1.  The religion of art has brought spirit/mind out of the form of substance and into that of subject, for it produces the subject's pattern establishing in it the action, self-consciousness, which in fearful substance only vanished and could not grasp itself in trust [VII.B.c. Spiritual artwork §14 M].  ²This evolution of the divine being into the human being starts from the statue that only has the external shape of the self while the inside, its activity, falls outside the statue [VII.B.a. Abstract artwork §5 and §10 M].  In the cult, however, the two sides are united.  There in the result of the religion of art in its completion, the unity has also passed over to the extreme of the self.  All essential character is immersed in the spirit/mind completely certain of itself in the singularity of consciousness.  ³The sentence, the proposition that expresses this frivolity is: the self is the absolute essence, the absolute being.  The essence, the being, that was substance and in which the self was accidental has been demoted to a predicate; in this self-consciousness with nothing confronting it that takes the form of essence, spirit/mind has lost its consciousness.

2.  This proposition: the self is the absolute essence, the absolute being, clearly belongs to the non-religious, to actually real spirit/mind and we should recall now which pattern of that actual spirit/mind expresses this sentence.  ²It contains both the motion and the inversion of that proposition, reducing the self to predicate and elevating substance to subject.  ³In such a way, that is, that the inverted proposition does not make substance into subject in itself or for us, or what amounts to the same thing, reproduce substance in such a way that spirit/mind's consciousness is thrown back to its beginning, to natural religion; but so that the inversion is accomplished by and for self-consciousness.  ⁴This gives itself up consciously, so it is sustained within its alienation or expression, remaining the subject of substance.  Still, it is no less alienated and retains the consciousness of substance; by generating substance as subject through its sacrifice, the subject remains its own self.  ⁵The result of this is that for the two propositions – in the first, of substance, the subject only vanishes, while in the second the substance is only predicate and both sides are thus present in each with the opposed inequality of value – the unification and permeation of the two natures emerges in which both with the same value are equally as essential as they are just moments.  In this way then spirit/mind is just as much consciousness of itself as its objective substance as it is simple self-consciousness abiding within itself.

3.  The religion of art belongs to the customary ethical spirit we saw find its downfall in Legal status [VI.A.c. Legal status §2 M]; i.e. in the proposition: the self as such, the abstract person, is the absolute essence, the absolute being.  ²In customary life the self is immersed in the spirit/mind of its people; it is the fulfilled universality.  ³Simple singularity raises itself out of this content and its frivolity purifies it into the person, to the abstract universality of right [VI.A.b. Customary ethical action etc. §§12,13 M].  ⁴The reality of customary spirit/mind is lost in this, the content-free spirits of the individuals representing the peoples are gathered together in one pantheon; not in a pantheon of the imagination whose impotent form lets each of them stand as valid [VII.B.c. Spiritual artwork §1.1 ff. M], but in the pantheon of abstract universality, of the pure thought that disembodies them and assigns being in and for itself to the spiritless self, to the individual person.

4.  Now, with its emptiness this self has released the content; consciousness is only in itself the essence and its own existence, the legal recognition of the person, is the unfilled abstraction.  The self thus possesses only the thought of itself; i.e. the way it is there and knows itself to be object makes it the unreal self.  ²It is thus just the stoic independence of thinking and this finds its truth, passing all the way through the motion of sceptical consciousness, in that pattern that we called unhappy self-consciousness [VI.A.c. Legal status §3.1 ff. and §7 M].

5.  This knows what relation obtains with the actual validity of the abstract person and similarly with its validity in pure thought.  ²It knows such validity rather as complete loss; it is itself this its conscious loss and the alienation of its knowledge of itself.

– ³We see that this unhappy consciousness constitutes the opposing side and completion of the comic consciousness that is in itself completely happy.  ⁴All of the divine essence returns back into the latter; i.e. it is the complete alienation of substance.  ⁵The former, in contrast, is conversely the tragic destiny of the certainty of itself that should be in and for itself.  ⁶It is the consciousness of the loss of all essence in this knowledge of itself – of substance as of self; it is the pain that finds expression in the hard, dreadful sentence: God is dead [§§37, 38 below].

6.  In the legal status then the customary ethical world and its religion are immersed in comic consciousness, while unhappy consciousness is the knowledge of this whole loss.  ²It has lost both the sense of self of its immediate personality and of the mediated personality, the thought one.  ³Similarly, the trust in the eternal laws of the gods evaporates; the oracles who claimed to know the particular [VII.B.a. Abstract artwork §8.1 ff. M] all fall silent.  ⁴The statues are now corpses from which the enlivening soul has fled, just as the faith has from the words of the hymn; the table of the gods is bare of spiritual food and drink and consciousness does not return out of its games and festivals back to the happy unity of itself with the essence.  ⁵The works of the muse lack the force of spirited mind, the certainty of whose self emerged from crushing gods and men [VII.B.a. Abstract artwork §§4, 5, §6.4-7, §14 and VII.B.b. Living artwork §6 M].  ⁶They are now just what they are for us – beautiful fruit broken off the tree: a friendly destiny proffers them as a young girl might present them to us.  The actual life of their existence, the tree that bore them, the earth and the elements that are their substance, the climate that gave them shape or the succession of seasons that dominated the process of their development, all of this is no more.

– ⁷Destiny gives us the works of that art, but not its world, not the spring and summer of that customary ethical life in which that world blossomed and ripened; all we get is the memory of that reality enclosed in a hard shell.

– ⁸Our action in enjoying that is thus not one of a ceremony of a holy mass, by which it becomes the complete truth of our consciousness, filling it up.  It is just external action, like wiping away drops of rain or dust off these fruits.  Instead of the inner element of the actual reality in which is is embedded, which generates it and infuses it with spirit, only the dead element of its external existence, of language, of historical background etc. is available, again not in order to penetrate it and live within it, but only to imagine it within oneself.  ⁹Now, in fact, the young girl who proffers the plucked fruit is much more than those conditions and elements, the tree, air, light etc. in the extensive nature producing the fruit she offers us.  She brings all that together on a higher level in the beam of her self-conscious eye and her proffering gesture.  The same is true of the spirit of that destiny which proffers the artwork to us.  It is more than the customary ethical life and reality of the people who produced it; for this spirit is the internalized re-membering of the spirit still externalized in them – it is the mindful spirit of the tragic destiny that collects all those individual gods and attributes of substance in the one pantheon, into the spirit/mind that is conscious of itself as spirit/mind.

7.  All the conditions of its emergence and development are present and this totality of its conditions constitutes its becoming, its concept, or coming into being in itself.

– ²The circle of art's productions encompasses the forms of the externalizations or expressions of absolute substance, which substance is given in the form of individuality, as a thing, as a given object of sensuous consciousness.  Or as pure language or the becoming of the pattern whose existence does not step outside the self and is a purely vanishing object.  As immediate unity with universal self-consciousness in its enthusiasm and as mediated in the action of the cult.  As the beautiful self-like sensuous corporeality.  And finally as the existence elevated into imagination and its expansion into a world that in the end pulls itself together in the universality that is just as much pure certainty of itself [VII.B.a. Abstract artwork §2.1 ff., §§6,11 and §13.1 ff.; VII.B.b. Living artwork §§6,7; and VII.B.c. Spiritual artwork §1.1 ff. M].

– ³These forms along with, on the other side, the world of the person and of law, the desert wildness of the liberated elements of the content, also the thought person of stoicism and the completely unbounded unrest of sceptical consciousness [VI.A.c. Legal status §3.1 ff. and §5.5 ff. M], these constitute the periphery of patterns, pressing in expectation, circling the birth site of the mindful spirit that comes into the world as self-consciousness.  The pain and longing of unhappy self-consciousness permeating them all is their midpoint, the birth pangs they share in its emergence; it is the simplicity of the pure concept containing those patterns as its moments.

8.  This spirit has the two sides to it that were introduced in §2 above as the two contrary propositions.  The one says that substance externalizes its self and becomes self-consciousness and the other says the converse, namely that self-consciousness externalizes its self and translates it into thinghood or into the universal self.  ²Having approached each other in this way, the true unification of the two sides has emerged.  ³The externalization of substance, its development to self-consciousness, expresses the transition into the opposite, an unconscious transition from necessity, or this: that substance is in itself self-consciousness.  ⁴Conversely, the externalization of self-consciousness expresses that it is in itself  the universal essence; or because the self is pure being for itself  that remains in its opposite by itself, it expresses that for it substance is self-consciousness and precisely for that reason spirit.  ⁵We can now say of this spirited mind, which has shed the form of substance and enters existence in the shape of self-consciousness – if one wants to make use of the relations of the natural birth process – that it has a real, an actual mother, but only an immanent father, only in itself ; reality, self-consciousness, and the in itself, substance, are its two moments, through whose mutually opposed externalization, each turning into the other, this spirit arrives in existence as this: their unity.

9.  Self-consciousness grasps one-sidedly only its own externalization, so even if its object is to it as much being as self and it knows all existence to be spiritual/mental essence, that still does not mean this ensures for it  that the true spirit has come into being.  This is because being as such, or substance , has not in itself equally on its side externalized its self and become self-consciousness.  ²The immediate consequence of this imbalance is that all existence is spiritual/mental essence only from the standpoint of consciousness, not in itself.  ³What this does is only project spirit/mind into existence; this projecting or imagining is just the chatter that imputes a completely different inner significance to nature as well as to history, just as the mythological images of the preceding religions did to the world; different from what they directly presented to consciousness in their appearances, different also in terms of the religions from what self-consciousness, whose religions they were, knew in them.  ⁴But this significance is a borrowed one, a clothing that does not cover the nakedness of appearance and does not secure for itself belief and admiration, remaining just the deep night, the rapture of consciousness.

10.  For this meaning of the objective to be not just imagining it must be in itself, i.e. it must emerge to consciousness out of the concept, from its own necessity.  ²This is how self-knowing spirit/mind emerges to us through the process of recognition or knowledge of immediate consciousness; how the consciousness of the given, existing object emerges from its necessary motion.  ³This concept which, as immediate, also has the form of immediacy for its consciousness, takes in addition the pattern of self-consciousness in itself, i.e. just as, according to the necessity of the concept, the being or the immediacy that is the content-free, empty object of sensuous consciousness externalizes itself and becomes ego, I, for consciousness [VII. Religion §6.1 ff., §11.2-§12.7; VII.A. Natural religion §1.1 ff. M].

– ⁴Now, the immediate in itself, given, existing necessity, is distinguished from the thinking in itself, knowledge of necessity; a difference that does not lie outside the concept, for the simple unity of the concept is immediate being itself.  The concept is itself the process of its own externalization, the becoming, the coming into being, of the intuited necessity, while remaining by itself in that necessity, knowing and conceptually comprehending it.

– ⁵Spirit/mind's immediate in itself gives itself the pattern of self-consciousness and this means nothing other than that the real world spirit  has arrived at this knowledge of itself.  It is only at this point that this knowledge also enters into its consciousness as truth.  ⁶How that happened emerged above [§§7, 8 above].

11.  This situation, with the absolute spirit giving itself the shape of self-consciousness in itself, which means it is also given for its consciousness, now appears with self-consciousness as the faith of the world.  Spirit is one self-consciousness, i.e. is there as an actual human being; that he exists for immediate certainty, that believing consciousness actually sees this divinity and feels it and hears it [John 1 v.1 M].  ²As such it is not a projection or an imagining; it is actual in this man.  ³Consciousness does not then go out from its inside, from the thought out to bind within itself the thought of god with existence together; instead it proceeds from the immediate present existence and recognizes the god in him.

– ⁴The moment of immediate being is present in the content of the concept in such a way that the religious spirit has become the simple positive self through the return of all essence into consciousness, exactly as the actual spirit as such became precisely this simple self-conscious negativity in the unhappy consciousness [VII.C. Revealed religion §5 M].  ⁵This also has the effect of imparting the form of complete immediacy to the self of existing spirit/mind; it is neither something thought nor imagined, nor something produced or generated, as was the case with the immediate self variously in natural religion and in art religion [VII.A. Natural religion §1.16-18 and VII.A.a. Light god §1; VII.A.b. Plant and animal §2; VII.B.a. Abstract artwork §§4,5 and §6.7; and VII.B.c. Spiritual artwork §3 M].  ⁶Rather, this god is observed sensuously and immediately as self, as a real, individual man and only in this way is he self-consciousness.

12.  The evolution of the divine being into human form, i.e. that it essentially and immediately has the form of self-consciousness, this is the simple, integral content of absolute religion.  ²In absolute religion the essence is known as spirit/mind; spirit is consciousness of itself as spirit.  ³For spirit is the knowledge of itself in its externalization; the knowledge that essence is the motion of maintaining its identity with itself within its otherness.  ⁴Now, this is substance only to the extent that it is reflected into itself even in its accidental character, not indifferent to that as something inessential and alien, but in itself  therein, i.e. spirit is substance only to the extent that it is subject or self.

– ⁵This is why the divine essence, the divine being, is revealed in this religion.  ⁶It's revelation clearly consists in the fact that what it is becomes known.  ⁷The point is that it becomes known precisely because its becomes known as spirit, as an essence, a being, that is essentially self-consciousness.

– ⁸Something secret remains to consciousness in its object so long as it is an other or alien to it, so long as consciousness does not know the object to be itself.  ⁹This secrecy vanishes when the absolute being is the object of consciousness as spirit/mind; for then spirit/mind stands as self in its relation to the absolute being; i.e. the absolute being immediately knows itself or it is revealed to itself in spirit/mind.  ¹⁰The absolute being is only revealed to itself in its own certainty of itself; its object is the self and the self is not alien, but the inseparable unity with itself, the immediate universal.  ¹¹It is the pure concept, pure thinking or being for itself, immediate being and hence being for another; as this being for another it is immediately returned back into itself and by itself; it is thus what is true, the only revelation.  ¹²Goodness, justice, holiness, the creator of heaven and earth etc., etc. are predicates of a subject – universal moments that have their base in this point and really only exist in the process in which consciousness returns back into thought.

– ¹³Because they first have to become known, their ground and essence, the subject itself, is not yet revealed and so also the terms of the universal are not this universal itself.  ¹⁴The subject itself, and with that also this pure universal, is revealed as self, for this is precisely this inside reflected into itself that is immediately there and is the certainty of precisely that self for which it is there.  ¹⁵This – being what is revealed according to its concept – is thus the true pattern of spirit/mind and this its form, the concept, is similarly its sole essence and substance.  ¹⁶Spirit/mind becomes known as self-consciousness and immediately revealed to self-consciousness, for that's what spirit/mind is itself; divine nature is the same as human nature and this unity is precisely what is seen.

13.  Here we do indeed have consciousness, or the manner in which the essence is for itself, its pattern, equal to its self-consciousness.  This pattern is itself a self-consciousness.  It is hence simultaneously a given, existing object, which being similarly has immediately the significance of pure thinking, of the absolute essence, the absolute being.

– ²This absolute being, which is there as a real self-consciousness, appears to have come down out of its eternal simplicity; but in fact it is only with this step that it attains its highest essence.  ³That's because only when the concept of essence attains its simple purity is it the absolute abstraction that is pure thinking and hence the pure singularity of the self.  In fact, given its simplicity, it is also immediacy, being.

– ⁴What is called sensuous consciousness is precisely this pure abstraction; it is this thinking for which being is immediacy.  ⁵The lowest is thus simultaneously the highest; the revelation that steps out onto the surface is precisely for that what is deepest.  ⁶The highest essence, the highest being, is seen, heard, etc. as an existing self-consciousness and this is indeed the perfection of its concept; through this perfection this being is just as immediately there as it is essence.

14.  This immediate existence is not merely immediate consciousness; it is, after all, religious consciousness.  Immediacy has at once the significance not only of a given, existing self-consciousness, but of the purely thought, absolute essence, absolute being.  ²Religious consciousness is also aware of the one of whom we are aware in our concept that being is essence.  ³This unity of being and essence, of thinking that is immediately existence, is, being the thought of this religious consciousness or its mediated knowledge, similarly its immediate knowledge; for this unity of being and thinking is self-consciousness and is itself there, i.e. the thought unity has also this pattern of what it is.  ⁴God is thus here revealed as he is; he is in this way there as he is in itself; he is there as spirit/mind.  ⁵God can only be reached in pure speculative knowledge and only exists in that and is only that knowledge itself, for he is spirit/mind, and this speculative knowledge is the knowledge of revealed religion.  ⁶Speculative knowledge knows him to be thinking or pure essence, it knows this thinking as being and as existence, and it knows existence as the negativity of itself, hence as self, this self and universal self; and precisely this is what the revealed religion knows.

– ⁷The hopes and expectations of the preceding world pushed only towards this revelation, just to see what the absolute being is and to find itself in him [§7 above M].  This joy is given to self-consciousness and takes hold of the whole world, to see itself in the absolute being, for it is spirit/mind, it is the simple motion of those pure moments expressing this itself, that the essence is only known as spirit/mind by being first seen as immediate self-consciousness.

15.  This concept of spirit knowing itself to be spirit is still only the immediate concept; it is not yet developed.  ²The essence is spirit, it has appeared, it is revealed; this initial state of being revealed is itself immediate.  But the immediacy is similarly pure mediation or thinking; so it must represent this within itself as such.

– ³Looking at this more closely, in the immediacy of self-consciousness spirit is this single, individual self-consciousness, opposed to universal self-consciousness.  Spirit is exclusive one which, for the consciousness for which it is there, has the as yet unresolved form of a sensuous other.  This still does not know the spirit as its own; spirit is not yet there as a single self, nor as a universal self, as the self of all.  ⁴This amounts to the same thing as saying that the pattern does not yet have the form of the concept; i.e. of the universal self, of the self that in its immediate actual reality is also overcome, thinking, universality, without losing the former in this latter.

– ⁵The next and itself immediate form of this universality is, however, not already the form of thinking itself, of the concept as concept, but the universality of actual reality, the totality of the self, and the elevation of existence into the imagination; as everywhere, to give a specific example, when the sensuous this overcome is first the thing of perception, it is not yet the universal of the understanding.

16.  This single human being then, as which the absolute being is revealed, accomplishes within himself as a single individual the motion of sensuous being [I. Sense certainty §3.1 ff. M].  ²He is the immediately present god; that's how his being passes over into has been.  ³The consciousness for which he has this sensuous presence ceases to see him, to hear him.  It has seen and heard him and given that it has only seen and heard him, past tense, it becomes spiritual consciousness itself; as he previously emerged in sensuous existence he has emerged now in spirit.

– ⁴For it is as something that sees and hears him in sensuous terms, this is only immediate consciousness with the imbalance of objectivity not yet overcome; not yet having taken itself back into pure thinking, it knows this objective single individual as spirit but not itself as spirit.  ⁵With the vanishing of what is known as the absolute essence's, the absolute being's immediate existence, the immediate acquires its negative moment.  Spirit/mind remains the immediate self of actual reality, but as the universal self-consciousness of the community that rests in its own substance; this substance being universal subject in it.  Not the single individual for itself but together with the consciousness of the community, what the individual is for the community, this is the complete whole of the individual.

17.  Past and distance are just the incomplete forms in which the immediate mode is mediated or universally asserted.  This mode has only broken the surface in diving into the element of thinking, is preserved therein as a sensuous mode, and is not asserted as one with the nature of thinking.  ²It has only been elevated into image thinking, for this is the synthetic combination of sensuous immediacy and its universality or of thinking.

18.  This form of image thinking is the definition in which spirit/mind becomes aware of itself in this, its community.  ²This form is not yet the self-consciousness that has grown into its concept as concept [VII. Absolute knowledge §11.1 ff M].  The mediation is as yet incomplete.  ³Clearly, this combination of being and thinking has the defect that the spiritual/mental essence is still loaded with an unreconciled division into a here and now and a beyond.  ⁴The content is the true content, but, asserted in the element of image thinking, all its moments have the character of not being comprehended; they appear as completely independent sides, relating to each other externally.  ⁵Higher development of consciousness is required for the true content to acquire its true form for consciousness.  Consciousness' intuition of absolute substance must be elevated into the concept, so that its consciousness is balanced out with its self-consciousness for itself, as this has already happened for us or in itself.

19.  This content must be considered in the mode in which it exists in its consciousness.

– ²Absolute spirit/mind is content; that's how it is in the pattern of its truth.  ³But its truth does not only lie in being the substance of the community or the community's in itself, nor also only in stepping up from out of this inwardness into the objectivity of image thinking.  It lies in becoming an actual self, reflecting itself in itself, being a subject.  ⁴This is then the motion it accomplishes in its community; this is the life of the community.  ⁵What this self-revealing spirit/mind is in and for itself is thus not brought out by pushing the rich life of the community as far as it will go and returning back to its first threads, perhaps back to the images of the first incomplete community; and certainly not back to what the actual human being said.  ⁶At the base of this returning process lies the instinct of going down to the concept; but it confuses the origin as the immediate existence of the first appearance with the simplicity of the concept.  ⁷As a result of this impoverishment of the life of the spirit, as the image of the community and its action against its image is disposed of, instead of the concept mere externality and singularity emerge, i.e. the historical manner of immediate appearance and the spiritless memory of a single imagined form and its past.

20.  Spirit/mind is the content of its consciousness at first in the form of pure substance; it is the content of its pure consciousness.  ²This element of thinking is the motion of stepping down into existence or to singularity.  ³The midpoint, between them is their synthetic linkage, the consciousness of becoming other, or image thinking as such.

– ⁴The third term is the return from out of imagination and otherness, i.e. the element of self-consciousness itself.

– ⁵These three moments constitute spirit/mind.  Its separation in imagination consists in existing in one specific mode; this determinateness, however, is nothing other than one of its moments.  ⁶Its extensive motion thus lies in expanding its nature within each of its moments as in an element; in that each of these circles completes itself within itself this, its reflection into itself, is at the same time the transition into the other.  ⁷The image constitutes the midpoint between pure thinking and self-consciousness as such and is only one of the defined terms, while at the same time, as has emerged, its character, i.e. synthetic linkage, is extended over all these elements and is their common definition.

21.  The content itself that we have to consider has partly already been dealt with as the patterns of unhappy and believing consciousness.  In the former, however, it was considered in terms of the content produced by consciousness and longed for by it, in which the spirit cannot satiate itself nor find peace because it is not yet in itself, it is not its own content as its substance.  In the latter, in contrast, the content is considered as being the selfless essence of the world, the essentially objective content of image thinking; an image thinking that completely escapes from actual reality as such and hence does not have the certainty of self-consciousness.  That is the certainty that separates itself from it partly as the vanity of knowledge and partly as pure insight [IV.B. Freedom of self-consciousness etc. §21; VI.B.b. Faith and pure insight §1.4 ff.].

– ²The consciousness of the community, in contrast, has it for its substance, just as it is the community's certainty of its own spirit/mind.

22.  Imagined initially as substance in the element of pure thinking, spirit/mind is immediately the simple essence, identical to itself and eternal, which, however, does not have this abstract meaning of essence, but that of absolute spirit/mind.  ²However, spirit/mind is this: not to be the meaning, not what is inner, but to be actual reality.  ³The simple eternal essence thus would only be spirit/mind as an empty word if it remained an image, the expression of the simple eternal essence.  ⁴The simple essence, however, because it is abstraction, is in fact the negative in itself; indeed, the negativity of thinking, negativity as it is in the essence in itself.  It is the absolute difference from itself, its pure process of becoming other.  ⁵As essence it is only in itself or for us; but because this purity is precisely the abstraction, negativity, it is for itself; it is the self, the concept.

– ⁶It is thus objective; and because imagination grasps and expresses the necessity of the concept just mentioned as an event, it will be said that the eternal essence, the eternal being, generates, fathers for itself another.  ⁷Now, in this otherness it has just as immediately returned back into itself, for the difference is the difference in itself, i.e. it is immediately only differentiated from itself, so it is the unity that has returned back into itself.

23.  Three moments are thus clearly distinguished.  Essence is one.  The other two are both forms of being for itself.  The first of them is the being for itself  that is the otherness of the essence, for which the essence exists.  The other is the being for itself  that is self-knowledge inside the other.  ²Essence sees only itself in its being for itself.  In this externalization it remains by itself, while the being for itself  that excludes itself from essence is essence's knowledge of itself.  It is the word [John 1 v.1 ff.] which, once spoken, leaves the speaker behind externalized and empty.  It is readily heard; only being heard is the existence of the word.  ³This shows how it is that the differences drawn are, in being drawn, simultaneously dissolved and vice versa; the true and actual is precisely this motion circling within itself.

24.  This motion within itself declares the absolute being to be spirit/mind.  The absolute being that is not grasped as spirit/mind is but abstract emptiness, just as the spirit/mind that is not grasped as this motion is only an empty word.  ²When spirit's moments are grasped in their purity they are the restless concepts, which only exist in that each is in itself  its own opposite and which only find their rest in the whole.  ³Now, the image thinking of the community is not this comprehending thinking of the concept; it has the content without its necessity and instead of the form of the concept, brings the natural relations of father and son into the realm of pure consciousness.  ⁴The community behaves in this way in thinking by imagining itself, so the essence, the being, is certainly revealed to it, but this synthetic imagination results in the moments separating themselves from each other for the community, such that they do not relate to each other through their own concept.  However, it can also step back from this, its pure object, relating only externally to it.  The object is revealed to the community by someone foreign to it and in this thought of spirit it does not recognize itself, not the nature of pure self-consciousness.  ⁵The forms of image thinking and those relations that derive from nature must be left behind, superseded.  But when that happens by taking the moments of the motion that is spirit/mind for isolated, unshakable substances or subjects instead of transiting moments then, as previously mentioned in another case, this superseding must be seen as an urge of the concept.  To the extent that it is only instinct, it mistakes itself, discards the content along with the form and, what amounts to the same thing, reduces it to a historical image, something inherited from tradition.  In this, however, only what is purely external in faith is retained, which makes it a dead thing devoid of knowledge, the inwardness of which has vanished, for this would be the concept that knows itself to be concept.

25.  Now, absolute spirit/mind, imagined in the pure essence, is not the abstract pure essence.  In spirit/mind this abstract, pure essence is only a moment, which means it sinks down to the level of element.  ²The problem is that representing spirit/mind in this element has the same defect, in terms of form, that the essence has as essence.  ³The essence is abstract and for that reason the negative of its simplicity, something other; similarly, spirit/mind in the element of essence is the form of simple unity, which, precisely for that reason, is also essentially a process of becoming something other.

– ⁴Another way of putting this is that the relation of the eternal essence to its being for itself  is the immediate and simple one of pure thinking.  Thus, in this simple observation of itself in the other, otherness is not asserted as such.  It is the difference as in pure thinking that is immediately no difference at all; it is a recognition of love in which the two are not opposed in terms of their essence.

– ⁵The spirit/mind expressed in the element of pure thinking is essentially itself something that is not only in thinking, but is actually real, for its concept includes otherness, i.e. the overcoming of the pure, merely thought, concept.

26.  The element of pure thinking, being abstract, is itself rather the other of its simplicity and for that reason transits into the genuine element of image thinking – the element in which the moments of the pure concept acquire a substantial existence just as much in opposition to each other as they are subjects.  As such they do not have for a third the indifference of being against each other; instead, reflected into themselves, they separate from each other, setting themselves opposed to each other.

27.  Thus, the merely eternal or abstract spirit/mind becomes another to itself, it enters into existence and directly into immediate existence [Genesis 1 v.1 M].  ²He creates a world.  ³This creation is the word of the imagination for the concept in terms of its absolute motion; it is the simplicity declared to be absolute, pure thinking, which, being abstract, is in fact the negative and hence opposed to itself or other to itself.  In other words, what is asserted as essence is simple immediacy or being and as such lacks self, so, lacking inwardness, it is passive, being for another.

– ⁴This being for another is at once a world; spirit/mind in the definition of being for another is the peaceful persistence of the moments previously enclosed in pure thinking, hence the dissolution of their simple universality as they move away from each other into their own particularity.

28.  The world is, however, not only this spirit/mind thrown asunder into completeness and its external order.  Spirit/mind is essentially the simple self, so this self is no less present in the world.  It is the existing spirit/mind, a single self with consciousness, distinguishing itself from itself as another, as a world.

– ²Initially asserted so immediately, this single self is not yet spirit/mind for itself.  It is thus not yet fully spirit/mind; it can be called innocent, but not really good.  ³It is in fact self and spirit/mind and just as the eternal being shows itself to be the motion of being identical to itself within its own otherness, so the first thing it has to do is become another to itself.  ⁴This spirit/mind is determined as initially immediately existing or as dispersed throughout the diversity of its consciousness.  In these terms its process of becoming another is the movement into itself of knowledge as such.  ⁵Immediate existence switches into thought, merely sensuous consciousness into the consciousness of thought.  Indeed, that happens because it is the thought coming out of immediacy, it is not pure knowledge, but conditioned thought with otherness inherent to it; this is what makes it the self-antithetical thought of good and evil [VIIB.a. Abstract artwork §11.6].  ⁶Man is imagined as if that were an event that was not necessary – that he lost the form of self-identity by picking the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, losing his state of innocent consciousness, leaving paradise and the nature that offered itself without work, driven out of the garden of the animals [Genesis 1 v.3 M].

29.  This entering into itself by existing consciousness determined itself immediately as the process of becoming unequal to itself, so evil appears as the first existence of the consciousness that has gone into itself; the thoughts of good and evil are simply opposed in an unresolved antithesis, so this consciousness is essentially only evil.  ²This antithesis implies that the good consciousness is also there confronting evil as well as their relation to each other.

– ³Immediate existence switches into thought and interiority is more precisely determined as partly itself thinking and partly also essence's moment of becoming other, so it is possible for becoming evil to be displaced further back out of the existing world into the first realm of thinking.  ⁴It can thus be said that the first-born light son in going into himself falls away, but his place is immediately taken as another is fathered.  ⁵Such forms that only belong to imagination not to the concept like falling away, also son, reduce the moments of the concept into image thinking, but they also carry image thinking over into the realm of thought.

– ⁶More diversity of other patterns could just as well be incorporated into the simple thought of otherness in the eternal essence, the eternal being, and that process of entering into itself could be transferred into that.  ⁷Along with that this incorporation must be immediately approved, for through it this moment of otherness also expresses difference, as it should.  Not as plurality as such, but as determinate diversity so that the one part, the son, is the simple one knowing himself to be essence, while the other is the externalization of being for itself  that only lives in praising the essence, the being.  Again, taking back the externalized being for itself and evil's process of entering into itself can both be assigned to this part.  ⁸Since otherness breaks down into two, this would define spirit/mind in its moments; and when they are counted that would make a unity in four.  In fact, given that the group again breaks down into two parts, namely the one that remained good and the one that became bad, that would come down to a unity in five.

– ⁹Counting the moments turns out to be completely useless when what is differentiated is just one.  That happens because the thought of difference is only one thought as what is different, the second against the first, but partly also because the thought encompassing many in one must be released from its universality and differentiated into more than three or four different ones.  That universality appears against the absolute definition of the abstract one, the principle of number, as the lack of definition in the relation to number itself so that it is only possible to talk of number as such, i.e. not of a given number of differences.  Thus, it is completely superfluous to think of number or counting here, just as in general the mere difference of magnitude and number is devoid of the concept and says nothing at all.

30.  Good and evil turned out to be the determinate difference of thought.  ²Their opposition has not yet resolved itself and they are imagined as essence of thought while being each for itself independent.  This makes of man the self devoid of essence and the synthetic ground of their existence and struggle.  ³But these universal powers certainly belong to the self, i.e. the self is their actual reality.  ⁴This moment is what causes goodness to enter into actual reality just as, conversely, evil is nothing other than that process of entering into itself of spirit/mind's natural existence, and that goodness appears as an existing self-consciousness.

– ⁵What is only hinted at in the merely thought spirit/mind as the divine being's becoming other here approaches closer to its realization for image thinking.  It consists for spirit/mind in the self-reduction of the divine essence, of the divine being, renouncing its abstraction and unreality.

– ⁶Image thinking takes the other side, evil, as something alien to the divine being.  Grasping evil within that as its own anger is the highest, hardest exertion of image thinking struggling with itself which, since it lacks the concept, remains fruitless.

31.  We thus have here the alienation of the divine being in both its forms.  The self of the spirit/mind and its simple thought are the two moments whose absolute unity constitutes spirit/mind.  Its alienation consists in the fact that they separate from each other and that one has an unequal value with respect to the other.  ²This makes for a double inequality; two combinations emerge whose common moments are the ones given.  ³In the one the divine being is what is essential, natural existence and the self being inessential, what has to be overcome.  In the other, in contrast, being for itself is essential, what is simply divine is then inessential.  ⁴Their still empty midpoint is existence as such, the mere common feature of the midpoint's two moments.

32.  The resolution of this opposition also does not come about through the struggle between the two, which are imagined as separate and independent essences.  ²It lies in their independence that in itself, through its concept, each must resolve itself within itself; the struggle falls in that point where the two first cease to be these mixtures of thought and independent existence and where they both confront each other solely as thoughts.  ³For only in the relation of opposition are they essentially determinate concepts.  As independent, in contrast, they have their essential character outside the opposition, so theirs is their own free motion.  ⁴Just as the motion of the two is motion in itself, because that motion itself must be considered in them, it's the motion that initiates what is determined as each's being in itself against the other.  ⁵This is imagined as a free action; but the necessity of its externalization lies in the concept that that being in itself, only determined as such in the opposition, precisely for that reason does not have true persistence.  What alienates itself is then that for which the simple and integral, not being for itself, counts as essence; it is what dies and thereby reconciles the absolute being with itself.  ⁶For in this motion it presents itself as spirit/mind.  The abstract essence is alienated from itself.  It has natural existence and a reality that is self-like.  This is its own otherness, its sensuous presence, and it is taken back by its second movement of becoming other and asserted as overcome, as universal; this is how essence becomes itself in that reality.  The immediate existence of reality has ceased to be something alien or external to it precisely by being overcome, universal.  That's why this death is its arising as spirit.

33.  The immediate presence of self-conscious essence overcome is essence as universal self-consciousness.  This concept of the single self overcome that is absolute essence thus immediately expresses the constitution of a community.  Formerly the community dwelt in thought, but now it has returned into itself as into the self; with that the spirit moves out of the second element of its definition, image thinking, over into the third, self-consciousness as such [§20.1-4 and §25.1 ff. above].

– ²Let us take a look at the manner in which that image thinking behaves in its progress.  We first see this expressed: the divine being takes on human nature.  ³This effectively states that in itself  they are not separate from each other; also: the divine being externalizes itself from the start, its existence enters into itself and becomes evil.  In this it is not stated, but certainly implied, that in itself  this evil existence is not alien to it.  The absolute being would only have this empty name if in truth there were something other to it, if there were a falling off from it.  In fact, the moment of interiority is the essential moment of the self of spirit/mind.

– ⁴Interiority belongs to the being, and only then does it have actual reality.  This is the concept for us.  Indeed, given that it is concept, it appears to image-thinking consciousness as an incomprehensible event.  The in itself  takes on the form of indifferent being for that consciousness.  ⁵The thought, however, that the moments that appear to be fleeing from each other – the absolute being and the self being for itself – are not separate, occurs to this image thinking too, for it possesses the true content; but only afterwards, in the externalization of the divine being that becomes flesh [John 1 v. 16 M].  ⁶This keeps the image still immediate and for that reason not spiritual/mental.  For it knows the human form of the essence to be at first only particular, not yet universal.  The image becomes spiritual and mindful for this consciousness in the motion of the structured being in that it sacrifices its immediate existence and returns back to the essence.  Only essence reflected into itself is spirit/mind.

– ⁷The reconciliation of the divine being with the other in general, and specifically with the thought of that other, with evil, is thus here what is being imagined.

– ⁸If this reconciliation is expressed, according to its concept, as that evil is the same as good or that the divine being is the same as nature in its total range – implying that nature separate from the divine being is just nothingness – then this is clearly an non-spiritual mode of expression that's bound to cause misunderstandings.

– ⁹If evil is the same thing as goodness, then evil is not evil and neither is goodness good, for then both are instead overcome.  Evil as such is being for itself  that exists in itself and goodness is selfless simplicity.  ¹⁰When both are stated according to their concept then their unity becomes immediately clear.  For the being for itself existing in itself is simple knowledge and selfless simplicity is similarly pure being for itself existing in itself.

– ¹¹It must be said that, according to this, their concept, good and evil are the same to the extent that they are not good and evil.  But it is no less important to state that they are not the same, but simply different, for simple being for itself, or also pure knowledge, are equally pure negativity, i.e. absolute difference within themselves.

– ¹²Both these propositions are required to complete the whole and the claim and assurance of the first must confront the insistence on the other with unwavering firmness.  Both are equally right, so both are equally wrong; their falsity lies in taking abstract forms like the same thing and not the same, identity and non-identity for something true, fixed, real and to rest content with them.  ¹³Truth does not lie in the one or the other, but in their motion, which consists in the fact that simple sameness is an abstraction and hence absolute difference; also that this as difference in itself  is different to itself, i.e. is self-identity.  ¹⁴This is precisely what happens when the divine being and nature in general are said to be the same, especially when that nature is the human variety.  The divine being is nature in so far as it is not essence; nature is divine according to its own essence.  But the divine being is spirit/mind when both abstract sides exist as they are in truth, namely asserted as overcome – an assertion that cannot be expressed by a proposition and its spiritless copula, is.

– ¹⁵Equally, nature is nothing outside its essence; but this nothing itself no less is.  It is the absolute abstraction, pure thinking, or interiority, and with the moments of its opposition against spiritual/mental unity it is evil.  ¹⁶The difficulty with these concepts arises alone from clinging to: is and forgetting to think, i.e. thinking in which the moments are as much as they are not – they are only the motion that is spirit/mind.

– ¹⁷This spiritual/mental unity, the unity in which the differences only exist as moments or as overcome, this is what has come into being for image-thinking consciousness in that reconciliation.  It is the universality of self-consciousness, which has now ceased to be image thinking; the motion has returned back into self-consciousness.

34.  Spirit/mind has finally landed in the third element, universal self-consciousness, and is now its own community.  ²The motion of the community as that of the self-consciousness distinguishing itself from its own image is all about producing what in itself  has become, what has come into being.  ³The divine man or human god who has died is in itself  universal self-consciousness.  It must become this for this self-consciousness.  ⁴Self-consciousness is one side of the opposition of imagination, namely the evil side, which regards natural existence and single being for itself as the essence, so then this, which is imagined as independent, not yet as moment, must, in and for that independence, elevate itself to spirit/mind, which means it must represent the motion of that process within itself.

35.  It is the natural spirit; the self must pull itself back out of this naturalness and go into itself, i.e. it has to become evil.  ²But it is already in itself evil; so going into itself consists in convincing itself that natural existence is evil.  ³Becoming evil within existence and the state of evil of the world fall within image consciousness, just as does the given, existing reconciliation of the absolute being.  This imagined thing, however, only falls in self-consciousness in terms of its form, only as a moment overcome – for the self is the negative – which is what makes it knowledge; a knowledge that is a pure action of consciousness into itself.

– ⁴This moment of the negative must equally express itself in the content.  ⁵The essence in itself  is already reconciled with itself and is spiritual/mental unity in which the parts of the image are overcome, moments, so each part of the image here acquires the oppsoite meaning to what it formerly had.  Each meaning thereby completes itself in the other and only with this does the content become a spiritual/mental one; any determinate form here is now immediately its own opposite so the unity in otherness, the spiritual/mental aspect, is complete.  Opposite meanings now unite themselves and overcome the abstract forms of sameness and not the same, of identity and non-identity on their own, which formerly happened only for us or in itself.

36.  For imaging consciousness the process of becoming inward of natural self-consciousness was the existing evil [§27.5-§28.1], but now becoming inward in the element of self-consciousness is the knowledge of evil as of something that is in itself  in existence.  ²This knowledge is indeed a process of becoming evil, but only the becoming of the thought of evil and is for that reason recognized as the first moment of reconciliation.  ³For as a return into itself from out of the immediacy of a nature defined as evil, it is about leaving that behind and the dying out of sin [Romans 6 v. 11 M].  ⁴Natural existence as such is not left behind by consciousness, but it as something that is known as evil.  ⁵The immediate motion of going into itself is just as much a mediated one.  It presupposes itself or is its own ground, which is the ground of the moving into itself because nature has already gone into itself.  It is because of evil that man must go into himself, but evil is precisely the process of entering into itself.

– ⁶This first motion is precisely for that reason itself only the immediate motion, or its simple concept, because it is the same thing as its own ground.  ⁷Thus the motion, becoming other, has yet to emerge in its own genuine form.

37.  To this end we need the mediation of imagination in addition to the immediacy.  ²The knowledge of nature as the untrue existence of spirit is in itself, while this universality of the self that has emerged internally is the reconciliation of the spirit with itself.  ³For the self-consciousness that does not comprehend, this in itself acquires the form of something given, existing, something imagined by it.  ⁴Comprehension is thus for it not a grasping of this concept, one that knows the naturalness overcome as universal, i.e. reconciled with itself; rather, it is about grasping that image of what happens through the divine being's own externalization, through its evolution into a human being that has actually happened and the death of that human being.  The divine essence is reconciled with its essence.

– ⁵The grasping of this image expresses more precisely what was formerly called spiritual arising within it, the development of its single self-consciousness into the universal, i.e. the community.

– ⁶The death of the divine man, as death, is abstract negativity, the immediate result of the motion that only ends in the natural universality.  ⁷It loses this natural meaning in spiritual self-consciousness, i.e. it becomes its own concept as just described.  Death is transfigured from what it immediately means, from the non-existence of this single individual, into the universality of spirit that lives in its community, daily dying and resurrecting.

38.  What belongs to the element of imagination, that absolute spirit/mind presents its own nature as a single individual, or better as a particular, in its own existence, is clearly here displaced into self-consciousness, into the knowledge maintaining itself within its otherness.  This therefore does not really die as the particular is imagined as really having died; its particularity dies in its universality, i.e in its knowledge, which is the essence reconciling itself with itself.  ²The initially prior element of image representation is thus here overcome; it has returned back into the self, into its concept.  What was in that a merely given, existing something has now become the subject.  ³With this move the first element too, pure thinking, as well as the eternal spirit within it, is no longer beyond the imagining consciousness nor the self.  Rather, the return of the whole into itself consists in precisely this, that it contains all the moments within itself [§20.1 and §§22-24 above M].  ⁴The death of the mediator, the death he embraces, is the overcoming of his objectivity or his particular being for itself ; this particular being for itself  has become universal self-consciousness.

– ⁵On the other side, the universal has become self-consciousness precisely because of this and the pure or unreal spirit of mere thinking has become real, actual.

– ⁶The death of the mediator is the death not only of his natural aspect or of his particular being for itself ; what dies is not only the shell already removed from the essence; rather the abstraction of the the divine being dies too.  ⁷For, in so far as his death has not yet completed the reconciliation, he is the one-sidedness that knows the simplicity of thinking as the essence in opposition to the reality; this extreme of the self does not yet have equal value with the essence; the self only acquires this in spirit/mind.  ⁸The death of this image thus contains the death of the abstraction of the divine being that is not established as self.  ⁹This death is the painful feeling of the unhappy consciousness that God himself is dead [§5 above].  ¹⁰This is the hard expression of the innermost knowledge that is simple and integral to itself, the return of consciousness into the depths of that dark night of  I = I, which differentiates and knows nothing else besides itself now.  ¹¹This feeling is thus indeed the loss of substance and its move to an opposing position confronting consciousness; but it is simultaneously the pure subjectivity of substance, the pure certainty of itself it lacks as its object, as its immediacy, or as its pure essence.  ¹²This knowledge is thus the infusion of spirit by which substance becomes subject, its abstraction and lifelessness have died so it is actual; it has become simple and universal self-consciousness [Preface §17.1].

39.  This is what makes spirit/mind self-knowing.  It knows itself.  What is object to it is; the image of spirit/mind is the true absolute content: this content expresses, as we have seen, spirit/mind itself [§§12-14 above M].  ²Spirit/mind is now not only the content of self-consciousness and not only object for it, it is also actual spirit/mind.  ³It is that because it passes through the three elements of its nature [§20.1-4, §25.1 ff. and §32.1 ff. above M].  This motion through itself constitutes its actual reality.  What moves is spirit/mind itself, it is the subject of the motion and it is just as much the motion itself, the substance through which the subject moves.  ⁴The concept of spirit/mind emerged to us when we entered into the realm of religion as the motion of the self-certain spirit forgiving evil and thereby discarding its own simplicity and hard, unchanging fixity; or as the motion of recognition that absolutely antithesis is itself identity, with this knowledge breaking out as the great affirmation, the cry of yes, between these extremes [VI.C.c. Conscience etc. §§39,40 M].  The religious consciousness to which the absolute being is revealed sees this concept, overcoming the difference between its self and what is sees.  Similarly, the absolute being is now the subject that is also substance and is thus itself spirit/mind precisely because, and only to the extent that, it is this motion.

40.  This community is, however, not complete in this, its self-consciousness.  Its content is really only in the form of the image for it.  This division does retain the actual mindful spirituality of the community, its return out of its imagining, just as the element of pure thinking itself retained it [§18, §20.7, §§22-24 and §32.1 ff. above M]  ²But it lacks a consciousness of what it is.  It is the spiritual/mental self-consciousness that is not this object to itself, that does not unlock itself to become consciousness of itself; instead, to the extent that it is consciousness, it does retain the images we considered above [§§26-31 M].

– ³At its last turning point now, we see how self-consciousness becomes inward to itself and attains knowledge of interiority.  We see it externalize its natural existence and gain pure negativity.  ⁴Now, the positive meaning is that this negativity or pure inteoriority of knowledge is no less the self-identical essence.  This is the same as saying that in this substance has reached the stage of being absolute self-consciousness.  This is all quite distinct from, other than, devotional consciousness.  ⁵It grasps this side, that knowledge's pure process of becoming inward is in itself absolute simplicity or substance, as the image of something that does not happen according to the concept, but as an act of magnanimity from elsewhere.  ⁶For it  this depth of the pure self is not the force by which the abstract essence is pulled out of its own abstraction and then elevated into self by the power of its pure devotions.

– ⁷The action of the self maintains throughout this negative meaning against it, because what from the side of substance is externalization of substance remains in itself  for the self that it does not also grasp and comprehend, that does not find it as such in its own action.

– ⁸This unity of essence and self has emerged in itself, so consciousness has this image of its reconciliation, but still as image.  ⁹It gets satisfaction by externally adding to its pure negativity the positive meaning of the unity of itself with the essence, so its satisfaction does remain loaded with the opposition.  ¹⁰Its own reconciliation therefore enters into its consciousness as something distant, in space and time, like the reconciliation the other self accomplished that now appears as distant in the past.  ¹¹Only the individual divine man's mother is actually real, while his father's existence is in itself, and similarly the universal divine man, the community, has its own action and knowledge with respect to its father, while it relates to its mother in eternal love, which it only feels but does not see in its consciousness as a really immediate object.  ¹²Its reconciliation thus lies in its heart, but remains divided with its consciousness, so its actual reality is still broken.  ¹³What enters into its consciousness as the in itself, the side of pure mediation, is the reconciliation lying in the beyond; what, however, is present as the side of immediacy and existence is the world that still has to wait for its transfiguration, its glorification.  ¹⁴It is certainly in itself  reconciled with the essence and is certainly known by the essence, since it recognizes the object as not yet self-alienated, rather, in its love as equal to itself.  ¹⁵Now, for self-consciousness this immediate presence is not yet in the pattern of spirit/mind.  ¹⁵The immediate consciousness of the spirit of the community is separate and distinct from its religious consciousness, which, while it does state that in itself  they are not separate, also acknowledges that they constitute an in itself  that is not realized, that has not yet also become absolute being for itself.