It is crucial to follow here Hegel’s entire line of argumentation and, not to miss the audacity of his point, to read this passage together with the one in which he asserts that subjective knowledge is not just the possibility to choose evil or good, “it is the consideration or the cognition that makes people evil, so that consideration and cognition themselves are what is evil, and that therefore such cognition is what ought not to exist because it is the source of evil.”

In short, what makes us divine is our very fall (into Evil) since thinking is both at the same time, evil and reconciliation. Hegel is clear here: thinking not only opens up the choice between Good and Evil, thinking as such is evil since the reflexivity that it implies makes it operate at a distance from immediate substantial unity – when we think, we abstract, we tear up the unity of the object of thought. Simultaneously, this reflexive distance implied in thinking implies freedom (in our thoughts we are free – formally, at least).

This is how one should understand Hegel’s dictum from his Phenomenology that Evil is the gaze itself which perceives Evil everywhere around it: the gaze which sees Evil excludes itself from the social Whole it criticizes, and this exclusion is the formal characteristics of Evil. And Hegel’s point is that the Good emerges as a possibility and duty only through this primordial/constitutive choice of Evil: we experience the Good when, after choosing Evil, we become aware of the utter inadequacy of our situation.

We all know Wagner’s motif Die Wunde schliesst der Speer nur der Sie schlug [poorly translated: ‘only the spear that struck you will close the wound’] from the finale of his Parsifal. Hegel says the same thing, although with the accent shifted in the opposite direction: the Spirit is itself the wound it tries to heal, i.e., the wound is self-inflicted. That is to say, what is “Spirit” at its most elementary? The “wound” of nature: subject is the immense – absolute – power of negativity, of introducing a gap/cut into the given-immediate substantial unity, the power of differentiating, of “abstracting,” of tearing apart and treating as self-standing what in reality is part of an organic unity.

This is why the notion of the “self-alienation” of Spirit (of Spirit losing itself in its otherness, in its objectivization, in its result) is more paradoxical than it may appear: it should be read together with Hegel’s assertion of the thoroughly non-substantial character of Spirit: there is no res cogitans [poorly translated: 'thinking’], no thing which (as its property) also thinks, spirit is nothing but the process of overcoming natural immediacy, of the cultivation of this immediacy, of withdrawing-into-itself or “taking off” from it, of – why not – alienating itself from it.

The paradox is thus that there is no Self that precedes the Spirit’s “self-alienation”: the very process of alienation creates/generates the “Self” from which Spirit is alienated and to which it then returns. (Hegel here turns around the standard notion that a failed version of X presupposes this X as their norm (measure): X is created, its space is outlined, only through repetitive failures to reach it.) Spirit’s self-alienation is the same as, fully coincides with, its alienation from its Other (nature), because it constitutes itself through its “return-to-itself” from its immersion in natural Otherness. In other words, Spirit’s return-to-itself creates the very dimension to which it returns. (This holds for all “returns to origins”: when, from nineteenth century onwards, new nation-states were constituting themselves in Central and Eastern Europe, their discovery and return to “old ethnic roots” generated these roots.)

What this means is that the “negation of negation,” the “return-to-oneself” from alienation, does not occur where it seems to: in the “negation of negation,” Spirit’s negativity is not relativized, subsumed under an encompassing positivity; it is, on the contrary, the “simple negation” which remains attached to the presupposed positivity it negated, the presupposed Otherness from which it alienates itself, and the “negation of negation” is nothing but the negation of the substantial character of this Otherness itself, the full acceptance of the abyss of Spirit’s self-relating which retroactively posits all its presuppositions.

In other words, once we are in negativity, we never quit it and regain the lost innocence of Origins; it is, on the contrary, only in “negation of negation” that the Origins are truly lost, that their very loss is lost, that they are deprived of the substantial status of that which was lost. The Spirit heals its wound not by directly healing it, but by getting rid of the very full and sane Body into which the wound was cut. It is in this precise sense that, according to Hegel, “the wounds of the Spirit heal, and leave no scars behind”: Hegel’s point is not that the Spirit heals its wounds so perfectly that, in a magic gesture of retroactive sublation, even their scars disappear; the point is rather that, in the course of a dialectical process, a shift of perspective occurs which makes the wound itself appear as its opposite – the wound itself is its own healing when perceived from another standpoint.

At its sharpest, this coincidence of the opposites appears apropos self-consciousness, i.e., subject as thinking: Abstractly, being evil means singularizing myself in a way that cuts me off from the universal (which is the rational, the laws, the determinations of spirit). But along with this separation there arises being-for-itself and for the first time the universally spiritual, laws – what ought to be. So it is not the case that rational consideration has an external relationship to evil: it is itself what is evil