Culture, Faith, and Pure Insight

I. Spirit in Self-Alienation (§484-537)

Hegel explores the reaction of the mind as an individual to culture at large. The State and the pursuit of personal wealth (in profit-incentive economic systems) are opposed, at least apparently, as the embodiments of service and selfishness. A person chooses either the noble-minded road of favoring the State, or the base road of favoring financial success. In practice, however, these two apparent opposites are like all of Hegel's dialectics: they merge and are in flux. Service requires flattery which is an endeavor in selfishness and the selfish pursuit of wealth is in fact an engagement in an end that is universally appreciated. Again, these two cannot be fully separated. The paradox alienates the mind from the world of culture.

The next level of the spiral is the realm of the religious. The naive faith imagines the world of the religious as a perfect world of "pictures," of projections of what is perfect in our world. But it seems the spiritual should be an ethereal place of un-understandable abstract infiniteness. These two opposites meld into what Hegel sees as the truth of religion, a truth borne out in the Trinity (finite touchable, perfected humanity in the Son; abstract infiniteness in the Father; and the dialectic result in the Holy Spirit -- in this case the middle term is dialectically and chronologically the Son) (§532-533). Hegel appears to think that this is what those outside the Church cannot understand: the dialectic joining of what looks like idol worship with what looks like fantasy yields a truth that is neither (§534, 552-554).