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[XXXI.1.]
form as dialectic, is therefore regarded as truly human life, and
because it is nevertheless an abstraction--an estrangement of human life--it
is regarded as a divine process, but as the divine process of man,
a process traversed by man's abstract, pure, absolute essence that is
distinct from himself.
Thirdly, this process must have a bearer, a subject. But the subject
only comes into being as a result. This result--the subject knowing itself
as absolute se1f-consciousness--is therefore God, absolute Spirit,
the self-knowing and self-manifesting idea. Real man and real nature
become mere predicates--symbols of this hidden, unreal man and of this
unreal nature. Subject and predicate are therefore related to each other
in absolute reversal--a mystical subject-object or a subjectivity
reaching beyond the object--absolute subject as a process, as
subject alienating itself and returning from alienation into itself,
but at the same time retracting this alienation into itself, and the subject
as this process; a pure, incessant revolving within itself.
First. Formal and abstract conception of man's act of self-creation
or self-objectification.
Hegel having posited man as equivalent to self-consciousness, the estranged
object--the estranged essential reality of man--is nothing but consciousness,
the thought of estrangement merely estrangement's abstract and
therefore empty and unreal expression, negation. The supersession
of the alienation is therefore likewise nothing but an abstract, empty
supersession of that empty abstraction--the negation of the negation.
The rich, living, sensual, concrete activity of self-objectification
is therefore reduced to its mere abstraction, absolute negativity an
abstraction which is again fixed as such and considered as an independent
activity--as sheer activity. Because this so called negativity is nothing
but the abstract, empty form of that real living act, its content
can in consequence be merely a formal content produced
[XXXII.1.]
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[XXXI.2.]
by abstraction from all content. As a result therefore one gets general,
abstract forms of abstraction pertaining to every content and on
that account indifferent to, and, consequently, valid for, all content--the
thought-forms or logical categories torn from real mind and from
real nature. (We shall unfold the logical content of absolute
negativity further on.)
Hegel's positive achievement here, in his speculative logic, is that the
definite concepts, the universal fixed thought-forms in their
independent vis-à-vis nature and mind are a necessary result
of the general estrangement of the human being and therefore also of human
thought, and that Hegel has therefore brought these together and presented
them as moments of the abstraction-process. For example, superseded being
is essence, superseded essence is concept, the concept superseded is absolute
idea. But what, then, is the absolute idea? It supersedes its own self again,
if it does not want to perform once more from the beginning the whole act
of abstraction, and to satisfy itself with being a totality
of abstractions of the self-comprehending abstraction. But abstraction comprehending
itself as abstraction knows itself to be nothing: it must abandon itself--abandon
abstraction--and so it arrives at an entity which is its exact opposite--at
nature. Thus, the entire logic is the demonstration that abstract
thought is nothing in itself; that the absolute idea is nothing for itself;
that only nature is something.
[XXXII.2.] |
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