Symbolization

In the fundamental notion of symbolization - mystical, practical or mathematical, it

makes no difference—we have the keynote of all humanistic problems. In it lies a new

conception of “mentality,” that may illumine questions of life and consciousness, instead

of obscuring them as traditional “scientific methods” have done. If it is indeed a

generative idea, it will beget tangible methods of its own, to free the deadlocked

paradoxes of mind and body, reason and impulse, autonomy and law, and will overcome

the checkmated arguments of an earlier age by discarding their very idiom and shaping

their equivalents in more significant phrase. The philosophical study of symbols is not a

technique borrowed from other disciplines, not even from mathematics; it has arisen in

the fields that the great advance of learning have left fallow. Perhaps it holds the seed of

a new intellectual harvest, to be reaped in the next season of the human understanding.

(P. 25)

Suzanne Langer: Philosophy in a New Key:

A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite and Art

Word and Image

In ancient times, before alphabetic literacy, there existed many image-based cultures. These cultures were superceded by cultures that forbade the use of images and relied primarily on the written word. In the book. The Alphabet vs the Goddess, The Conflict Between Word and Image, Leonard Shlain describes how cultures of the Word aggressively suppressed our natural human tendencies to use the image.

The rise and fall of images, women’s rights, and the sacred feminine have moved

contrapuntally with the rise and fall of alphabetic literacy. 1 am convinced we are

entering a new Golden Age—one in which the right hemispheric values of tolerance,

caring, and respect for nature will begin to ameliorate the conditions that have pervaded

for the too-long period during which left-hemispheric values were dominant. Images of

any kind are the balm bringing about this worldwide healing. (P. 432)

The Alphabet vs the Goddess, 

The Conflict Between Word and Image,  

by Leonard Shlain

Unfulfilled Potential

Speaking of the physical costs of unfulfilled potential, the American poet, John Ciandi,

addressing a group of powerful, practical-minded businessmen, had this to say:

There is no poetry for the practical man. There is poetry for the mankind of the man who

spends a certain amount of his life turning the mechanical wheel. For if he spends too

much of his time at the mechanics of practicality he must become something less than a

man or be eaten up by the frustrations stored on his irrational personality...

An ulcer, gentlemen, is an unkissed imagination taking revenge for having been jilted. It is an unwritten poem, an undanced dance, an unpainted watercolour, it is a declaration from the mankind of the man that a clear spring of joy has not been tapped and that it must

break through muddily, on its own.”

The Challenge of Art to Psychology