Gnothi seauton
Γνῶθι σεαυτόν , transliterated gnōthi seautón (in API seauton). This expression in Greek old old means “Know itself yourself”. It is one of the three precepts registered on pediment of the temple of Delphes, word ‑ key of the socratic Humanisme assigning with the man the To have to take Conscience its own measurement without trying to compete with the Gods.
Presentation
Hegel sees this “know itself yourself” as the sign of a major turning in the History of the Spirit because Socrate while being claimed some made of “the single universal spirit”, a “singular spirit with the individuality which takes shape”, in other words, it makes interior conscience, the authority of the truth and thus of decision. There is turning because, in the Eastern culture, the Spirit, such as Hegel conceives it, was about the unattainable mystic (from where Sphinges and the Egyptian Pyramids that no one cannot penetrate); what on the contrary Socrate forecasts (and in the same manner Oedipus) it is “revolving of the Spirit in its interiority”, i.e that instead of being unattainable, the Spirit is claimed like being in the man himself.
It is there in fact, the significance of the murder of Sphinge by Oedipus to the doors of Thèbes: when this last request with Oedipus: " Who walks to four legs the morning, two legs midday, and three legs the evening? " , she asks him in fact " Who is the Spirit? " (since the Spirit is well marked of an active movement of the East in the Occident); this true question, Oedipus answers " It is the man! ". Such an answer is then so unbearable for Sphinge, which represents the Spirit in its Eastern mysticity, that it throws the top of cliff. Thus, know it yourself socratic is in total rupture with the share of the East among Greeks: it is the full assertion that the Spirit is in the man .
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