A Forest of Ideas by blake parker

Author:blake parker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-08-04T16:00:00+00:00

The Symbolic vs. the Literal

In the first place, I want to insist on the distinction between facts & metaphors, the literal & the symbolic, reason & the imagination.

a) “Facts” concern the “objective” world – causal relations, the repeatability of experiments & falsifiability. They are verifiable by the community.

b) The “symbolic” is comprised of the reality created by metaphor – that is meaning created by correspondences, similarities & substitutions. These are essentially subjective & created by the imagination. They may be corroborated by the community or they may not be. In any event, a certain sort of world is conjured up by the play of the symbolic imagination, a world that is metaphoric & illusory.

c) “Language” partakes of both “facts” & their causal relations, & also metaphor & substitutions on the basis of similarity. Two different sorts of language emphasize the one or the other. In general, both aspects are present. This is represented on the structuralist grid with the two axes of syntactic (causal arrangement) & the metaphoric (axis of substitutions). The causal relationships set up a system of “differences” & separate one thing from another – the metaphoric relationships set up a system of similarities & joins one thing to another.

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