(c) The works of Egyptian art in their excessively mysterious symbolism are therefore riddles, let us rather say the objective riddle's self. And we may summarily define the Sphinx as symbol of the real significance of the genius of Egypt. It stands as a symbol for symbolism itself. In countless numbers, set forth in rows of a hundred at a time, we come across these Sphinx-forms on Egyptian soil; they are hewn from the hardest stone, polished, covered with hieroglyphics, and in the vicinity of Cairo of such colossal dimensions that their lion-claws alone measure a man's height. Their animal bodies lie in repose, above which as bust a human body rears itself; now and again we find the head of a ram, but in the most common case it is that of a woman. Out of the obtuse strength and robustness of animality the spirit of man is fain to press forward, albeit still unable to attain the perfect representation of his own freedom, or a counterfeit of his body in motion; and this is inevitable, for he is still forced to remain blended in the company of that Other which confronts himself. This straining after self-conscious spirituality, which fails to grasp itself from the truth of its own substance in a form of external reality which is alone adequate to express it, and instead envisages and brings the same home to consciousness in that which is merely cognate with it, but also that which is equally foreign to it, is, in its general terms, the symbolical; and we find it here concentrated to a point as the riddle.
It is in this sense that the Sphinx in the Greek mythos, which itself again is open to symbolic interpretation, appears as the monster which propounds its riddle. The sphinx asked here the famous and problematical question: "Who is it, who walks in the morning on four legs, at noon upon two legs, and in the evening on three?" Oedipus discovered the simple answer that it was man himself, and hurled the sphinx from the rocks. The resolution of the symbol consists in the illumination of all that is implied in the significance of one word, Spirit, just as the famous Greek inscription cries out to mankind: "Know thyself." The light of consciousness is that clarity, which suffers its concrete content to shine all luminous through the form which is wholly adapted to unfold it, and in its positive form of existence simply reveals that which it is in truth.
[37] Bedeutung.
[38] What Hegel means is that calling an aspect of sense bodily or natural itself implies a distinction from that which is spiritual, or only cognized by mind, and this distinction is not present to the earliest human cognition of Divine reality.
[39] Das Lichtreine.
[40] Except in the conceptions of the Hebrew prophets this is only true subject to qualification even of the God of Israel. For he was evidently associated with the thunder, to take but one case—the deliverance of the tables of stone on Sinai.
[41] Phantasie may often be translated by the word imagination, but here the element of caprice and dependence on sensuous image rather than creative impulse directed by a principle of selection is to be emphasized.
[42] Ein Taumel, i.e., the dance as of intoxication.
[43] This is obviously a difficult passage to follow. The main thing to remember is that Hegel is here describing the movement of a dialectical process, that is the purely objective, rather than the point of view of personal or even national experience. Such vivid expressions as Taumel and schamlos hineinrücken remind one of the Platonic dialectic.