Das Dieses ist ein Baum ist ein Baum: Der absolute Geist als freies Dasein der Wirklichkeit in Hegels Phänomenologie des Geistes

This text, an examination of the chapter on religion in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, argues that religion is not to be understood as a projection of man (Feuerbach) but as that which marks the impossibility of all projection. For Hegel, religion constitutes an essential stage of consciousness in which the self-consciousness of absolute spirit knows that the self cannot locate itself in the world and that the world no longer serves as the self's projection surface. As a result, the religious stage is one of absolute loss in which the self's relation to being is fundamentally negative. In this non-relation, the subject appears to itself as divested of substance and being appears as negativity defying objectification. Therefore, the substance appears independent of consciousness, as a self, i.e. as the other subject. Although the phases of religious development (natural religion, religion in the form of art, etc.) represent an experience of loss, Hegel critique of revealed religion ist hat it holds on to a representation of the absolute as a positive past or a pending future, as for Hegel the absolute is fundamentally incommensurable with representation. Instead, the paper argues that it appears through the sublation of mediating images and referential language. Sense certainty, the first stage of the Phenomenology, appears anew in the book‘s last part on the absolute knowledge, as the absolute realizes itself as an immediate sensual event. Whereas sense certainty as the first stage tried to grasp its object directly, sense certainty as the last stage does no longer aim at constituting an immediate reference to its object or creating an image, and exactly because of this, sensuality in its real sense is possible. The name Jesus is the form assumed by that concrete and singular event in which all positive and finite predicates are revoked, a moment of sensuousness occasioned by the fractures of reflection and language's relation to a fracture that effaces all immediate and denotative representation.