1.  The various modes of the negative behaviour of consciousness in scepticism and in theoretical and practical idealism are but subordinate forms in comparison to this one, pure insight and its dissemination, the Enlightenment.  For Enlightenment is born of substance and knows that the pure self of consciousness is absolute, embracing it with a pure awareness of it as the absolute essence of all actual reality.

– ²The same pure consciousness, faith and insight are opposite in form.  Faith's essence is thought, not concept, so it is thoroughly hostile to self-consciousness.  In contrast, pure insight's essence is the self.  Each is the straight negative of the other.

– ³When the two enter the fray against each other, all content goes to faith, for in its calm element of thinking every moment acquires duration.  Pure insight is initially empty, more like the pure vanishing of content.  Negative movement against what is negative to it is how pure insight realizes itself and produces its own content.

2.  Being reason and truth, pure insight knows faith to be its opponent.  ²Enlightenment regards faith in general as a fabric of superstitions, prejudices and errors and it sees the consciousness of this content organizing itself further into a realm of error where false insight occupies the general mass of consciousness, which is direct, uncommitted and free of reflection on itself.  In fact, however, in the background, isolated from its impartiality, it does indeed harbour the moment of reflection on itself, i.e. self-consciousness, but only as an insight confined to itself and an evil intention only out to fool self-consciousness.  ³That mass is the victim of the priesthood's deception.  A jealous and vain priesthood it is too, committed to its sole possession of insight and the pursuit of its self-interest in conspiracy with despotism.  Despotism is the synthetic, concept-free unity of the real with this ideal realm – a strangely inconsistent beast – standing above the bad insight of the people and the bad intention of the priests; combining both within itself, it uses the deceiving priesthood to exploit the ignorance and confusion of the people, holding both in contempt.  Enjoying the advantage of calm control, despotism pursues its pleasures and indulges its arbitrary power, but it is never more than that same stunted insight, the same superstition and error.

3.  Enlightenment takes up the cudgels against these three faces of the enemy, and not without varying its campaign.  Its essence, pure insight, is in and for itself the universal, so its true relation to the other extreme is that in which it seeks what is common to, and equal in, both.  ²Singularity isolating itself out of the impartial consciousness of the masses is the opponent with which Enlightenment cannot directly come into contact.  ³This is why the will of the deceiving priesthood and the oppressive despot is not the immediate object of Enlightenment's action.  Instead it confronts the insight without will, which does not individuate itself to being for itself, the concept of rational self-consciousness.  This has its existence in the masses, but not yet as concept.  ⁴Pure insight now strips this honest insight and its impartial essence of all its prejudices and errors, it wrests the reality and power of its deception out of the hands of the bad intention, ground and material for whose realm the concept-free consciousness of the general mass, i.e. whose being for itself has its substance solely in that simple consciousness.

4.  Pure insight's relation to the impartial consciousness of absolute essence now has two sides.  On the one hand, pure insight is inherently, in itself, the same as naive consciousness.  On the other, this consciousness allows the absolute essence and its parts to establish themselves with duration in the simple element of its thought and only acknowledges their validity as its own in itself and hence in objective terms while, however, denying its own being for itself in this in itself.

– ²In the first case pure insight takes this faith to be in itself pure self-consciousness and all it has to do now is become self-consciousness for itself.  This gives Enlightenment in this concept of faith the element in which it can realize itself instead of the false insight.

5.  Both are essentially the same here and the relation of pure insight occurs in and through the same element, so their communication is direct and their giving and taking is an undisturbed mutual flow into each other.  ²No matter what else may be stuck into consciousness as pegs, it is inherently, in itself, this simplicity in which everything dissolves, forgotten and uncommitted; this simplicity is precisely what makes it directly amenable to the concept.  ³Communication of pure insight is thus a calm spreading or dispersal and can be compared with a fragrance wafting through an atmosphere without resistance.  ⁴It is a penetrating infection that did not previously make itself noticed as an opponent to the indifferent element in which it insinuates itself and for that reason, cannot be stopped.  ⁵It's only after the infection has spread that an awareness of it emerges in the consciousness that submitted to it without concern.  ⁶It was, after all, the simple essence, identical to itself and to this consciousness, which the latter took into itself.  It was, however, also the negativity reflected into itself, which later developed according to its nature as antithetical, reminding consciousness thereby of its own previous mode: the concept that is the simple knowledge knowing itself to be simultaneously with its opposite overcome within it.  ⁷This is why pure insight, as it is for consciousness, has already spread; the struggle against pure insight only reveals the infection that has already taken hold.  It's too late for the struggle and everything undertaken against it only worsens the disease, for it has reached the marrow of spiritual/mental life, i.e. consciousness in its concept, its pure essence itself.  Consciousness has no power to counter pure insight.  ⁸Being in the essence itself, the as yet isolated manifestations can be suppressed along with the superficial symptoms.  ⁹This is a highly advantageous position to be in for pure insight.  Now it doesn't waste any energy, nor is it unworthy of its own essence, which would happen if it broke out in symptoms and isolated eruptions against the content of faith and against the context of its external reality.  ¹⁰Now pure insight is an invisible and unnoticed spirit seeping thoroughly into the noble parts and soon it has comprehensively mastered all the innards and limbs of the unconscious idols and "one fine morning, it gives its comrades the elbow and bumpety bump! the idol is lying on the floor." [Diderot, Rameaus Neffe (Rameau's nephew) in Goethe's translation Werke v. 1.45, p. 116 f. M].

– ¹¹That's one fine day when lunchtime is not bloody, when the infection has permeated all the organs of spiritual/mental life and only the memory preserves, no-one knows how, the previous dead pattern of spriti/mind in a story.  Meanwhile, the new pattern of spirit/mind, the snake of wisdom set up for worship, has through all this painlessly discarded its old, whithered skin [compare Numbers 21:8 And the LORD said unto Moses, Make thee a fiery serpent, and set it upon a pole: and it shall come to pass, that every one that is bitten, when he looketh upon it, shall live. King James Bible M] .

6.  This silent spreading of mindful spirit in the simple innards of its own substance, with its activity concealed, is only the one side of the realization of pure insight.  ²Its dissemination does not only consist in bringing the same things together and its implementation is not only a spreading without opposition.  ³In fact, the action of the negative essence is just as essentially a developed motion, differentiating itself within itself, which as conscious action sets up its moments in specific revealed existence.  It must be present as a big noise and violent struggle with its opponent.

7.  We now have to look at how pure insight and intention operates against the opponent they find in place.

– ²Behaving negatively, since its concept is all essence and nothing else, pure insight and intention can only be the negative of itself.  ³Thus, as insight it becomes the negative of pure insight, it becomes untruth and irrationality, while as intention it becomes the negative of the pure intention, the lie and impurity of purpose.

8.  It entangles itself in this contradiction when it enters into the conflict and fancies it is struggling against something other.

– ²This is no more than fancy, however, for its essence as absolute negativity is to have otherness within itself.  ³The absolute concept is the category.  The absolute concept is that knowledge and the object of knowledge are the same.  ⁴What pure insight regards as its other, denouncing it as error and lies, can in fact be nothing other than itself.  Pure insight can only damn itself.  ⁵Whatever is not rational has no truth, i.e. what is not conceptually comprehended is not.  So when reason speaks of something other than itself, in fact it only speaks of itself.  Reason cannot step outside itself.

– ⁶This struggle with the opponent thus binds together within it the significance of being the realization of pure insight.  ⁷This consists precisely in the motion of developing the moments and taking them back within it.  One part of this motion is drawing the distinction that allows comprehending insight to confront itself as object.  As long as it abides in this moment, so long does it remain alienated from itself.  ⁸As pure insight, it is completely without content.  The motion of its realization consists in the process by which it becomes its own content itself.  Nothing else can become content for it because it is the self-consciousness of the category.  ⁹Initially, pure insight only knows content in the opponent and not yet as itself, so it mistakes itself in that other.  ¹⁰Pure insight's completion thus has the significance of recognizing what is initially objective content for it as its own content.  ¹¹Its result from that, however, is neither the reproduction of the errors it is struggling against, nor only pure insight's own first concept, but rather an insight that recognizes the absolute negation of itself as its own reality, as itself, i.e. its own concept that recognizes itself.

– ¹²This nature of the struggle of Enlightenment with error, only to be struggling with itself therein, and to be damning only what it itself claims, is for us; it is what Enlightenment's struggle is in itself.  ¹³Its first side, however, the pollution resulting from accepting the negative behaviour into its own self-identical purity, is exactly how Enlightenment is as an object for faith.  Faith thus experiences Enlightenment as lies, irrationality and bad intentions, just as faith is error and prejudice for Enlightenment.

– ¹⁴In consideration of Enlightenment's content, it is initially empty insight, to which its own content appears as something other.  Enlightenment thus finds the content in this pattern pre-existing, namely that of not yet being Enlightenment's own content, an existence completely independent of it within faith.

9.  Enlightenment takes its object initially as pure insight and, not recognizing itself, declares it to be error.  ²Consciousness grasps insight as such as its object in such a way that it either makes it the essence of consciousness or into an object it penetrates and in which it sustains itself, remaining therein by itself and present to itself.  Being in this way the motion of the object, consciousness produces it.  ³It is in this sense that Enlightenment expresses faith correctly when it says of it that its absolute essence is a being of its own consciousness, its own thought, something generated by consciousness.  ⁴With this Enlightenment dismisses faith as error and fiction of what it is itself.

– ⁵Enlightenment wants to teach faith the new wisdom, but with all these declarations it tells faith nothing new, for faith regards its own object precisely as the pure essence of its own consciousness, which does not lose itself and negate itself therein; it trusts its object, it finds itself therein as this consciousness, i.e. as self-consciousness.  ⁶When I trust somebody, then his certainty of himself is for me the certainty of myself; I recognize my being for myself in him and that he acknowledges it and that it is his purpose and essence.  ⁷Faith is trust because its consciousness relates directly to its object and sees clearly that it is one with that object, that it is in it.

– ⁸Further, when my object is something in which I recognize myself, that means I am also in it simultaneously another self-consciousness.  This means I am someone whose particular singularity, namely his naturalness and accidental features have been alienated while also remaining partly self-consciousness and partly essential consciousness just as pure insight is.

– ⁹The concept of insight includes not only this, that consciousness recognizes itself in the object into which it has insight, that it actually has itself immediately therein without leaving thought and having to return back into itself, but also that it is conscious of itself as the mediating motion or of itself as the action and generation.  This is how its self-identity as the unity of self and object is for it in the thought.

– ¹⁰This consciousness is precisely faith.  Obedience and action together form a necessary moment by which the certainty of being comes about in absolute essence.  ¹¹It does not appear that absolute essence, the absolute being, itself is generated by this action of faith.  ¹²But the absolute being of faith is essentially not the abstract being who lies beyond believing consciousness; rather, it is the spirit of the congregation, the unity of abstract being and self-consciousness.  ¹³Being this spirit of the congregation makes the action of the community an essential moment and it is only that through generation by consciousness.  Better, it is nothing without being generated by consciousness; for, as essential as generation is, that's how essentially it is also not the only ground of essence, rather, it is only one moment.  ¹⁴The essence is simultaneously in and for itself.

10.  Looked at from the other side, the concept of pure insight regards itself as something other than its object, for it is precisely this negative distinction that constitutes the object.  ²Here we can see that, from the other side too, pure insight expresses the essence of faith as something alien to self-consciousness, which is not its essence but a changeling that has been foisted on it.  ³Here the Enlightenment is just being foolish.  Faith experiences it now as a kind of speech that does not know what it is saying and completely misses the point when it talks of priestly lies and deceiving the people.  ⁴It speaks as if the hocuspocus of shifty priests was foisting something absolutely alien and other and passing it off as essence, all the while claiming that this is a knowledge of consciousness in which it believes, trusts, and to which it seeks to accommodate itself.  This means that consciousness sees in that its pure essence as much as it does its universal and only individuality, generating this unity of itself and its essence through its own action.  ⁵Enlightenment directly expresses that what it sees as being alien to consciousness is in fact most intimately its own.

– ⁶So how can Enlightenment talk of lies and deception?  ⁷By stating exactly the opposite of what is claims for faith, it rather reveals itself to faith as the conscious lie.  ⁸How can deception and lies happen there where consciousness in its truth immediately has the certainty of its self, where in its object it possesses itself by virtue of the fact that in the object it simultaneously finds itself and generates itself.  ⁹The distinction is no longer present in the words!

– ¹⁰When the general question is put: is it permitted to deceive a people, then the answer has to be that the question is irrelevant because it makes it impossible to deceive a people.

– ¹¹Brass for gold, counterfeit money for the real thing, these may pass here and there may be people who claim that a lost battle was won.  Such lies about sensuous things and individual events may be made credible over a time period, but when it comes to the knowledge of the essence in which consciousness has the immediate certainty of its own self, here the thought of deception becomes completely irrelevant.

11.  Let us consider further how faith experiences Enlightenment in the various moments of faith's consciousness, which the perspective developed above initially only considered in general terms.  ²These moments are pure thinking, or as object, absolute essence, the absolute being in and for itself; then comes faith's relation to that as a form of knowledge, the ground of its faith; and finally faith's relation to that in terms of its action, faith's service.  ³Pure insight is mistaken about faith and denies itself therein and its behaviour will be just as distorted with respect to these moments.

12.  Pure insight relates negatively to the absolute essence, the absolute being of believing consciousness.  ²This being is pure thinking established within itself as the object or as essence.  In believing consciousness the in itself  of thinking secures for the consciousness existing for itself also the form, but only the empty form, of objectivity.  It has the character of something imagined.  ³To pure insight, pure consciousness in terms of the self existing for itself, however, the other appears as a negative of self-consciousness.  ⁴This could be taken either as the pure in itself of thinking or also as the being of sense certainty.  ⁵But because for the self, and this as self, it also has the one object, it is actually real consciousness and this means that Enlightenment's most genuine object as such is a common existing thing of sense certainty.  ⁶Enlightenment's object appears to it in the image of faith.  ⁷Enlightenment damns this image and in doing so damns its own object.  ⁸In this Enlightenment has already done an injustice to faith, grasping faith's object in such a way as to make it its own.  ⁹Enlightnement says of faith that its absolute being is a piece of stone, a block of wood, that it has eyes but does not see [Psalms 115 v.4 ff etc., etc. M], or perhaps a piece of bread dough that, after being transformed by men from what was grown in the field was sent back; or in whatever other ways faith anthropomorphizes the essence, makes it objective, gives it presence.

13.  Passing itself off as purity, the Enlightenment turns what for the mindful spirit is eternal life and holy ghost into a merely transient thing and denigrates it with the inherently empty perspective of sense certainty.  This perspective is not a part of pious faith at all and, in fact, Enlightenment is simply lying to faith about this.  ²What faith honours is not stone to it, nor wood, nor bread, nor any kind of transient object of sense.  ³When Enlightenment has the bright idea of claiming that the object of faith is this also or even goes so far as to say that the object is this in itself  and in truth, then faith knows that also too, but that only holds outside its piety, while it is also true that for faith nothing is like a stone etc. in itself, for there is only one thing in itself  for faith and that is the essence of pure thinking.

14.  The second moment is the relation of faith as knowing consciousness to this essence.  ²Thinking, pure consciousness, this essence is immediate to faith; but pure consciousness is just as much a mediated relation of certainty to truth.  This is a relation that constitutes the ground of faith.  ³Enlightenment regards this ground also as just a contingent knowledge of a coincidental situation.  ⁴But the ground of knowledge is the knowing universal, which in its truth is the absolute mindful spirit that, in abstract, pure consciousness or in thinking as such, is only absolute essence as self-consciousness, i.e. it is knowledge of itself.  ⁵Pure insight takes this knowing universal, the simple self-knowing mindful spirit again as a negative of self-consciousness.  ⁶Enlightenment is itself purely mediated thinking, i.e. thinking mediating itself with itself, pure knowledge.  However, Enlightenment is pure insight, pure knowledge, that does not yet know itself, i.e. for which it does not yet hold that Enlightenment is this purely mediating motion, so it appears to itself like everything else as what it is itself, namely as something other.  ⁷Thus caught up in its own realization, Enlightenment develops this its essential moment, but it appears to Enlightenment as belonging to faith and in terms of its character as something external to Enlightenment, as a contingent knowledge of precisely such common real stories.  ⁸Enlightenment thus imputes here to religious faith that its certainty rests on some isolated historical evidence.  As such, that would not provide us with the same level of certainty as newspaper reports on current events.  Moreover, the claim is that faith's certainty rests on the chance of preservation of that evidence; preservation on paper that is, which involves the accuracy and honesty in transferring the material from one paper record to another.  Finally, it all rests on the correct interpretation of the sense of dead words and scripts.  ⁹In fact, it does not occur to faith to bind its certainty to such evidence and coincidence.  In its certainty, faith is an impartial relation to its absolute object, a pure knowledge of it that does not mix scripts, paper and scribe in its consciousness of the absolute essence, which is simply not mediated by such things.  ¹⁰The truth is that this consciousness is the self-mediating ground of its own knowledge; it is the spirit itself that is the evidence of itself no less in the inside of single consciousness as through the universal presence of the faith of all in the spirit.  ¹¹When faith wants to give itself in addition that kind of justification, or at least confirmation of its content, from history that Enlightenment speaks of, and claims and acts as if it was seriously important to it, then faith has already let itself be seduced by Enlightenment and faith's efforts to justify or fix itself in that way is only evidence of its infection.

15.  There remains the third side, the relation of consciousness to absolute essence as an action.  ²This action is the overcoming of the particularity of the individual, of the natural mode of his being for itself, from which he gets the certainty of being pure self-consciousness according to his action, i.e. of being as a single consciousness existing for itself one with the essence.

– ³Teleology and purpose are distinguished in the action.  Again, in relation to this action, pure insight behaves negatively, denying itself as it does in the other moments.  So in terms of teleology it must look like a lack of understanding.  When insight is bound to intention, then the agreement of end and means will appear to insight as something other, indeed as its opposite.  In terms of the purpose, however, insight takes the bad, pleasure and possession for its purposes, its goals, proving itself to be the most impure intention, given that the pure intention, now as its own other, is similarly an impure intention.

16.  From all this we can see that, in terms of teleology, Enlightenment finds it foolish when the believing individual attains the higher consciousness of not being chained to natural pleasures by actually denying itself the same and proves in action that it is not lying about its contempt for all that, but that it's true.

– ²Similarly, Enlightenment finds it stupid when the individual frees himself from his character as absolutely single, excluding all others and possessing property, by disposing of his own property.  In fact, this shows that it does not take its isolation seriously, that it is elevated above the natural necessity of isolating itself and of denying, in this absolute isolation of being for itself, that the others are the same as itself.

– ³Pure insight finds both not to be serving any purpose and no less unjust – not serving any purpose, because when they deny themselves pleasure and give away their property in order to prove that they are free of pleasure and property that implies that, on the contrary, they would declare somebody who, in order to eat, seized the means to really eat, to be a fool.

– ⁴Enlightenment also finds it unjust to deny oneself a meal and not to exchange butter and eggs for money, or vice versa, but simply to give them away without receiving anything in return.  Enlightenment declares a meal or the possession of things to be an end in itself and thus itself to be a very impure intention, for which such pleasure and possession are indeed very essential.  ⁵Enlightenment claims to be over natural existence and over avarice of its means; but it still finds it stupid and unjust that this elevation should be proved through action.  It sees this pure intention as in fact just deception when it claims to be an inward elevation, demanding that people get serious about it, to really get down to work on it and to prove its truth.  Enlightenment claims that with all this faith just shows itself to be superfluous, foolish and indeed unjust.

– ⁶ Enlightenment thus denies itself as pure insight too, for it denies immediate purposive action as it does pure intention; it denies the intention of proving oneself to be free from the goals of single individuality.

17.  This is how Enlightenment presents itself to the experience of faith.  ²It looks so bad because it takes on a negative reality in relation to something other, which is to say Enlightenment presents itself as the opposite of its self.  Pure insight and intention must give itself this relation, for this is its realization.

– ³The realization appeared initially as a negative reality.  ⁴Perhaps its positive reality looks better.  Let's take a look at how this behaves.

– ⁵When all prejudice and superstition has been banned, the next question is: what to we do now?  ⁶What exactly is the truth that Enlightenment propagates instead of that?

– ⁷It declared this positive content in its expunging of error, for that alienation of its self [§12 above M] is just as much its positive reality.

– ⁸Enlightenment grasps what it discovers to be defining characteristics of what faith sees as absolute spirit/mind only as wood, stone etc., i.e. as a isolated, real things.  When Enlightenment conceptually comprehends every feature, i.e. all such content and filling, in this way as a finitude, as a human being and an image, then absolute essence, the absolute being, turns into a vacuum for it to which no features, no predicate can be attached.  ⁹Such an attachment would be inherently culpable and that is precisely the seedbed in which the monsters of superstition are born.  ¹⁰Reason, pure insight, is certainly not itself empty with the negative of itself being for it and its own content, but richly endowed, if only in details and limitations.  Declining to allow anything of that to attach to the absolute essence is its insight-rich lifestyle, knowing how to put its own wealth of finitude in pure insight's place and to treat the absolute with respect.

18.  Confronting this empty essence stands the second moment of the positive truth of the Enlightenment, namely singularity as such excluded from an absolute being, the singularity of consciousness and of all being, itself as the singularity of absolute being in and for itself.  ²Consciousness, which in its very first actual reality is sense certainty and meaning, returns here from out of the entire path of its experience thus far and is once more a knowledge of the pure negative of itself, a knowledge of sensuous things, i.e. existing things that are indifferent to its being for itself.  ³Here, however, it is not immediate, natural consciousness, now it has become that to itself.  ⁴At first abandoned to all entanglements, in which it is overturned by its own unfolding, consciousness is now lead back to its first embodied form, its first pattern, by pure insight, and has now experienced that first form as a result.  ⁵Grounded in the insight into the nullity of all other patterns of consciousness and hence of everything beyond sense certainty, this new sense certainty is no longer meaning.  No, now it is absolute truth!  ⁶The nullity of everything going beyond sense certainty is clearly only a negative proof of this truth; but it is not capable of any other, for the positive truth of sense certainty is inherently just the unmediated being for itself of the concept as an object, and that means in the form of otherness – that every single consciousness is simply certain that it exists as well as other real things besides it, and that consciousness in its natural being, just like these things, is in and for itself, i.e. absolute.

19.  Finally, the third moment of the truth of Enlightenment is the relation of single essence to absolute essence, the relation between the first two.  ²Insight as pure insight of equals, or of the unlimited, goes beyond unequals, namely finite reality, i.e. beyond itself as mere otherness.  ³Insight has emptiness for the beyond of that, to which it has now related sensuous reality.  ⁴This relation does not apply to the two sides as content, for one is emptiness, so a content is only available through the other, sensuous reality.  ⁵The form of the relationship, however, to which the side of the in itself contributes, can be set up arbitrarily, for the form is inherently negative, which makes it antithetical: being as well as nothingness; in itself just as much as the opposite.  This amounts to the same thing as saying that the relationship of actual reality to the in itself as the beyond is just as well one of negating as of affirming it.  ⁶This is what makes it possible for finite reality to be taken just as one needs it at the time.  ⁷Now the sensuous is related to the absolute as to the in itself positively.  Sensuous reality is now in itself : the absolute makes it, sustains and takes care of it.  ⁸Now again it is related to that as to its opposite, its own non-existence, and in terms of this relation reality is not in itself, but only for another.  ⁹In the preceding pattern of consciousness the concept of antithesis was good and bad, for pure insight, in contrast, they become the pure abstractions of being in itself and being for another.

20.  Both ways of looking at this situation, the positive and the negative relation of finitude to the in itself, are in fact equally necessary and everything is just as in itself as it is for another, i.e. everything is useful [VIII. Absolute knowledge §4.3].

– ²Everything is now at the mercy of others, lets itself be used by others and exists for them.  Then again, it rears against them too, standing on its hind legs, so to speak, turns rigid against the others, asserts its being for itself and uses the others itself.

– ³As the conscious thing here, the human being gets his essence and position from this relation.  ⁴He is what he is immediately: natural consciousness, in itself, good, individually absolute; and the other is for him.  Indeed, they are there for him, the animal conscious of itself, as the moments that have the significance of universality, so everything is there for his pleasure and entertainment and he goes into the world, as if stepping from the hand of God, running around in it as if it were a garden planted just for him.

– ⁵He must also have plucked the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.  He has a utility therein that distinguishes him from everything else for, coincidentally, his inherently good nature is so constituted that excessive pleasure harms him, or better, his singularity too has its beyond therein; it can go beyond itself and destroy itself.  ⁶Against this, reason is a useful means of appropriately limiting this tendency to surpass himself, the better to sustain himself when he ranges beyond specific limits, for this is the power of consciousness.  ⁷The pleasure of the conscious, inherently universal essence does not have to be specific in terms of variety and duration; it must rather be universal.  Measure is there to prevent the termination of pleasure in its variety and duration; which really means that what defines measure here is intemperance, the the lack of measure.

– ⁸Just as everything is useful to man, so is he useful too, his calling now is to make himself useful to the community, a generally useful member of the troop.  ⁹As much as he provides for himself, just so much must he give for the others; as much as he gives of himself, just so much does he provide for himself: you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours.  ¹⁰Wherever he is, he is in the right place; he uses others and is used by them.

21.  Different things are useful to each other in different ways.  All things have this mutual utility from their essence of being doubly related to the absolute: positively and hence being in and for itself ; negatively and hence being for another.  ²Religion, the relation to the absolute essence, to the absolute being, is thus within all utility the most useful of all; it is pure utility itself, this persistence of all things, their being in and for itself as well as the fall of all things, their being for another.

22.  To faith, of course, this positive result of Enlightenment is no less of an abomination than the latter's negative behaviour towards it.  ²Its insight into the absolute being sees nothing other in him than precisely the absolute being, the être suprême, i.e. emptiness.  Its intention of seeing everything in its immediate existence as in itself, i.e. good, that at last the relation of individual conscious being to the absolute being, religion, is completely expressed by the concept of utility, is quite simply abominable to faith.  ³This, Enlightenment's own wisdom, appears to faith necessarily as utterly banal, as the confession of banality.  It consists in nothing other than knowing nothing other of the absolute being than the whole flat truth that it is precisely the absolute being.  In fact, it only knows finitude; this is all it knows of the truth and regards its knowledge of this as the truth as the highest truth itself.

23.  Faith has the divine law on its side, the right of absolute self-identity or of pure thinking, against Enlightenment and suffers only injustice from it; for Enlightenment distorts faith in all its moments making them into something other than what they are in faith.  ²Enlightenment, in contrast, has only the human law against faith and for its truth; for the injustice it perpetrates is the right of inequality and lies in distorting and changing.  This is a right that belongs to the nature of self-consciousness in opposition to the simple essence or to thinking.  ³Now, since Enlightenment's law is the law of self-consciousness, it will not only maintain its right so that two equal laws of mindful spirit stand in deadlock confronting each other, while neither can satisfy the other, Enlightenment will go beyond that and claim the absolute right too, because self-consciousness is the negativity of the concept that is not only for itself, but also reaches beyond its own opposite.  And because it too is consciousness, faith will not be able to deny Enlightenment its right.

24.  The fact is that the Enlightenment does not relate to believing consciousness with its own particular principles, but with principles faith has within it.  ²Enlightenment simply brings faith's own thoughts together for it, which lie separate and unconscious in it.  In taking up one of its modes, Enlightenment simply reminds believing consciousness of the other it also has, but which, when it takes up that one, it always forgets.   ³It is precisely by seeing the whole whenever considering one specific moment that Enlightenment proves itself to be pure insight, that it it always brings up the opposite relating to any given moment thereby bringing out the concept into clear relief, i.e. the negative essence of both thoughts turning each into the other.  ⁴This is what makes Enlightenment seem to faith to be distortion and lies, because it reveals the otherness of faith's own moments.  This is why Enlightenment seems to faith immediately to make something different out of those moments than they are in their singularity.  This other is just as essential and is, indeed, present in believing consciousness even if it does not think of that but keeps it tucked away somewhere.  It is not alien to believing consciousness at all, nor can faith deny it.

25.  Enlightenment itself, however, reminding faith of the opposites in its isolated moments, is, unfortunately, just as little enlightened about itself.  ²It relates purely negatively to faith when it excludes its own content from its own purity and takes it for its own negative.  ³Thus Enlightenment does not recognize itself in this negative, in the content of faith; and this is why it also does not bring the two thoughts together, namely the one it brings up itself and the one against which it raises the first.  ⁴Enlightenment does not realize that what it damns in faith is immediately its own thought, it gets stuck itself in the opposition of the two moments, of which it only recognizes the one, namely the one it always sets up as opposed to faith, while doing with the other exactly what faith does with it, namely keeping it strictly separate.  ⁵This is why Enlightenment does not generate the unity of the two as the unity of the same, i.e. the concept; but the concept for itself emerges to Enlightenment, which only finds the concept present.  ⁶Essentially, this is the realization of pure insight, that it, whose essence is the concept, becomes something absolutely other to itself and denies itself – the antithesis of the concept is the absolute antithesis – and then out of this otherness it comes to itself, i.e. to its concept.

– ⁷There is nothing more to the Enlightenment than this motion; it is the still unconcsious activity of the pure concept that, while it does come to itself as an object, it takes this object for something other.  It does not know the nature of the concept either, that namely what is not differentiated is precisely what divides itself.

– ⁸Against faith then, insight is the power of the concept; it is the motion and the process of relating the moments lying separated in faith's consciousness.  This relating is a process that brings their contradiction clearly into view.  ⁹Herein lies the absolute law of violence Enlightenment exercises over faith; and it itself recognizes the reality to which Enlightenment brings this violence precisely because believing consciousness itself is the concept, and thus the antithesis that brings faith the insight.  ¹⁰Enlightenment remains in the right against believing consciousness by asserting in faith what is necessary to faith itself and what it has in itself.

26.  At first, the Enlightenment claims to be the moment of the concept, an action of consciousness.  It claims this against faith: that faith's absolute essence, the absolute being, is an essence of its own consciousness as a self, i.e. that it is generated by consciousness.  ²Faith's absolute being is in itself, so it cannot regard it as something alien just standing there from no-one knows where.  Faith's trust lies precisely in finding itself therein as this personal consciousness and faith's obedience and service lie in generating it in its own action as its own absolute being.  ³Enlightnement merely reminds faith of this when it hears faith declaring purely that the in itself of the absolute being lies beyond the action of consciousness.

– ⁴Enlightenment is right to point out the one-sidedness of faith by opposing faith's own action to the fixed state of being, which is all faith's thinks of here.  But it is wrong when it fails to bring its own thoughts together, isolates the pure moment of action, and talks of the in itself of faith as being nothing more than something produced by consciousness.  ⁵The isolated action opposed to the in itself, however, is a contingent action and, as an act of imagination, just production of fictions – images with no in itself – and this is how Enlightenment regards the content of faith.

– ⁶Conversely, pure insight says exactly the reverse.  ⁷By claiming the moment of otherness that the concept has within it, insight declares the essence of faith to be something in which consciousness is not involved, beyond it, alien to consciousness and simply unknown to it.  ⁸That's also true for faith, for while, on the one hand, faith trusts the absolute being and has finds its certainty of itself therein, on the other hand, his ways are past finding out [Romans 11:33 KJV M] and in his being, he is unattainable.

27.  Enlightenment is also in the right against believing consciousness, which the latter concedes, when it regards the object of faith's admiration as stone and wood or some other finite, anthropomorphic feature.  ²For faith is a divided consciousness with a beyond outside reality and a pure here and now of that beyond, which means this perspective of the sensuous object is indeed there within faith; this is what gives it its validity in and for itself.  Faith does not, however, bring together these two thoughts of a being in and for itself that is now pure essence, now a common thing of sense.

– ³Even its own pure consciousness is influenced by that perspective.  Because its extrasensory realm lacks the concept, the differences there amount to no more than a series of independent patterns and their motion is one of events, occurrences, that is, they exist only in imagination under the aspect of sensuous being.

– ⁴For its part, the Enlightenment similarly isolates reality as essence forsaken by spirit, definition as immovable finitude, which could not be a moment in the spiritual/mental motion of essence itself, neither nothing nor a something existing in and for itself, but vanishing, evanescent.

28.  Clearly, this all holds also for the ground of knowledge [§15 above ff. M].  ²Even believing consciousness acknowledges chance knowledge, for it has a relation to contingencies and the absolute being itself exists for faith in the form of an imagined, common reality.  Believing consciousness is also a certainty that does not have the truth within it and it acknowledges itself to be such an inessential consciousness this side of the spirit that certifies and confirms itself.

– ³Faith forgets this moment, however, in its spiritual/mental, immediate knowledge of the absolute being.

– ⁴Enlightenment reminds faith of that and thinks again only of the contingent knowledge and forgets the other – it thinks only of the mediation that happens through an alien third, not of the mediation in which the immediate is the third to itself with which it mediates itself with the other, namely with itself.

29.  Ultimately, Enlightenment's view of the action of faith is that rejecting pleasure and discarding possessions is unjust and senseless, without purpose.

– ²As far as being unjust, Enlightenment gets the agreement of believing consciousness in that the latter acknowledges this reality itself, namely by having possessions, securing them and enjoying them.  Believing consciousness behaves in a way that is narrower and more hard-headed in defending its property and it is cruder in its pleasures, because its religious action – abandoning possession and pleasure – lies beyond this reality and purchases for faith the freedom to all that here.  ³This service in the sacrifice of natural activity and pleasure has, given this contradiction, no truth.  It's all maintained side by side with the sacrifice, reducing this latter to a sign indicating that the real sacrifice only affects a small part and so it is really only imagined.