selection one - Sound and Signifier

History and Phenomenology / 43
integrates into his work all the more specifically historical arguments
on objective spirit and on religion. Since the problem is to
raise the individual to the consciousness of spirit, to make spirit
become self-consciousness in the individual, how can the individual
understand his substance without rediscovering within
himself the development of the spirit that is still a part of his
present world?
We can wonder nonetheless how the two tasks which we
have just defined can coincide : on the one hand, the passage of
empirical consciousness to science, and on the other, the elevation
of the specific individual to the consciousness of the
spirit of his time, to the consciousness of humanity within
himself. Hegel gradually abandoned his early ambition to influence
his age directly through pedagogical and practical works,
an ambition generated by the French reformers and the French
Revolution. Beginning with his arrival in Jena, he reflected on
the philosophic systems of Fichte and Schelling and tried to
define philosophy as the expression of the culture of an epoch
in world history. His speculative interest was engaged by philosophy's
attempt to resolve the oppositions in which that culture
was crystallized. Much later, 4I the Philosophy of Right, he
wrote :
One word more about giving instructions as to what the world
ought to be. Philosophy in any case always comes on the scene _
too late to give it . .A13 the thought of the world, it appears only
when actuality is already there cut and dried after its process of
formation has been completed. The teaching of the concept, which
is also history's inescapable lesson, is that it is only when actuality
is mature that the ideal fust appears over against the real and
that the ideal apprehends this same real world in its substance
and builds it up for itself into the shape .of an intellectual realm.20
The same idea is expressed in the famous phrase