Its crucial importance lies in its recognition as belonging to an order radically different from the purely behaviorist or causal theory of meaning. As Susanne Langer points out, any attempt to reduce the symbol function to a signal process will leave out precisely that which is unique in the symbolic relationship. A symbol is the vehicle for the conception of an object and not a term in a reflex schema which directs the organism to a referent.
The inadequacy of doctrinal empiricism and the deliverance of the symbolic transformation are perhaps best illustrated by beginning with the emblem of positivist semiotic, Ogden and Richards’s triangle symbol-reference-referent. This relation is alleged to be a refinement of the signal-significatum relation and is to be conceived in a strictly causal context. Meaning is a stimulus-response sequence in which reference follows symbol in the same way as dog salivation follows the buzzer signal. As Charles Morris puts it, a symbol is nothing more than a signal produced by the interpretent which acts as a substitute for some other sign with which it is synonymous. Thus in the absence of food, when the buzzer sounds, hunger cramps may come to be a “symbol” for food.
What is omitted in this schema is the obvious but nonetheless extraordinary characteristic of symbolization — that the symbol denotes something. It is the name of something. It is the vehicle by which we are able to speak and perhaps to think about something. The relationship between symbol and conception is generically and irreducibly different from the purely causal order of signal-significatum.
It is the very indispensability of the role which symbolization plays in cognition which prevents our seeing its unprecedented character. The most graphic warrant for its uniqueness and for the qualitative difference between the signal world and the symbol world is the unwitting testimony of blind deaf-mutes like Helen Keller and Laura Bridgeman.
Of the many consequences of the insight into the uniqueness of the symbolic function, there are two or three which are particularly relevant to our purpose.
Once it dawns upon one, whether deaf-mute or not, that this is water, then the first question is What is that, and so on, toward the end that everything is something. There has come into existence an all-construing mode of cognition in which everything must be formulated symbolically and known intentionally as something. There is a need for formulation of such a degree that that which is not fixed and formulated by the symbol is the source of a disability before the thing which, depending upon the formidability of the thing, can range from a simple insentience — not “knowing” the thing because it has not been named for one — to acute anxiety before a pressing something which is unformulated.
Besides the symbol, the conception, and the thing, there are two other terms which are quite as essential in the act of symbolization. There is the “I,” the consciousness which is confronted by the thing and which generates the symbol by which the conception is articulated. But there is also the “you.” Symbolization is of its very essence an intersubjectivity. If there were only one person in the world, symbolization could not conceivably occur (but signification could); for my discovery of water as something derives from your telling me so, that this is water for you too. The act of symbolization is an affirmation: Yes, this is water! My excitement derives from the discovery that it is there for you and me and that it is the same thing for you and me. Every act of symbolization thereafter, whether it be language, art, science, or even thought, must occur either in the presence of a real you or an ideal you for whom the symbol is intended as meaningful. Symbolization presupposes a triad of existents: I, the object, you. Hocking suggests that the symbol arises from the direct experiential knowledge that “We are.” But surely it is that the “We are” follows upon and is mediated by the symbolization, the joint affirmation that this is water.
What has this to do with existentialism?
We will pass over the epistemological consequences of symbolic knowing, the possession of the thing by the symbol rather than adaptation by signal — a knowing which is indeed existential in the broad sense of knowing something by being something — and go at once to the more typical existentialia. The recognition of the uniquely human use of the symbol will provide insights into the favorite concepts of existentialism — serving by no means as a key to their reducibility but as an hermeneutic toward the grounding and ordering of human realities in a hierarchical but nonetheless empirically valid scheme. The act of symbolization is to be conceived as a threshold beyond which new entities come into being, not by fiat, but precisely as they are enabled by the symbol.
(1) The symbolic predicament of Self. (a) The Self, the object, and the thou.
A study of the aboriginal symbol relation will be seen to be highly relevant for the existentialia, in particular as it illuminates and rectifies existential theories about the nature of consciousness.
Sartre, for example, ontologizes the primary transphenomenal consciousness as the being-for-itself, and the transphenomenal object as being-in-itself. The prime reality of human consciousness is accordingly not the Cartesian cogito but a pure impersonal awareness, the “prereflective cognito.” Such an entity is probably fictitious, however, since consciousness is of its nature intersubjective. The originary act of consciousness is the joint affirmation that the object is there for you and me. The formula for the “prereflective cogito” is properly not the Cartesian
I am conscious of this chair
nor the Sartrean
There is consciousness of this chair
both of which presuppose consciousness but
This is a chair for you and me
which joint act of designation and affirmation by symbol is itself the constituent act of consciousness.
The symbolic corrective is that both the empiricists and the existentialists (excepting Marcel) are wrong in positing an autonomous consciousness, whether a series of conscious “states” or a solitary subjective existent. The decisive stroke against the myth of the autonomous Kantian subject is the intersubjective constitution of consciousness. There is a mutuality between the I and the Thou and the object which is in itself prime and irreducible. Once, in theorizing, this relation is ruptured, it cannot be recovered thereafter — witness the failure of both Sartre and the empiricists to give an account of intersubjectivity.
Thus the two term subject-object division of the world, as the situation in which one finds oneself, is not the original predicament of consciousness but rather a decadent “unauthentic” state, a falling away from an earlier communion.
(b) The self and the symbolized other. The world of the Nought and the world of the Other. Being-for-itself and Being-in-itself. Self as Nought.
It is of the nature of the symbol-mongering consciousness to delineate and transform all sensory data into intentional symbolic forms. The whole objectizing act of the mind is to render all things darstellbar, not “proper” but presentable, that is, formulable. The world before me is divided and configured into a great assembly of autonomous and resplendent forms. The naming judgment, This is a chair, That flower is a lupin — an identification which, as Marcel says, satisfies a peculiar need which has nothing to do with the definatory uses of the name — this naming act is both existential and figurative. It affirms that this is something, but in so rescuing the object from the flux of becoming, it pays the price of setting it forth as a static and isolated entity — a picture-book entity. But at any rate it is the requirement of consciousness that everything be something and willy-nilly everything is something—with one tremendous exception! The one thing in the world which by its very nature is not susceptible of a stable symbolic transformation is myself! I, who symbolize the world in order to know it, am destined to remain forever unknown to myself. The self, that which symbolizes, will, if it perverts its native project of being conscious of something else and tries to grasp itself as a something, either fail and remain as the unformulable, a nothingness (Sartre), the aching wound of self (Marcel) — or it will fall prey to miserable unauthentic transformations (the impersonations of Marcel and Sartre, and in primitive life, the totemic transformation: In the importunate need for construing all things, the self in its terrible inscrutability is as capable of being one thing as another; I can as well “be” a parakeet as an alligator — anything at all is more tolerable than the vacuum which I am). As Marcel puts it: It may be of my essence to be able to be not what I am.