inner Spirit, certain of itself, “no longer needs to form/shape nature and to render it spiritual in order to fixate the divine and to make its unity with nature externally visible: insofar as the free thought thinks externality, it can leave it the way it is ( kann er es lassen wie es ist ).” This sudden retroactive reversal from not-yet to already-is (we never directly realize a goal—we pass from striving to realize a goal to a sudden recognition that it is already realized) is what distinguishes Hegel from all kinds of historicist tropes, including the standard Marxist critical reproach that the Hegelian ideal reconciliation is insufficient, since it leaves reality (real pain and suffering) the way it is, and that what is needed is actual reconciliation through radical social transformation. For Hegel, the illusion is not that of the enforced “false reconciliation” which ignores the persisting divisions; the true illusion resides in not seeing that, in what appears to us as the chaos of becoming, the infinite goal is already realized : “Within the finite order, we cannot experience or see that the goal is truly achieved. The accomplishment of the infinite goal resides only in overcoming the illusion [ Täuschung— deception] that this goal is not yet achieved.”15 In short, the ultimate deception lies in the failure to see that one already has what one is looking for—like Christ’s disciples awaiting his “real” reincarnation, blind to the fact that their collective already was the Holy Spirit

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