第5章 黑格尔开口说话：《精神现象学》(2)
The failure of either “Enlightenment” or “Faith” to decisively resolve that dispute (and the premature triumph of Enlightenment against “faith” in European intellectual life) resulted in the completely fragmented social “whole” of modernity, itself seemingly incapable of providing any real guidance for people since it embodied completely contradictory ideals within itself. Out of this fragmented social life, however, the modern, despairing experience of “groundlessness” gradually reshaped itself into a project of “self-grounding,” of working out one’s rational commitments from within a conception of free, selfdetermining “subjectivity.” This was given political expression in what for Hegel was the decisive modern event, the French Revolution. However, without any “grounded” social institutions to mediate the claim to “absolute freedom” embodied in the revolutionary upheaval - with all the old social roles discredited and with no guidance except the general injunction to “be free” - no group in the Revolution could establish itself as anything more than just another particular point of view, just another “faction.” With nothing more to guide it than the abstract utilitarian thought bequeathed to it by the Enlightenment, that “absolute freedom” violently obliterated the distinction between individuals, and the Revolution became the Terror, with the sanitized executions of the guillotine serving to protect the “whole” from those who supposedly threatened it. The routinized mass executions in the name of revolutionary justice resulted in nothing more, as Hegel put it, than “the coldest and stalest of deaths, with no more significance than cutting off a head of cabbage or swallowing a mouthful of water.”'®
“启蒙运动”或“宗教正统”都无法对这种争论做出决断，这种失败（和启蒙运动过早地战胜欧洲人知识生活中的“正统宗教”）产生了现代性的完全碎片化的社会“整体”，而且这种失败本身似乎不能为人们提供任何真正的引领，因为它完全体现了它自身中的自相矛盾的理想。然而，由于这种碎片化的社会生活，“无根基”的现代和绝望的体验逐渐使它自身重新成为一项“立得住”的计划，重新成为一项在自由和自决的“主观性”概念内作出理性承诺的计划。这一点在政治上被从法国大革命中加以陈述，对黑格尔来说，这意味着这一决定性的现代事件。然而，如果没有“根基”的社会公共机构能使体现在革命动乱中的“绝对自由”这一主张变得和缓——由于一切声名狼藉的旧有的社会角色和除“成为自由”这一一般的命令外别无引领——法国大革命中任何团体都不能被认为至多只代表另一种特殊的观点或某一“派别”。由于引领“成为自由”充其量是被启蒙运动传给它的抽象的功利主义思想，这种“绝对自由”极力抹杀个体间的差别，法国大革命则变成了大恐怖，并取消了那用作保护“整体”免受可能对整体构造威胁的人的侵害的断头行刑。如黑格尔所述，以革命正义之名来按照惯例判处的大批死刑只不过导致了“最冷酷最平淡的死亡，比劈开一棵菜头和吞下一口水并没有任何更多的意义”。
As he had suggested in his lectures of 1805-06, Hegel argued somewhat obliquely in the Phenomenology that the revolutionary terror had to end when it was no longer felt by the citizens of revolutionary France to be necessary to protect the country from attack from without. With the fall of Robespierre, the Revolution began to institutionalize itself, a process that was completed only with the arrival of Napoleon, whom Hegel saw as the key figure in finishing the “novel” of the Revolution and a central personage in the story of the way the abstract ideals of modern freedom began to take form in social practice.
像黑格尔已在1805至1806年间的讲演中所揭示的，他在《精神现象学》中带点婉转语气论证的是，当革命的法国公民不再感到必须使国家免遭外来攻击的时候，革命的恐怖必须终结。随着罗伯斯庇尔的垮台，法国大革命开始使它自身制度化，这一过程只是由于拿破仑的到来才得以完成。拿破仑被黑格尔看作完成法国大革命这部“小说”的关键性人物和关于这样的方式的故事中的核心人物：借此方式，现代自由的抽象理想开始在社会实践中形成。
Modern Life, Modern Morality, and “Beautiful Souls”
现代生活、现代道德和“优美的灵魂”
A major point of Hegel’s discussion of the development of the spirit of modern Europe in the chapter on “Gm/” was to show how the political revolution in France had effectively broken with the old ideals, thus setting the stage socially and intellectually for a fundamental rethinking of what a worthy way of life based purely on the norms and commitments that would precipitate out of our own activities of fully mutual recognition would look like. Hegel argued that although the French had begun the political phase of the modern revolution, the torch had nonetheless passed to German philosophy to complete in theory what the Revolution had only begun in practice."
在“精神”这一章里，黑格尔讨论了现代欧洲精神的发展，其要点在于表明法国政治革命已经怎样有效地与旧的理想决裂。因此，黑格尔从社会和知识意义上为对一种有价值的生活方式通常看起来像何种东西作基本的再考察而设置了这一阶段，这种有价值的生活方式纯粹奠基于一类总是由于我们自己的充分地相互认知活动而形成的规范和承诺。黑格尔坚称，虽然法国人开创了现代革命的政治阶段，但革命的火炬却传到德国哲学，以让它在理论上去完成法国大革命只在实践上开创的东西。
The first phase of this activity lay in Kant’s own theoretically revo- lutionary claim that freedom should be an end in itself. The Enlightenment had culminated in a view of the “whole” that orients us in life as consisting only in the abstract claims of “utility,” of the greatest happiness for all. The Revolution, under Rousseau’s influence, had culminated in a vision of “absolute freedom” as determined by a “general will,” which in the development of the Revolution became identified with the “nation.” Kant saw that what was required had to be a selfdetermined whole that made room for the individual agent and neither swallowed him in abstractions such as “utility” nor reduced him to moral insignificance as merely a cog in the machine of the “nation.” Instead, in Kant’s hands, the emphasis on spontaneity and freedom committed us to a “moral worldview,” an ideal of a way of life that recognizes the dignity of all and in which each autonomously wills as a member of the “kingdom of ends.”
这种活动的第一阶段在于康德本人理论上的革命主张，即自由本身应是目的。启蒙运动在下面这种“整体”观中体现到极致：“整体”在生活上把我们引向作为仅在于“功利”的抽象主张，引向作为仅在于为所有人的最大快乐的主张。法国大革命，在卢梭的影响下，充分体现在对作为受“共同意志”决定的“绝对自由”的看法中，“共同意志”在法国大革命的发展过程中被认同于“民族”。康德看出，当务之急必须形成自决的整体，整体为个体的行动者留有地盘，并且既不使他们淹没在诸如“功利”之类的抽象概念中，也不使他们沦为道德上无足轻重而仅作为“民族”机器上的轮齿。相反，在康德手中，对自发性和自由的强调使我们承认拥有“道德世界观”，拥有关于承认一切有尊严的生活方式的理想，由于这种理想，每个人都自发地希望成为“目的王国”中的一员。
To conceive of oneself as a “moral” agent and to will as a member of the “kingdom of ends” requires one to do one’s duty, that is, both to do what is right and to be motivated to perform the action solely on account of its rightness, its justifiability, and not on account of some other attractive, empirical feature of the action (such as its utility or its promoting one’s own happiness). Thus, the “moral worldview,” so Hegel argued, always sets into opposition “morality” and the “actuality” of the individual willing agent (his relationships, his inclinations, his own project for his life, and so on). The proponents of the “moral worldview” put the individual at center stage; but they claimed that he was required to act from universal duty alone.
要将自己设想为“道德”行动者且愿意作为“目的王国”中的一员，这就要求一个人尽己任，也就是说，既做得正又仅因行为的正当或无可非议而有目的地行事，而不是因行为的其他有吸引力和经验的特征（例如行为的功利性或行为提升一个人自己的幸福）而行事。因此，这种被黑格尔加以竭力论证的“道德世界观”总是涉及对立的“道德”和个体渴望的行动者的“现实情况”（他对于他的生活的关系、倾向和他自己的生活计划等）。“道德世界观”的倡导者们将个体置于核心地位；但他们声称个体必须只能根据共同义务行事。
The “moral worldview,” so eloquently elaborated by Kant and developed to its one-sided conclusion by Fichte, thus had to feign and dissemble about acting only for duty’s sake, since, by putting the selfdetermining individual at the center of their account, they made such a thing impossible. The philosophers of the “moral worldview” displayed their implicit acknowledgment of this dilemma in the ways in which they were forever smuggling in additional motivation to make up for their overly rigorous conception of moral duty. Kant himself even argued for commitments to various “postulates” concerning rewards for virtue in the next life. Such “postulates,” however, only demonstrated that the proponents of the “moral worldview” had implicitly although not explicitly acknowledged that self-determining individuals neither do nor can act from duty alone and for that reason, such postulates could only be “feigning” maneuvers to avoid coming to terms with the implicit contradictions at work in the “moral worldview.”
“道德世界观”，被康德作了极其雄辩而详尽阐述的，却被费希特得出片面结论的“道德世界观”，因而必然假装行事并掩盖仅仅出于责任的缘故行事。因为，康德和费希特二人借着将自决的个体置于他们论述的中心地位而使这种事情落空。那些主张“道德世界观”的哲学家们显然含蓄地承认这些方面的难题，在这些方面，他们不断地私底下另有所图以弥补他们那过分严格的道德义务概念。康德本人甚至主张支持对有关报偿来生美德的不同“假设”的承认。不过，这类“假设”只说明，“道德世界观”的倡导者们虽未明确但含蓄地承认，自主的个体没有也不能仅仅根据义务行事。出于这种原因，这类假设只是或许能成为“假冒的”策略，以避免屈从“道德世界观”中正在起作用和含蓄的自相矛盾的内容。
It is thus no surprise, Hegel concluded, that the early Romantics in the late eighteenth century - and in Jena in particular - picked up on this deficiency of the “moral worldview” and took the Kantian and Fichtean emphasis on “spontaneity” and “autonomy” in a different direction. The “moral worldview” had shown that as self-determining moral agents, we had to be true to our own consciences as to whether we were acting out of respect for the moral law or out of more mundane considerations; the early Romantics attempted to effect a shift of moral consciousness away from the idea of obedience to a self-imposed law and toward the idea of being “true to oneself,” of finding one’s way around in the world in a manner that “fits” one’s own nature. Kant had tried to make room for individuals but had dissolved all significant notions of individuality into the rigorism of his theory; the early Romantics reacted by bringing the individual fully back into the picture. Whereas Kant, in his notion of the universal “moral law,” stressed the impersonality of reason’s demands, the early Romantics stressed the uniqueness of each individual and the need to appeal to a sense of being both true to oneself and of being capable of attaining an ironic distance from oneself and one’s surroundings, all the while being open to the claims of the emotions in finding one’s way around in the world.
因此，黑格尔得出这样的推断是不足为奇的：18世纪末叶的早期浪漫主义作家们——尤其是耶拿的浪漫主义作家们——继承了“道德世界观”的这一缺陷，并从不同方面理解康德和费希特对“自发性”和“自律”的强调。“道德世界观”早已表明，身为自决的道德行动者，我们在或者出于尊重道德律，或者出于更为世俗的思考而行事方面必须忠于我们自己的良心。在“适合一个人自己的禀性”意义上，早期浪漫主义作家们试图实现从顺从理念向自律这一远离道德意识的转换，以及向“忠于自己”这一理念的转换，或向到处设法人世的理念的转换。康德就已试图为个体留出地盘，但把极有意义的个性概念消解成他的理论的严格主义。早期浪漫主义作家们借以作出反应的是把个体完全复原到这幅画中。尽管康德在他关于普遍的“道德律”的概念中，着重强调理性所要求的非人格性，但早期浪漫主义作家们却强调每一个体的唯一性，以及需要诉诸于既忠于自己的观念又能讽刺性地与自己和一个人周围的事物保持一定距离的观念。他们所强调的这一点始终易于形成一个人到处设法人世的情感的主张。
That emphasis on conscience and uniqueness, however, necessarily collapsed into a self-defeating doctrine of “beauty of soul,” of maintaining the purity of one’s own convictions independent of the social consequences of one’s actions and the judgments of others.*^ Hegel characterizes the “beautiful soul” as an agent of such purity of motive that he never acts from “mere” “inclination” but always and solely on the basis of what is most essential about himself The alleged “beauty” of the “beautiful soul” supposedly consists in the way in which the fragmentation characteristic of modern social reality is thereby absent from his unsullied unity, purity, and innocence. However, exactly because the “beautiful soul” is unified and undivided within himself - he is “beautiful” in opposition to the degraded and fragmented “ugly” characteristics of the modern world in which he lives - he essentially cannot act in that fragmented world without thereby also sullying that undivided “beauty” of his soul. Seen in that way, the “beautiful soul” is the “moral worldview’s” agent completely withdrawn into himself, who can no longer dare to act because action in a fragmented world would inevitably stain the purity of the moral motive. To act is to take a stance in the actual world, to do something that in fragmented circumstances will necessarily be seen by others, perhaps even by oneself, as wicked or misguided. Facing up to that, the “beautiful soul” also assumes the shape of the Romantic ironist (perhaps embodied in the form of Friedrich Schlegel, Hegel’s nemesis at Jena), who realizes the necessity for acting but eschews all justification in terms of general principles, so only his “beautiful” conscience can discern what the particularities of each situation require.
然而，对良心和唯一性的强调，必然跌入一种自拆台脚的“灵性之美”的学说怀抱，必然跌入维持一个人自己的信念的纯洁性学说怀抱，这些信念不依赖于一个人的行为的社会后果和他者的判断。黑格尔赋予“优美的灵魂”作为纯动机的行动者的特点，以致他从不根据“纯”“倾向”行事，但总是仅仅基于对他自己来说最为本质的东西行事。所谓“优美的灵魂”的“美”据称在于这样的方面，由于这方面，现代社会现实特有的碎裂从而缺乏他的完美无瑕的统一、纯洁和清白。可是，正因为“优美的灵魂”本身是统一的和不可分的——他的“美”与他生活于其中的现代世界所具有的降级和碎片化的“丑”的特点相反——所以他根本不能在碎片化世界中行事，且因此又没有玷污他的灵魂的不可分的“美”。在这方面来看，“优美的灵魂”是“道德世界观”的沉默寡言的行动者，这种行动者不再敢行事，因为在碎片化世界中行事会不可避免地玷污道德动机的纯洁性。行事即为在现实世界中采取态度，就是做些事情，事情在碎片化环境中必将为邪恶的或误导的他者所见，甚或必将为一个人自己所见。“优美的灵魂”不但正视这个问题，而且采用浪漫主义冷嘲者的表现形式（或许体现在弗里德里希·施莱格尔这位黑格尔在耶拿时的论敌那里的形式），“优美的灵魂”认识到有必要行事，但避免用一般原则的字眼描述的一切正当理由，所以只有他的“美的”良心才能觉察出每一情境中的特殊性所要求的东西。
The result of the stress on the primacy of maintaining beauty of soul is that the community of “beautiful souls” itself fragments into two camps. One camp consists in those “beautiful souls” who suffer from the kind of paralysis that comes from fear of doing anything at all and who thereby become judgmental moralists, holding fast to the rigorist purity of their moral vision; the other camp consists of those who realize the necessity of action but who eschew having to offer justification for it, since they claim they are only being true to themselves in particular situations. The result is the very modern frenzy for accusations and counteraccusations of hypocrisy, charges of only pretending to have a “beautiful soul,” countered by charges of “radical evil,” of substituting one’s own particular interests for those of morality itself. Such accusations and counteraccusations, though, set the stage for a fully modern Christian reconciliation, for the acknowledgement and confession by each agent that each of them is, after all, only a particular point of view and that out of the whirl of competing unique points of view, we are nonetheless obligated to act on reasons that can be shared by all. Such reasons must be negotiated and struggled over; they can never be just “given,” and the struggle can be reconciliatory only to the extent that It is guided by a Christian religious viewpoint that we are all “sinners,” all in need of mutual forgiveness.
强调维持灵魂的美的第一性，其结果是“优美的灵魂”共同体本身分裂成两个阵营。一个阵营在于那些“优美的灵魂”，他们深受那种来自于担忧做任何事情的瘫痪之苦，由此成了批评的道德家，严格坚持他们的道德观点的纯洁性；另一个阵营由那些人组成，他们认识到有必要行事，但无法避免必须为行事提供正当的理由，因为他们声称只忠于处在特殊情境中的他们自己。其结果恰恰是现代对伪善的疯狂控诉和反控诉，指责仅仅佯称具有遭到“极端的邪恶”反对的“优美的灵魂”，指责用一个人自己的特殊利益代替道德本身的利益。虽然如此，这类控诉和反控诉却为现代基督教的完全和解提供了舞台，却为每一个行动者所承认和供认的东西提供了舞台，无论承认还是供认毕竟只是一种特殊的观点。由于这一系列无与伦比的观点，我们仍然有责任按照能被一切人分有的理性行事。这类理性必将被调和，并必然成了斗争的对象；它们绝不可能只被“给予”，这种斗争仅仅在这样的程度上才能得到调和：这种斗争受引领于基督教的观点，我们全是“罪人”，全需相互宽恕。
Religion and Absolute Knowing
宗教和绝对知识
If modern life is reconciliatory only by virtue of a certain type of mutual forgiveness carried out in a religious practice, then it had to be established just what would count as such a religious practice for “we moderns. Hegel s book had already turned out to be much longer than he had originally planned, and he now added yet another long chapter in an already very large book, a penultimate chapter offering an account of how and why Christianity could lay claim to be the modern religion. There were both systematic and personal reasons for doing so: Hegel’s reflections on Geist as the “I that is We and the We that is I” - that we are each “minded” only to the extent that others are so “like-minded” — put him in a position to return to his earliest concerns about what would count as a “modern” religion and to give them full voice in his newfound philosophical view.'^
假如现代生活只凭借在宗教的实践中实现的某类相互宽恕才是调和的，那么必将被确立的恰好应认作“我们现代人”的这种宗教的实践。黑格尔《精神现象学》一书早已证明比他原先计划写出的要长得多，他现在还要在已经篇幅很长的书中再加上一长章，即倒数第二章，用来论述基督教怎样且为何能够认为自己是特定的现代宗教。有两个系统和个人的理由使黑格尔这样做：黑格尔对作为“我是我们，而我们是我”的精神——我们每个人只是在他者是极其“类似精神的”程度上才是“精神的”——所作出的沉思使他可能回到他最早关注的什么东西应认作“现代”宗教，并使他可能借他新发现的哲学见解来赋予他最早关注的东西完美的声音。
From Hegel’s 1806 standpoint, religious practice is essentially a collective reflection on what ultimately matters to us, on what humanity’s highest interests are - in short, on what it means to be the kind of geistig, “minded” creatures we are. In religious reflection, as in artistic and philosophical reflection, we encounter “the spirit that knows itself as spirit. Quite strikingly, though, Hegel argued that religious reflection is fundamentally different from theoretical reflection, offering something that theoretical, philosophical reflection simply cannot offer, even though, as his argument turns out, in modern times it must also be subordinate to philosophical reflection.’^
从黑格尔的1806年观点来看，宗教的实践本质上是对最终与我们有关的东西或对人类最高利益所在的集体的反思。简而言之，是对宗教实践所意味着的成为那种我们所属的“精神的”人的反思。在宗教的反思里，像在艺术和哲学的反思中一样，我们遭遇“认为它自己作为精神的精神”。然而，相当明显的是，黑格尔论证道，宗教的反思根本不同于理论的反思，它提供的东西是理论和哲学的反思压根儿无法提供的，虽然，像他的论证证明的，在现代，宗教的反思同样必然隶属于哲学的反思。
Religion is the collective reflection on the “divine” through rite, ritual, and symbol. It “represents” the divine instead of “conceptually” articulating it. As such a form of reflection, it too progresses historically as part of a way of life; the various shapes of religious practice and reflection emerge from the very specific ways in which earlier forms of such reflection fail on their own terms, and what counts as sacred and divine can only be understood by grasping the way in which it has come to be sacred and divine for a people.
宗教是通过礼仪、仪式和信条而对“神灵”作出的集体的反思。宗教“描绘”神灵而非“概念式地”阐明神灵。因此，作为一种反思，宗教也历史地发展成生活方式的一部分；宗教的实践和反思的不同形态恰好来自那些特殊的方面，由于这些方面，这种反思的那些较早形式缺乏它们自己的术语，于是人们认作奉献给上帝和神灵的东西只能被借助把握这样的路径加以理解：由于这种路径，宗教开始成了一个民族奉献给上帝和神灵的东西。
The earliest forms of such reflection on divinity take the form of “nature religions,” in which the divine is interpreted as an abstract natural “whole” that does not necessarily concern itself especially with humanity; such “natural” religious reflection culminates in the “nature religions” of Egyptian life. Egyptian religion, though, was unsatisfactory because it only abstractly combined human and natural concerns in its highly symbolic works of art; its divinities remained fundamentally opaque even to the Egyptians, and the creators of its statuary and relics were thereby never able to rise to the level of art, remaining instead only “artisans,” capable of great craftsmanship but incapable of using their talents to direct communal reflection on the divine.
对神性的这种反思的最早形式采取了“自然宗教”的形式，在自然宗教里，神灵常被解释为一个本身不必特意干预人类的抽象的自然“整体”；这种“自然的”宗教反思在埃及人生活的“自然宗教”中达到了登峰造极的地步。尽管如此，埃及人的宗教却是不尽如人意的，因为它只不过抽象地把人类与自然的关系融入它的象征手法用得很多的艺术作品中；埃及人宗教中的神性甚至对埃及人来说也仍然基本上是晦涩难解的，因此埃及人宗教中的雕像和圣物的创造者们从未能把自己提升至艺术层面，反而依旧只不过是些“手艺人”；这些创造者们能成为伟大的工匠，但无法用他们的天才指导人们对神灵作出共同的反思。
It took the Greek breakthrough, in which the gods took on the forms of idealized human beauty, to depart from “nature religions.” In “nature religions,” the divinity’s concerns are simply different from humanity’s concerns, and thus man and the divine can never be reconciled in such religions. Moreover, as idealized forms of human beauty, the Greek divinities call on the creators of statuary to do more than produce well-crafted results; they call on them to adequately capture the sheer beauty of divinity in their works. The Greek artisans thus gradually became instead artists, men (and women) involved in leading the communal thought on what was at stake in mortal life. Likewise, the people themselves ceased to be mere supplicants begging for the gods’ favors; the community itself became a necessary participant in the ways of the gods and in the way the gods appeared.
这就需要希腊人加以突破，在突破过程中，希腊人的众神在形式上具有理想化的人类的美，从而脱离了“自然宗教”。在“自然宗教”里，神灵所关注的东西压根儿不同于人类关注的东西，因而人和神决不会在这类宗教中得以和解。而且，作为人类美的理想化形式，希腊人的众神要求雕塑家们所要做的不止是取得完全工匠化的成果；希腊人的众神要求雕塑家们要恰当地捕捉他们作品中纯粹的神性的美。希腊的工匠们因此反倒逐渐变成了艺术家，这些艺术家们牵涉到使他们自己相互思考道德生活中成问题的东西。同样，希腊人自己已不再只成为向神邀宠的哀求者；希腊人共同体本身必然变成了一个以众神的方式和众神所借以显露的方式的参与者。
This introduced, however, a kind of “negativity” already implicit in all religious reflection into Greek life. As they crafted their works, the internal tensions in the ideals to which they were collectively committed began to be made explicit. In their epic of self-creation, of how they came to be the “people” they were - Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey - the role of fate came to the fore and the general issue of whether Troy’s destruction was in fact in accordance with justice emerged. The creation of tragedy (already discussed by Hegel in the book in the section on Antigone) only accentuated this “negativity,” and in comedy, that “negativity,” that practice of reflective criticism and “criticism of criticism,” emerged in full force. In comedy, the pretensions and self-deceptions of everyday life are put in the foreground and made the object of laughter in order to point out the deeper substantial truths at work in a way of life. In Greek comedy, that only served to bring out the role of the detached, reflective individual, the ironic character who sees the folly of what is going on around him. By no accident, tragedy, comedy, and Socratic philosophy emerged at the same time, and the “beautiful whole” of Greek life could not survive being put under the scrutiny of that kind of ultimately philosophical, reflective, individualized attention to itself The Greeks own triumphs in art (epic, tragedy, and comedy) ultimately undid the allegiance they had formerly held to the way of life that brought those triumphs about.
然而，这已给希腊人的生活带来了一种所有宗教反思固有的“否定性”。像他们精心创作作品一样，他们所集体产生的理想的内在张力开始变得明朗起来。在他们独创的史诗中，在他们怎样开始成为他们所属的“民族”的史诗——荷马的《伊利亚特》和《奥德赛》——中，命运所扮演的角色来到了前台，出现了特洛伊人的毁灭实际上是否与正义相符这一一般性问题。悲剧创作（已被黑格尔在《精神现象学》一书有关《安提戈涅》这部分中加以讨论）只不过更加突出这种“否定性”，在喜剧里，“否定性”、反思式的批判活动和“批判之批判”得到了极其有力的表现。在喜剧中，日常生活的要求和自欺通常被置于最突出的地位，被弄成了笑料，以指出生活方式中正在运作的深度的实体法则。在希腊喜剧里，这仅仅用来揭示独立和反思的个体所扮演的角色，这种个体作为令人啼笑皆非的人物常常对在他身边将要发生的蠢事有先见之明。悲剧、喜剧和苏格拉底哲学的同时问世绝非偶然，而希腊人生活的“美的整体”不可能因被那种对它自身进行最终哲学化的、反思的、个体化的仔细思考而得以侥幸存在。希腊人自己在艺术（史诗、悲剧和喜剧）上所取得的成就最终使得他们不再热爱他们从前一直坚持且导致那些成就取得的生活方式。
Greek religion thus created the necessity for the kind of Stoic religion of the Romans, and out of the practices of individualized and alienated self-reflection of the Roman period following the denouement of Greek beauty and harmony, Christianity emerged as the “revelation” in the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth that God was Geist, that His nature was fully manifest to us, that the concerns of divinity and humanity were not at odds with each other, and that the divine had in fact become human. Christianity taught that God was “love,” and that the divine’s claims on us were therefore to be found in human “hearts” after they had opened themselves to the potential transformation in their own “hearts” that was necessary for them to appreciate this “love.” Moreover, the Christian rites and practices of introspection, of forgiving one’s enemy, doing penance for one’s sins, and asking for forgiveness oneself - only fostered the kind of self-transformation that enabled people to absorb the Christian teachings.
希腊人的宗教因而必然创造出罗马人的一种斯多葛学派宗教。由于随后出现的摧毁希腊人的美与和谐的罗马时期的个体化和异化的内省，基督教出现了。在拿撒勒的耶稣教义中的“启示”是：上帝是精神，他的禀性向我们显露无遗，对神性的关注与对人性的关注不是相互抵触的，神实际上早已变成了人。基督教教导人们，上帝是“爱”，神对我们所提出的要求因此见之于人的“心”中。在那些要求早已在人们自己的“心”里接受潜在的转变并且这种潜在的转变是人们对这种“爱”表示感激所必需的之后，基督教关于内省的仪式和实践、对一个人的敌人的宽恕、对一个人的罪的惩罚以及对一个人自己的宽恕的要求，只不过促进了那种使人们能够理解基督教教义的自我转变。
Jesus’ death was the death of God, the way in which God became human. The divine, Hegel argued, had thereby been made manifest as rational self-conscious Geist itself. This did not imply that man was God; in Christian religion, Hegel argued, we acknowledge that we worship not ourselves, which would be absurd, but the “divine principle” within ourselves, a claim he was later to try to make good in his “philosophy of nature.” The divine in Christianity is the rational structure of the whole in which we live and work, are born and die, not some transcendent entity beyond human life and concerns. The divine is in one sense only the way in which the world embodies within itself the potential for Geist, for our “mindedness” and “like-mindedness,” which comes to its penultimately full realization in the human religious community.
耶稣的死就是上帝之死，即上帝借以成人的最高方式。神，黑格尔论证道，因此被揭示为合理的自我意识的精神本身。这并不意味着人是上帝；在基督教里，黑格尔力主，我们承认不朽拜我们自己，自我崇拜当然是荒谬绝伦的，但我们崇拜自己心中的“神的原则”，一种被黑格尔后来试图在他的“自然哲学”中所证实的主张。基督教的神是我们在其中生活和工作、出生和死亡的整体所具有的合理结构，而不是处于人类的生活和关注的彼岸的某种先验的实体。神从这种意义上说只是特定的路径，借此路径，世界本质上体现为精神的存在物，体现为我们的“精神”和“类精神”的潜在物，这种潜在物终于在人类宗教共同体中达到近乎完满的实现。
Even modern Christian religion itself, however, is not capable of formulating that truth about itself For that, we require “philosophy,” the kind of “absolute knowing” that consists in our own historicized self-understanding that expresses itself in the Phenomenology's account of modernity as the necessary result of humanity’s own history - not as a result of blind causal forces but as a way of life that can justify its own claims to allegiance and continually reinvent itself along rational lines. The modern faith in reason is capable of redeeming itself and continually renewing itself, guiding itself only by the lights of the kind of self-bootstrapping, communally understood project of rationally comprehending what ultimately matters to us. That project completed itself in the philosophical self-knowing that was “our” self-knowledge in the Phenomenology of Spirit, the final chapter of Hegel’s book, his own self- described “voyage of discovery.” In that book, Hegel, the Seminary student and failed “popular philosopher,” became, irrevocably and finally in a form satisfactory to himself, Hegel, the systematic philosopher of Geist and modern life.
然而，甚至现代基督教本身也不能对关于它自己的真理作出系统的阐述。因此，我们需要“哲学”，需要那种“绝对知识”。绝对知识在于我们自己的历史化的自我理解，这种自我理解体现在《精神现象学》把现代性认作人类自己的历史的必然结果中——不是体现在《精神现象学》把现代性认作某种因果力量的结果中，而是体现在《精神现象学》把现代性认作一种生活方式中。这种生活方式能证明其自身对忠诚的要求是合理的，并且能够沿着理性路线不断地自我更新。理性的现代信仰能救赎信仰本身且不断更新信仰自身。信仰只是借着依靠自己的那种力量来引领自己，理性的现代信仰被一致理解为一项合理地领会最终与我们相关的东西的计划。这项计划在哲学的自知中得以完成，哲学的自知是《精神现象学》中“我们”的自知，这种自知在黑格尔这本书的最后一章中被他自己说成“发现的航行”。在《精神现象学》这本书里，黑格尔这位神学院学生同时又是不成功的“通俗哲学家”，最终以令他自己满意的形式变成了黑格尔——这位精神和现代生活的系统哲学家。
