“Spirit closes and opens its eyes” - an experimental reading of Hegel’s Concept of Spirit in The phenomenology of Spirit

Abstract

Hegel’s philosophy is well-known for its lengthy, abstract, and complex intertwined expressions. This paper proposes an experimental reading of Hegel’s concept of Spirit through imagination to identify Spirit as a character in a “literary” work named The Phenomenology of Spirit. In this work, the images of Spirit lying in the darkness of night and Spirit stepping into the full-of-daylight reality are described many times by Hegel. This article borrows the symbolic sculpture of a closing-eyes Gautama Buddha in peaceful contemplation and an opening-eyes Jesus Christ in willful determination, which iconically represent the two distinguished religious teachings: the teaching of contentment and liberation from suffering in Buddhism and the teaching of sacrifice and endurance of suffering in Christianity, based on their influences on Hegel’s philosophy. The use of those symbolic images is to, and at the same time of the awareness of Hegel’s imaginative and expressive style, call out the symmetrical phases of Spirit closing and opening its eyes. In the continuous realm of eyes opening and closing, Spirit gains several understandings about the deep night and the daylight - or in Hegel’s words, about in-itself unity and for-itself opposites, respectively in part (A) “Consciousness” and part (B) “Self-Consciousness” of The Phenomenology of Spirit.