morality becomes religious: we experience a spirit at once present in, yet transcending, the difference of conscientious agents, and which is rightly thought of as suprapersonal and divine. God exists and is active because He lives beyond any form of reasoned consensus.

Hegel’s phenomenology of Religion: a spirituality which transcends their own, and which as much lies behind nature as behind the personal and social life of men.

All forms of religion, which unite the self-consciously human with what transcends it, must, however, suffer decay and attrition in a period when man becomes alienated from his deeper self, a period of such as that of Rome under the Caesars, or again of Europe in the 18th century, and so on. It was at such a point in time that Christianity first made its appearance, a religious stance in which human spirituality strives upwards towards and becomes one with a spirituality which transcends the human, while the latter likewise is seen as coming down into and transfiguring human spirituality.

Such a union of the individual and the specific with the transcendently universal is, for Hegel, the sense and ‘truth’ of everything.

The Christian God is essentially redemptive, and Hegel’s philosophy is essentially a philosophy of redemption, of a self-alienation that returns to self in victory. If Hegel was nothing better, he was at least a great Christian theologian.

It has become aware of the community of conscious persons as united and also dirempted, by the close bonds of common ancestry and family love, and also more loosely but widely held together by governmental and economic ties. It has experienced the tensions of social positions where men are sujected to external legal and economic pressures, where their need for a more profound communion has to be displaced to the higher plane of faith.

* For absolute knowledge is simply the realization that all forms of objectivity are identical with those essential to the thinking subject, so that in construing the world conceptually it is seeing everything in the form of self, the self being simply the ever-active principle of conceptual universality, of categorial synthesis.

The final form of conceptual grasp emerged, where the self or subject saw itself as itself the Absolute, externalizing itself in substantial, objective nature, yet conscious of itself in this very act of self-externalization, and of itself, in fact, as simply being its own act of self-identification in and through such externalization.

Sound reason knows immediately what is right and good. Reason is for him a useful instrument for keeping excess within bounds.

* In this knowledge of himself as the sum and substance of all actual powers, this lord and master of the world is the titanic self-consciousness that thinks of itself as being an actual living god. But since he is only the formal self which is unable to tame those powers, his activities and self-enjoyment are equally monstrous excesses. [This is why I study Buddhism]. [481]
The lord of the world becomes really conscious of what he is, viz. the universal power of the actual world, in the destructive power he exercises against the self of his subjects. for his power is not the union and harmony of spirit in which persons would recognize their own self-consciousness.

Actuality has lost all substantiality and nothing in it has intrinsic being. Thus, not only the realm of Faith, but also the realm of the actual world, is overthrown. This revolution gives birth to absolute freedom, and with this freedom the previously alienated Spirit has completely returned into itself, has abandoned this region of culture and passes on to another region, the region of the moral consciousness.

…to make himself a member of the group, of use for the common good and serviceable to all. The extent to which he looks after his own interests must also be matched by the extent to which he serves others. [560].