For Hegel the symbol is the
beginning or “threshold” of art. A symbol is to be understood on a wider and
more “universal sense” (304). Hegel makes two distinguishes in the symbol: the meaning, which is just the idea or
topic, and the expression, which is a
“sensuous existent.” The link between these two distinctions is purely
arbitrary. The expression or the sensuous thing or picture brings something to
our minds “something foreign to it” (what is the “it” here?). A color in itself
as a sign has nothing to with its meaning until it becomes a symbol in art. It
is not until a color is put onto a flag that the color may represent the
country. “Yet nevertheless it is not to bring itself before our minds as this
concrete individual thing but in itself only that universal quality of meaning
[which it signifies]” (305). It is also necessary, however, that the symbol not
monopolize its meaning to where it can not also mean other things. The symbol
for courage is a lion, but a lion is not only brave or strong, etc. The bull or
horn can, too, serve as a symbol of courage or strength. Hegel goes further and
says, “altogether endless is the mass of figures and pictures used as symbols
to represent God” (306). Thus, the very nature of a symbol remains ambiguous.
Is a symbol supposed to express and mean “only itself or to portray and signify
something still further”? (306). Should we take the symbol literally or
metaphorically?
On
death and immortality, Hegel uses the Egyptians to explain that the principle
of freedom is the self-knowledge that the self is “withdrawn from the
naturalness of existence and as resting on itself” (?). He says that the
Pyramids of ancient Egypt are the “simple prototype of symbolical art itself”
(356). They have an “inner meaning” and represent a free and living spirit. On
the worshipping of animals Hegel points out that it must be understood as an
intuition of a secret inner being which, as life, is a higher power over the
purely external” (357).
Hegel
continues to include Egyptian worship in his writings, now saying that
everything in Egypt has a symbol not pointing to itself, but to “everything
which it has affinity and therefore relationship” (358). Such enormous
“colossi” of the statue gods of Egypt require light to reveal their symbolism,
instead of “drawing it from within.” What is natural is different from what is
a symbol of spirit.
Although the explanations of
symbols are made difficult, it is virtuous that the symbols are ambiguous
because of its “inner subjectivity which alone can develop itself in many
directions” (360). Hegel does say that the Egyptian symbols contain “implicitly
much, explicitly nothing” (360). There are hidden meanings in the Egyptian
forms of art in the form of riddles, the answers of which are not only obtained
by us, but also by those who put the riddles there in the first place. Hegel
says that the Sphinx is “the symbol of the symbolic itself.” “The explanation
of the symbol lies in the absolute meaning, in the spirit, just as the famous
Greek inscription calls to man: Know thyself” (361). The sphinx’s riddle (What is it that in the morning goes on four
legs, at mid-day on two, and in the evening on three?) belongs to a “conscious symbolism,”
separate from the symbol because the meaning is only known to the inventor of
the riddle. The “shape that veils it” (the sphinx) is therefore chosen for this
semi-veiling” (397).
The
riddle itself is the conscious “wit of symbolism” which involves ingenuity and
the flexibility in combining things, and its “mode of representation is
self-destructive because it leads to the guessing of the riddle” (398).
Hegel concludes (in this excerpt)
that riddles belong to the art of speech, involving witty notions and play-on
words. On one hand we have an indifferent
object and on the other we have a subjective
notion, which represents one relation that was not found previously. This
new relationship sets the “topic in a new light as a result of new significance
to it” (398).
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