On Hegel's Aesthetics:

(Above, Oedipus and The Sphinx, by Picasso and Bacon, respectively)

~Before I begin an analysis of Hegel's interpretation of symbolism, I want to share a quote from Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a prominent English poet and literary genius, who lived around the same time as Hegel. He, too, was interested in the concept of symbolism: "A symbol is characterized by a translucence of the special in the individual or of the general in the especial or of the universal in the general. Above all by the translucence of the eternal through the temporal. It always partakes of the reality which it renders intelligible; and while it enunciates the whole, abides itself as a living part in that unity which it is the representative." A symbol is not merely a sign harkening towards a concept, like one of Plato's images. The thing doing the symbolizing implicates a deeper more significant meaning that escapes a literal explanation of thing being symbolized (sorry, I've been reading Heidegger lately and I'm afraid his impenetrable writing style might be rubbing off on me, but none of his brilliance). As Levinas points out, the choice of what specifically is used to represent the idea is extremely important: "Art is an allegory for Being." The tangible, temporally bound, object has characteristics that render it, specifically, suitable for translation to something intelligible. If Levinas is right, it tells us something more about the object, idea, or concept, something that would have been overlooked had a symbol not been used to represent it. Hegel, importantly, points out that the Egyptian symbols, for the most part, tether two distinct things that are known by the artist. There is a purposiveness to these renditions that occludes obscurement. The riddle, for example, has a specific answer, just as the sphinx represents a very clear ideology or belief. In that sense, they work very similarly to the way signs do in language. What makes a symbol powerful and significant is that very obscurement, that ambiguity. Symbols become riddles without solutions. Again, Levinas points this out about artists: Art requires perpetual rereading; Even the artist, themselves, must consider their own work again, and again, as if someone else had created it. The enigmatic quality of symbols is essential. The light strikes each subject's retinas subjectively. That is not to say that every interpretation of a symbol is valid; I simply want to argue for the innate multiplicity and provisionality of symbols and, more generally, art

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