The Phenomenology of Mind (Volume 2) (Paperback)

Book may have numerous typos, missing text, images, or index. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. 1910. Excerpt: ... II Enlightenment * The peculiar object on which pure insight directs the active force of the notion is belief, this being a form of pure consciousness like itself and yet opposed to it in that element. But at the same time pure insight has a relation to the actual world, for, like belief, it is a return from the actual world into pure consciousness. We have first of all to see how its activity is constituted, as contrasted with the impure intentions and the perverted forms of insight found in the actual world, f We have touched already on the placid type of conscious life, which stands in contrast to this turmoil of alternate self-dissolution and self-evolution; it constitutes the aspect of pure insight and intention. This unperturbed consciousness, however, as we saw, has no special insight regarding the sphere of culture. The latter has itself rather the most painful feeling, and the truest insight about itself--the feeling that everything made secure crumbles to pieces, that every element of its existence is shattered to atoms, and every bone broken: moreover, it consciously expresses this feeling in words, pronounces judgment and gives luminous utterance concerning all aspects of its condition. Pure insight, therefore, can have here no activity and content of its own, and thus can only take up the formal attitude of truly apprehending this ingenious insight proper to the world and the language it adopts. Since this language is a scattered and broken utterance and the pronouncement a fickle mood of the moment, which is again quickly forgotten, and is only known to be a whole by a third consciousness, this latter can be distinguished as pure insight only if it gathers those several scattered traces into a universal picture, and then makes them the insight of all. * Enlightenment (...