Symbol
A symbol (from the Latin: simbŏlum, and this from the Greek σύμβολον,symbolon, composed of σύν-, "with& #34;, "jointly", and ballein, "throw", "throw", "throw", that is, "throw together") is the perceptible representation of an idea, with associated features by a socially accepted convention. It is a sign without similarity or contiguity, which only has a conventional link between its signifier and its denoted, as well as an intentional class for its designated.
We call a symbol to a term, a name or an image that can be known in everyday life even if it has specific connotations in addition to its current and obvious meaning.Carl Gustav Jung.
Social groups usually have symbols that represent them: there are symbols referring to various cultural, artistic, religious, political, commercial, sports associations, among others.
Etymology
From the Latin symbŏlum, and this from the Greek σύμβoλoν, the symbol is the way of expressing a thought or idea, as well as the sign or means of expression to which it is attached. attributes a conventional meaning and whose genesis is the resemblance, real or imagined, with what is meant. Aristotle affirmed that one does not think without images, and science is symbolic, both constituting the most evident manifestations of intelligence.
Evolution
In the many stages that make up the evolution, in the form of human communication, from the development of spoken language to writing, visual signs represent the transition from visual perspective, through figures and pictograms, to abstract signs. Notation systems capable of conveying the meaning of concepts, words or simple sounds.
Signs and symbols convey ideas in preliterate and virtually illiterate cultures. But their usefulness is not less among the verbally literate: on the contrary, it is greater. In the technologically developed society, with its demand for immediate understanding, signs and symbols are very effective in producing a quick response. Its strict attention to the main visual elements and its structural simplicity provide ease of perception and memory.
Characteristics of symbols and signs
There are differences between signs and symbols:
- Signs can be understood by humans and, some (such as gestual signs), even by certain animals; symbols are specifically human.
- Signs point; they are specific to a fact or a circumstance. Symbols have a wider meaning.
Study of symbols
Symbols can be made up of realistic information, extracted from the environment, easy to recognize, or also by shapes, tones, colors, textures, basic visual elements that bear no similarity to objects in the natural environment. They have no meaning except the one assigned to them. There are many ways to classify symbols; they can be simple or complex, obvious or obscure, effective or useless. Its value can be determined as far as the mind penetrates in terms of recognition and recollection.[citation needed]
The signs
The interest in signs has given rise to an important field of study: semiotics. This deals with both the role of signs in the communication process and the place of symptoms in medical diagnosis.[citation required]
Signs and Signals
In communication, signs and signals generally appear in similarly illogical structures. Sometimes they require an intuitive approach that makes sense of them and therefore makes them open to creative interpretation. Intuition, inspiration, creative problem solving... whatever we call it, this activity has no logic, no predictable pattern. From the organization of unconnected signs arises the liberation of logic towards the leap of interpretation. We can call it inspiration, but it is a particular form of intelligence. It is the essential skill of anyone who must organize diverse information and extract meaning from it.[citation needed]
Scientific and technical symbols
In the scientific and technical sphere, it is also called symbol to abbreviations formed by graphs or letters. They differ from abbreviations because they lack a point. Such is the case of chemical symbols (e.g. C, O, H2O, C4H10), mathematical symbols (e.g. ► ► ,▪ ▪ ,∫ ∫ ab,f(x){displaystyle nablapartialint _{a}^{b},f(x)}), the units (e.g., kg, cd), the cardinal points (e.g. N, O), the coin symbols (e.g. $, €). Its fundamental purpose is to simplify writing in the transfer of ideas and knowledge.
National symbols
National symbols are those that a country adopts to represent its values, goals, history or wealth and through which it identifies and distinguishes itself from others, in addition to uniting its citizens around them and creating a feeling of belonging. The national symbols par excellence are the national flag and colours, the coat of arms and the anthem. Other emblems are sometimes added to them, such as a plant, animal or object closely associated with the country. Its typology differs in each culture, constituting an interesting field of anthropological study, since it provides abundant information on the most significant ideas, concepts and values of each society and era.
Religious symbols
In primitive societies, symbols served to express the essential qualities of their religious beliefs. Throughout history, religion has been linked to a number of significant symbols.
In Ancient Egypt this custom was practiced, thus, symbolic is its hieroglyphic writing, its mythology, where each of the divinities represents a cultural aspect, and even its artistic manifestations. Likewise, in the external forms of the Semitic religions such as the Assyrian and Phoenician, in the Hindu and Indo-European religions, such as the Greco-Latin religion, the symbol prevails, since in them the representation of the phenomena of nature was used, personified in beings. mythological, which ended up embodying the moral values of society.
Jews and Muslims forbid images as symbols of worship. Instead, they stress the word and the need for a written culture for prayer participation.
Christian Symbols
Many representations of abstract ideas through symbols are of oriental origin.
From Saint Clement of Alexandria we know that the symbols, which adorned the catacombs and were later reproduced in painting and sculpture, were already used by Christians in the 2nd century, commonly adorning rings, medals, etc., with the purpose of recognizing each other forced to the secrecy that the persecution imposed on the first Christians. Among others, symbols of union or reunion were used, such as the bronze or glass fish found in the catacombs of Rome, which were given to the baptized to be worn around their necks. It was also customary for travelers who had received hospitality in a house, to break a symbol of which they left half so that if they visited each other again, even their descendants, the hospitality could be remembered; Such is the use that many broken coins that are frequently found must have had.
Apart from these conventional symbols, they had others to which the Church gave great importance, the main one being the symbol of the Apostles, which was intended to provide a succinct guide to the Christian on the revealed truths, and so that the faithful could show a password of their own that would distinguish them from heretics; In this way, if for any reason they changed their congregation, they could be recognized as Orthodox Christians if they evoked the symbol. The early church forbade giving it in writing to prevent it from falling into the hands of infidels, so believers had to learn it by heart.
The figurative art adopted these symbols to represent, sometimes devoid of a religious or mythological character, attributes or qualities and even certain manifestations of human activity, to which it was adding others when necessary, although at the beginning debtors of the previous religious manifestations that constituted the common cultural patrimony.
A philosophical approach to the symbol
The symbolic of art in Hans Georg Gadamer
Inquiring about the definition of symbol from the hermeneutical perspective that the German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer proposes in a section of his book The actuality of beauty is to establish a dialogue with the etymology of the word and raise relationships with some of the Greek experiences; It is to delve into the semantic study that highlights the influence of the philosopher Heidegger in his work and to recognize the distances that he makes when interlocuting with the approaches of the philosopher Hegel, when he defines the beautiful in art. This is how Gadamer states that the essence of the symbolic is self-meaning.[citation required]
Gadamer, when making an etymological review of what symbol means, reaches the ancient tradition of the tablet and the relationship between the host and the guest, since each one kept part of the tablet and when joining them, the possessors recognized each other as old acquaintances. The above represents the meaning that symbol has from the Greek language as remembrance tablet. This element is of great importance when considering what is related to the experience of the symbolic, since "this individual-particular is represented as a fragment of the being that promises to complement in an integral whole the one that corresponds to it". —Hans Georg Gadamer
In this order of ideas, Gadamer proposes that the other existing fragment, which is always sought, will achieve total completeness in its own, in the vital fragment that is possessed. This is how the experience of the beautiful is the evocation of a possible complete order —Hans Georg Gadamer. With this notion raised, the statement is made in which the work of art is recognized from the same message of integrity, to then conceptualize what constitutes the significance of beauty and art. From there, he proposes that what is experienced from an encounter with art is not the particular, rather it is the totality of the experiential world that takes place. However, he makes the clarification that this does not mean that the indeterminate expectation of meaning that makes the work of art have a meaning for us can fully consummate its total meaning . —Hans Georg Gadamer
It is at this point that he returns to the philosopher Hegel, who posits the beautiful in art as the sensible appearance of the idea, this becomes truly present in the sensible manifestation of the beautiful. Gadamer distances himself from the above, calling it an idealist seduction, since he states that what Hegel proposes does not do justice to the authentic circumstance that the work speaks to us as a work, not as the bearer of a message —Hans Georg Gadamer. Consequently, the idea of the symbolic rests on a game of opposites of demonstration and concealment. Hence, the work is not reduced to the simplicity of a mere carrier of meaning, since the meaning of the work lies in the fact that the work itself is there. This shows that idealistic seduction does not take into account the game that involves showing and hiding, which makes it possible for the universal to occupy a place in the particular without necessarily having to pronounce itself universal. This is how the symbolic does not refer to the meaning but rather represents the meaning itself.
In addition to what was previously stated by Gadamer, he uses the concept of conformation by that of work, states that conformation "is nothing that one can think that someone has done deliberately" —Hans Georg Gadamer. This concept allows him to reinforce what has already been mentioned, in the direction that he gives to the conformation, since it is found and exists thus there, capable of being found by anyone who is with her.[citation needed]
It is important to remember the statement that Gadamer makes when stating that what is carried out in art is not a mere revelation of meaning, and it is here that he takes up one of the contributions of the philosopher Heidegger when he gives thought the possibility of escaping from the idealist concept of meaning and of perceiving the ontological fullness of the truth that speaks to us from art in the double movement of discovering-unconcealing, concealment-withdrawal.
The symbol as an expression of multiple meanings in Paul Ricoeur
Parallel to this, Paul Ricoeur in his text Freud: an interpretation of culture —Ricoeur, P. introduces the study of the symbol from the German voice traumdeutung composed of two elements: the dream and the interpretation. When outlining, initially, general pieces about the dream, it is observed that the interpretation falls on it, since being a word that opens up to psychic products, it requires to be revealed, and for this, psychoanalysis is required. The dream is thus inscribed in a region of language that announces itself as a place of complex significations, where another sense is given and hidden at the same time in an immediate sense —Ricoeur, P. Along these lines, what in Gadamer is understood as a game of opposites, of demonstration and concealment, obeys in Ricoeur the double region of meaning in which the symbol is installed.
Since it has a double meaning, the symbol requires an interpretation that is relegated to the hermeneutic field. Hermeneutics is conceptualized by Ricoeur as the theory of the rules that preside over an exegesis, that is, the interpretation of a text singular or a set of signs capable of being considered as a text —Ricoeur, P.; it is through the interpretation that the symbol is inscribed in the philosophy of language, the latter must be taken into account as an element founder of Ricoeur's philosophical approaches to the interpretation of the symbol, which will be seen later.
The work carried out by Ricoeur rests on the search for the semantic criterion in the double meaning intentional structure —Ricoeur, P. that the symbol has, and on the need to take this structure into account as the object of study of his investigation; Said work has demanded to observe the symbol from two definitions: a 'broad' in which the symbolic function is studied based on Ernst Cassirer's approaches, thanks to which Ricoeur makes a distinction between symbol and sign, three 'emergency zones' are added to this broad definition: phenomenology of religion, the dream and the poetic imagination. The second definition is the 'narrow' in which the symbol is seen from the connection of meaning to meaning provided by the analogy.
In Ricoeur's work, various elements are needed to limit the fields of action of the symbol and interpretation, one of these elements, of a fundamental nature, consists of a concrete definition of the symbol, this, as said before, is Unlike what Cassirer proposes, which would correspond, according to Ricoeur, more to a sign, due to its univocal meaning, than to a symbol, which is double or multiple in nature. In this order of ideas, the symbol in Ricoeur is an expression with a double or multiple meaning that requires an interpretation work that makes explicit the multiple meanings that compose it.
Regarding the three 'emergency zones' there are two that denote a special significance, those that have to do with the poetic imagination and phenomenology of religion, in the latter an essential component in Ricoeur's research is announced: language. The symbol in the phenomenology of religion is linked to the rites and myths that constitute the language of the sacred, the symbols are not presented as values of immediate expression but are inscribed in the universe of discourse where they acquire symbolic reality, it is then, through language, and specifically the word, that the cosmic expressiveness of the phenomenology of religion can be expressed. Likewise, in the poetic imagination, which understands the importance of the image as a vehicle or pretext to give verbal force to the expression, language and words are imposed as means to be able to say the symbol. In this sense, we understand that it is through language that the symbol can become real, understanding possibility of realization not material reality, but expressive reality.
- It always takes a word to retake the world and make it become hierophany; likewise the dreamer in his private dream is closed to all, does not begin to instruct us but when he tells his dream. Then it is the poet who shows us the birth of the verb as he was buried in the puzzles of the cosmos and the psyche (...) Show the symbol at the time poetry puts language in state of emergency-Ricoeur, P.