Spirit becomes subject only by fashioning substance as its own material.

Evidence

The development of the ‘substance-subject’ is accomplished through this sequence of religious ‘shapes’ and figures. In natural religion, spirit only knows itself as substance, as self-identity, and immediate unity between interior and exterior. Only through the distinction of the self – the difference that governs the division of substance and subject – can the spiritual content of religion be fulfilled. Since it has not yet arrived at such a distinction, the ‘wisdom’ of natural religion is ‘scarcely intelligible’ and remains attached to ‘this ambiguous being which is a riddle to itself’. In the religion of art spirit manages to escape and distinguish itself from itself: ‘Through the religion of art, spirit has advanced from the form of substance to assume that of subject’. Spirit is involved here in the ‘free becoming of the self’ in so far as substance becomes for it a material amenable to creative fashioning on which it can imprint its own form. Art ‘is the night in which substance was delivered over and betrayed (verraten wird) and has made itself into subject’. Through the artistic act of fashioning, spirit recognizes the way it has formed itself while distancing itself from itself. Hegel understands this transformation of substance into subject as the beginning of a process of ‘humanisation of the divine Being (Menschwerdung des göttlichen Wesens) which starts from the statue’. — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 771

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines how Hegel’s substance-subject transition passes through natural religion, art, and the beginning of divine humanization.
• XREF: connects to: Substance becomes subject by self-negating into its own content — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity,…, 240; Spirit develops by externalizing and returning to unite with itself — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity,…, 281; God becomes spirit only through self-differentiation that is eternally sublated in return (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Substance becomes subject by self-negating into its own content #corroborates (0.88) — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 240
• God becomes spirit only through self-differentiation that is eternally sublated in return #corroborates (0.85)
• Spirit develops by externalizing and returning to unite with itself #expands (0.82) — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 281
• Revealed religion marks spirit’s becoming-subject through self-revelation #exemplifies (0.75)