Commentary on Subjective Spirit, Chapter 22
What Spirit Is Here (§§ 440–444)
The determination (§ 440): spirit is “the truth of the soul and of consciousness” — and specifically as knowledge that “does not stand in relation to it as object.”
What “being with oneself” means, Hegel says in an image that captures the matter better than any formula. Spirit possesses
“the confidence that it will find itself in the world, that this world must be befriended with it, that, as Adam says of Eve, it is flesh of his flesh, so that it has to seek in the world reason of its own reason” (§ 440 addition).
Confidence, not certainty in the sense of a proof. And seek, not find: spirit proceeds on the assumption that the world is not foreign to it — it has not proved this and cannot, before it has sought.
The same image appears in the addition to § 4 of the philosophy of right. Hegel uses it, then, at both places where free spirit is determined — a further indication that the two books treat the same threshold here.
With this, both prior stages are sublated: the soul had its content immediately, consciousness had it opposite. Now spirit has it as its own.
The finitude that remains (§ 441): the soul is finite “insofar as it is immediately or naturally determined”; consciousness, “insofar as it has an object”; spirit, “insofar as, though no longer having an object, it still has a determinateness within its knowledge.”
Each stage, then, has its own finitude — and that of spirit is the last and thinnest: that its knowledge is still determined, rather than determining itself.
And the warning against a misunderstanding (§ 444): theoretical and practical spirit “are not to be distinguished as passive and active.” Both are productive; the difference lies in direction, not in degree of activity.