Spiritual Practice: The Forward Return To The Self

Here is a brief account of the slippery elusiveness of the contradictory whole apropos Spirit, language, negativity and transformation.

Spirit in Hegel’s book ‘Phenomenology of Spirit’ is the process of its own self-becoming. It is the movement of knowing that is aimed at forming a deeper knowing of itself. Its power lies in staying self-same in externalizing itself, i.e. becoming other to itself. Its supreme freedom and certainty of the knowledge of itself is the release from the form of its self. By moving forward, Spirit returns to itself.

“The force of spirit is only as great as its expression, and its depth goes only as deep as it trusts itself to disperse itself and to lose itself in its explication of itself.” - Hegel, PoS, (transl. Pinkard).

In its becoming, its goal is “the revelation of the depth of Spirit”. The goal is Spirit that knows itself as Spirit — Absolute Knowing.

"Here again, then, we see language as the existence of Spirit. Language is the self-consciousness existing for others , self-consciousness which as such is immediately present, and as this self-consciousness is universal. It is the self that separates itself from itself, which as a pure 'I = I' becomes objective to itself, which in this objectivity equally preserves itself as this self, just as it coalesces directly with other selves and is their self-consciousness. It perceives itself just as it is perceived by others, and the perceiving is just existence which has become the self." - Hegel, PoS, section 651.

Language is the existence of the Spirit. There is simply no universal truth or actuality outside of language, and so far as it is (posited to be) there, it is there as an outside that is inside language. The presumption that there is actuality, or a world behind or outside of language disproves itself because suggesting such ideas only occur within language, Spirit’s being-there.

Immanuel Kant argues that pure reason is not a truthful instrument to arrive at objective truth in itself because reason inherently gets stuck in what he called "antinomies": irresolvable contradictions. For Hegel, this apparent negation of the coherency of reason reveals a positive truth of reality and its consciousness itself. The negation of this negation denotes the lack or imperfection intrinsic to existence.

“One cannot step in the same river twice.” - Heraclitus

“Something moves not because at one moment of time it is here and at another there, but because at one and the same moment it is here and not here.” - G.W.F. Hegel, SoL.

According to Hegel, contradiction is a condition of possibility for change and the succession of moments, the passage of time. For Hegel, as for Heraclitus, the river is no longer the same as soon as you step back into it, nor are you the same anymore. Even the mode of change/movement is mutable itself. The river itself is transient and perishes. The form of change is not immutable since it always takes place within a certain discourse or shape of Spirit, the truth of which can only be regarded in retrospect as determinate negation. The truth of a superseded shape is revealed once one reflects upon its totality, which implies a having gone beyond it. Change itself changes.

Hegel’s dialectic as a logical tool deviates from Aristotle’s law of non-contradiction. Aristotle claimed that formal logic must adhere to the principle that A = A. An identity is what it is and remains so within formal logic. For Hegel, A can be both A and non-A. In fact, for A to be truly A it has to have been non-A. In other words, an actual identity contains within itself its difference. An identity that is actualized is one which has withstood the going through the negative of itself. Self-similarity implies internal division; positing “I = I” is a vanishing/passing and remaining/returning, a reflexive movement.

Phenomenologically, it can be experienced as follows, the self-othering that occurs in the self can be intensified in the reflexive reverberation it inaugurates. The return of that which the self has repelled from itself is the self in an inverted form, or the negative. The more one is trapped in the self-imposed alienated despair, and the resultant frantic grasping of certainty that is slipping away, the more one is pressured to make way for a breakthrough. The intractability allows for an overcoming of the pressure exerted. The overcoming of that resistance which is an expression of the power of spirit is a loss and finding of self. The unleashing of Spirit’s power, the supersession of its shape, necessitates one’s negative self-encounter and can be followed by what one desires in transformative spiritual practice, namely the supersession of oneself. The result is the emergence of a truer self, a self that is more self.

“Spirit […] wins to its truth only when it finds itself utterly torn asunder” - G.W.F. Hegel, PoS, section 32 (trans. Pinkard).

Only by being aware of the role of negativity in self-deception can one win to one’s truth. Self-deception is a fundamental part of every shape of Spirit. It should be noted that self-deception and truth are not externally and indifferently related to each other as a fixed opposition. The spiritual practice requires one to go into one’s self-deception and explicate it on its own terms. Only thereby can one transcend its shape. The practice, as labour of the negative, is not a leaping over the self-deception as an indifferent transcendental awareness that is not involved, that would be spiritual bypassing. On the contrary, it is only possible by Spirit willing to sacrifice itself.

The transformative spiritual practice necessitates confrontation and wallowing with the negative. The moment of the onset of negativity is a moment of encounter of truth of the self, and is the self. The self-deceit can lie in the experience of it as external disruption.

“[Spirit] is this power, not as something positive, which closes its eyes to the negative, as when we say of something that it is nothing or is false, and then, having done with it, turn away and pass on to something else; on the contrary, Spirit is this power only by looking the negative in the face, tarrying with it. This tarrying with the negative is the magical power that converts it into being.” - Hegel, PoS, section 32.

Fundamental to the transformative spiritual practice is the revelation of the negative. The practice aims at embracing the ruthless negativity that one encounters because it is necessary for enriching Spirit’s self-knowing.

The meeting of one’s demons is inevitable. The contingency of the spiritual practice lies in the formative work one puts in after having acknowledged the meeting as a negative and therefore crucial self-encounter. This formative work transforms the destructive demons into zealous angels and is the supersession of oneself. This rebirth is the attainment of a newer, livelier, more real, more present and more aware self. It is the attainment of a new way to be for self and others as a more actual self.