Hegel’s Condensation of His Philosophy
Hyppolite - “’The Absolute as subject.’ Such a proposition amounts to saying that mediation alone, and not any sort of immediate base, sustains the whole. The text of Hegel that we are going to cite perhaps condenses all of his thought.”
Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit (32) - “The circle that remains self-enclosed and, as substance, holds its moments, is the immediate relationship and therefore arouses no astonishment. But that the accidental as such, detached from its surroundings, that what is bound and is actual only in its connection with other things, attains a Being-there (Dasein) of its own and a separate freedom - this is the tremendous power of the negative; it is the energy of thinking, of the pure I. Death, if that is what we want to call this non-actuality, is the most dreadful of things, and to hold fast to what is dead requires the greatest force. Beauty without force hates the understanding because the understanding expects this of her when she cannot do it. But the life of spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps clear of devastation; - it is the life that endures death and preserves itself in it. Spirit gains its truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself. It is this power, not as the positive which averts its eyes from the negative, as when we say of something that it is nothing or false, and then, finished with it, turn away and pass on to something else; spirit is this power only by looking the negative in the face, and by dwelling on it. Dwelling on the negative is the magic force that converts it into Being. - This force is the very thing that we earlier called the subject, the subject which, by giving in its own element Being-there to determinacy, sublates abstract immediacy, i.e. the immediacy which simply is in general, and is thereby genuine substance: the Being or immediacy that does not have mediation outside it but which is this mediation itself.”
