On Symbols and the Symbolic; Hegel and others.

Hegel’s Aesthetics, is among other things, a sustained reflection on Signs and Symbols and their relation to Spirit in its various stages of evolution. To what extent does spirit embody itself or fail to embody itself, what degree of adequation is there between matter and spirit, sign and meaning?

One of Hegel’s early examples is the Zoroastrian religion. The Zoroastrians, in Hegel’s description, directly worship light. Light is not a symbol of the Divine, “a mere expression and image or symbol,” but the Divine itself. In this sense, Zoroastrianism does not worship ‘graven images’ at all since ‘images,’ graven or otherwise, have not yet arisen. “the adequate representation of the divine is found and enunciated directly in the external existent.”

When we reach the stage when light is, by contrast, a symbol of divinity, we have lost divinity or meaning in its immediacy. Light now “points away from itself” towards that which cannot fully be present. The symbol stands in for the “thing itself” which is elsewhere. We could also put this the other way around and say the appearance of the symbol is simultaneously the disappearance of the thing.

Another other relevant example here is Hegel on the mystic bread of Catholicism:

In this mystical identity there is nothing purely symbolical, the latter only arises in the reformed doctrine, because here the spiritual is explicitly severed from the sensuous, and the external object is taken in that case as a mere pointing to a meaning differentiated therefrom [emphasis added]

For Catholicism the bread is not a ‘symbol’ at all, it literally becomes the body of Christ. Only when there is not this ‘real presence’ can it be classified as ‘symbolic’. In the “reformed doctrine”, bread, rather than being the actual flesh, is now only a signifier. It “points towards” that which is not immediately present. Immediate presence, then, rather than symbolism. But, conversely, this entails that we ought to incorporate into our definition of the Symbolic a loss of ‘immediate presence’. The very occurrence of symbolism is here, paradoxically, an indication that some presence has departed. And so the symbol is therefore not only the representation of some thing (light, flesh) but an index of its absence. In this sense Symbols are therefore always ‘haunted’, the ghostly presence of that which has slipped through the symbolic net.(Just for illustration we might think of Yeats’s relation to the Rose, circling but unable to access the Thing behind the representation).

The symbol, then, in Hegel’s reading, is less some arbitrary sign, than a kind of memory of what is now out of reach, the symbol is a meaning dwindled to its own resemblance. As such it seems closer to Benjamin’s definition of the allegorical sign rather than the classic romantic concept of the symbol, which asserted precisely the reconciliation of sign and meaning.

Arguably, this loss of immediate presence then opens up room for two related things: desire on the one hand (for that which has escaped the substitution of symbol for thing) and interpretation (which enters the space left vacant by the birth of the symbol).

The caveat to the above, however, is that Hegel is not writing about the symbol per se, but – as he sees it – a stage in its evolution. From the “first unity” of meaning and sensuous representation as we find it (for example) in the worship of light, we pass through a series of necessary stages to a point where meaning is fully embodied in its symbolic envelope without surplus.  

To recap: With the birth of the Symbol, there is no longer an immediate identity between meaning and its sensuous envelope but a relation – ‘instead of appearing as an immediate identity asserts itself only as a mere comparison of the two.’ So, for example, Divinity is comparable to light not immediately identified with it. And  in dwindling to mere comparison, what now becomes visible are the differences between symbol and thing (a relation of negation). The two things have been severed: 

Symbolising therefore becomes a conscious severance of the explicitly clear meaning from its sensuous associated picture.

But from this art, that recognises the difference between the picture or symbol and Meaning, we move to a very interesting stage: 

This art has indeed an inkling of the inadequacy of its pictures and shapes and yet can call in aid nothing but the distortion of shapes to the point of the boundlessness of a purely quantitative sublimity [..] a world of blatant contrivances, incredibilities and miracles.. 

What I think Hegel implies is that, after the severance of the symbol from direct identity, or immediate meaning, what happens is then a frantic attempt to ‘fill up’, to reclaim the vacant space, the “non-identity”, with fantastication and agitated invention. In this art, there is a mad proliferation of the Symbolic which, attempts to recolonise, to crowd with representation, with sublimity of number (as we perhaps find it in Bosch?) what has been vacated by the withdrawal of immediate meaning.

Again, for Hegel, this ‘moment’, of fantastication and baroque invention, an explosion of signification, is a phase on the way to an eventual reconciliation of symbol and meaning. But if we put aside this grand arc of reconciliation, we can best read the Aesthetics as a number of semi-fictional models, or myths, detailing the possible relations between symbol and meaning, matter and spirit, subjectivity and its expression.

And so Hegel’s description of the symbolic mode, and the inadequacy or gap between symbol and meaning, of absence and the attempt to populate that absence with signs, is very close to the Modernist preoccupation with the postponed reconciliation between sign and meaning, sense and spirit. In particular that Baroque sense of invention, initially an attempt to fill the vacancy, which then breaks free and becomes a self-delighting creation of signs and symbols [to be continued].