Transcription
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You're listening to The Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who were at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 290 is something like: What is the relationship between human nature and symbolism? We read chapters one through five of Suzanne Langer's *Philosophy in a New Key* (1942), plus some of us looked at Ernst Cassirer's *An Essay on Man* (1944). For more information, please visit partiallyexaminedlife.com.
This is Mark Clinton-Meyer, my own generative idea in Madison, Wisconsin.
This is Seth Baskin, perceiving and wishing that he was not symbolizing time in Austin, Texas.
This is Wes All, one symbolizing, not signifying in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
This is Dylan Casey, announcing my presence as a sign of my attendance in Madison, Wisconsin.
Well, hey hey ho. This was supposed to be an extension over aesthetic stuff, but we're not going to talk about aesthetics today. The first half of this book is all preliminary, so maybe we'll get to aesthetics next time. Seth, you had suggested this.
Yeah, because you physically possessed it. Do you want to get us started with your impressions here?
I think that I originally picked up this book maybe in grad school, maybe before grad school, but I had in my mind that it was somehow associated with Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung and these kind of architect--it was something I always was interested in looking at, and because I--it resonates with something around music, just the way the name seems to suggest. I thought, "Oh, this would be something that would be really interesting to read at some point." And then, as you know, I studied other things, and the arc we've been on, I just sort of filed it away and that maybe one day I'll get around to it category. But I had always wanted to look at it, and it's just the book that I--version I have, the Harvard book, has a very distinct blue and white cover that has stared at me from the bookshelf for decades. So I was just--because like you said, we thought it was related to aesthetics, I thought, "Oh, well, this might be something we could finally get our--you know, I have an excuse to actually read it," in conjunction with PEL since I don't have time to do any other reading outside of PEL. And much to my surprise, it was not at all the book that I thought it was going to be, particularly not the first two chapters, which I thought was going to take me to a place I did not want to go, which is back into logical positivism and Wittgenstein and Carnap and all those guys. But I was delighted with her turn--what she called the "new key"--and I think she does a phenomenal job of articulating this concept of human beings as symbol-making creatures and weaving that into that context around language, the philosophy of language, and then creating a distinction in a very clear and interesting way. And I found myself delighted; I absolutely loved--love the book. And it didn't hurt that my prep was done predominantly on a 45-foot sailing catamaran in St. Martin, Virgin Islands, as opposed to trying to squeeze in 20 minutes when I'm not being accosted by children and dogs in my hovel here in Austin. But yes, I thought I always thought it was somehow an aesthetics text, and it's not really that, and it kind of took us in a different direction, but I really like it.
Yeah, it takes a while to get going. Maybe academic texts from the 1940s have a particular style. There are lots of quotes from other authors; reads like a research paper, a lot of it. So because she was referring so heavily to Cassirer in the first part of it, that made me look up so his *uh* *Philosophy of Symbolic Forms* came out in the 20s, three giant volumes, but he wrote, actually after this book came out, toward the end of his life, *An Essay on Man*, which reads very similarly to this book. And so I had suggested maybe we should do that instead, or an additional. And I read about 100 pages of it, and it says about the same thing that she does in her first couple chapters here, but then she diverges from that, and they have their own distinct things that they want to do with this insight that man is a symbolic animal. But I think, you know, as we're just describing what the concepts are, we don't really necessarily have to source them unless you have a particular quotes you want to pull out.
Is she honestly quoting Cassirer that much?
She's referring to him; it's the epistemological point that Cassirer is actually a neo-Kantian. I understand that there's some, but she hardly actually mentions his name throughout the book.
I read the Cassirer as well and saw some of the crossover, but to me it actually didn't read like an academic paper. I saw it more as an attempt to communicate--like a successful one--to reach a public audience with a philosophical--you know, she is quoting people left and right, but she has a very conversational style and a very good, you know, and it's very well written, in my opinion; very readable.
Right. It's a very different experience than reading Milo Branch, right, with the density, and they're just sitting there trying to decipher every little thing, you know. This is a readable book with a lot of really interesting ideas, and some of them, you know, she obviously owes a lot to other people in the development of her ideas. So when we get to the point where she's going to talk about what a denotation means and what discursive symbolization means, she's going to be highly indebted to the philosophy of language of a certain time, including Wittgenstein, for instance, and Russell. So, you know, I'm curious about what's happened since then and what philosophers today would think of those treatments because they are very insightful, but I'm sure a lot has um has happened since. And similarly with her talk about, for instance, about the origins of language and hints of language that we might see in non-human primates, and you know, her description of what the essence of language is, there's a lot of work that's been done since then, and I know a tiny bit about it. So her chapter on language, for instance, made me think of that, and I, you know, I have a hunch, I have some sense that quite a bit has happened since she was writing about it. But yeah, you know, she's borrowing a lot, or she's responding a lot, or quoting a lot from various things she's read and stuff that's popular in her time. So I don't want to call it dated in that sense, but it's I think it is in a way of its time, despite the fact that it's also, you know, it's it's very insightful, and I wouldn't know how to critique it, right? I wouldn't be able to come at this and say, "Oh, that's not the way language works." I simply don't have that point.
Dylan, initial impressions?
I agree that it's super readable. You know, I found the first couple chapters again one of these cases where that kind of summary that she presents was fine for me and uh sort of set the stage for the rest of the chapters. Once I got to particularly four and five, the question of why we would be reading it for an aesthetics episode felt like it became a lot more clear, and in an interesting way, maybe it's the most interesting part is the idea that our aesthetic sense--well, I guess you're sort of trying to derive aesthetic sense and make an account for why based upon the way human beings are looking at the way we are in that analysis of members of primates and distinct from other animals that we would have this and articulate what it would mean to talk about an aesthetic sense that informs how we even structure language. I haven't read the rest of the book; I don't know if where that goes. But to me, whether she does it or not, she's toeing up to two things: one is that an aesthetic sense in human beings is the foundation of our language, our linguistic ability, and also that it is our tendency towards the creation of language and the use of symbols, even in a pre-linguistic context, is both the origin of language and the origin of our notion of aesthetic judgment.
So she's going to be arguing for symbolism as being broader than discursive thinking.
Right. Yes, exactly. And that's pre-discursive thinking, and I think she's at least implying that that aesthetic sense is pre-discursive, and that way she would underline that it's a sense as is posed, even if it's related to rationality, like it helps generate language, helps generate thinking. So yeah, there's a kind of symbolism that's involved in using language, and then there's what she calls--this is really in the fourth chapter, but so there's discursive symbolism in language, and then there's presentational forms. So the idea is that symbolism is sort of baked into things at a very low level. She talks about it happening even at the level of senses before we get to the brain. I'm not sure if that's meant to be taken literally, but she's doing something very interesting there, which is she's rejecting all the stuff we've heard from Malebranche and others and Kant about, you know, that whole tradition where formal structure can't come in through the senses, right? It has to be supplied by the cognitive faculties. And so that sort of symbolism is generated by the mind and philosophers, even thought, you know, by language here, it comes in at a much more basic level. So it's like a variation on the idea that our experience of the world is theory-laden, except the theory perhaps comes in through the senses or it gets added at a very primitive level. So what Kant calls intuition, right, the forms of intuition, spatiality, temporality, and all the structural stuff that is there in the presentational form, and that is something that is essentially symbolic itself and is part of the functioning of our biology. I mean, there's a way in which you could subtitle the book, "Screw you, Descartes, you're wrong," right? I mean, in terms of a fundamental mind-body distinction, the rationality for her, it's baked in, right? Rationality comes out of that baked in the ability for us to render symbols through sensory experience.
Yeah, I don't know if I heard the two of you correctly. I don't know that I would put it quite that starkly. It's much more clear in the way that Cassirer approaches the problem about they're trying to come up with this what they call an anthropomorphic philosophy or anthropological philosophy, something that takes into account the function of the senses, like how the senses actually contribute something to the experience of sensation. So it's almost like the traditional dichotomy is mind and, you know, sensation and thought or mind and body, and I think what they're doing is they're saying what that does is it puts you in a place where you get into this what would have been the skeptical dichotomy, and in the context of when she was writing, the philosophy of language, this--if it can't be expressed propositionally, it's somehow not meaningful, right? It gets at this meaning dichotomy, and what she's saying and is--I can go with Kant that there's this manifold, or we can talk about the flux and the flow of sensation, but it's not that the mind is the only way that that gets structured. What she's saying is, "No, in fact, the way our eyes have evolved, the way our ears have evolved, the way that they process the information that applies a certain kind of structure already before the mind acts on it. And then if we ignore that fact by saying it's all mind or it's all propositional statements, right, and everything else is meaningless, we're missing out on a huge part of what constitutes human culture." And so they're trying to kind of dive back down into some form of--I wanted to say language, but that's not the right term. I mean, maybe it is, but just basically a form of representation that's not linguistic.
Well, it's symbolic though.
Yeah, right. It's not linguistic, but it's still symbolic; that's her big--her big thing, right? So well, it is some--yeah, I was trying not to say that either because we haven't really defined exactly that, but the point is human culture involves a lot of activity that can be explicitly captured in these linguistic forms that the propositional philosophy of language, the vic institution--if you can't--what is it? Whatever we can't talk about, we should remain silent, right? Shoot ourselves in the head.
Yeah. She'll say that the ear and the eye make their own abstractions, like that's how radical it gets. It reminded me of Aristotle a little bit in *De Anima*, like it's the question of whether, right, we get in little bits of data, and I say bits, I mean like computer bits or whatever the smallest like digital unit of digital information is, and it, you know, we put that into the processor in the brain, and then the computer does all of its constructive activity and applies the intuitions and the categories of the understanding and all that, and then we get structure. But here it's as if we are sensitive to structure from the very beginning. If the eye and the ear can do their own abstractions, and these are what she calls "quote-unquote genuine symbolic materials," right, there's symbolism in there from the ground up, presentational symbolism, then that's a much different conception of how we're related to the world. And Seth, as you pointed out, this is going to become a basis for thinking about art and religion and ritual and those sorts of things, which are symbolic, but they're not going to turn out to be meaningless on her account because they are going to be symbolic; it's just they're not going to be discursive and rational; they're going to be a different kind of symbolism which is more akin to this presentational symbolism in chapter 4 that we've been discussing.
Yeah. You might think that the basic way that we interact with the world is propositionally, that through simple declarative statements, right? I see her as at the birth of ordinary language philosophy. So she refers to Vican signs, but she's referring to Wittgenstein's *Tractatus*, not his *Investigations*, and the other people that were influenced by this. And so this is--I feel like a concurrent effort to what Wittgenstein himself was figuring out was that it's not that there's this basic kind of speech which is all just making statements about states of affairs, and then everything that's sort of artistic or creative or stating myth or something is sort of some more complex, specifically human thing that is built off of that. Instead, she wants to say that actually what seems more complex but are actually sort of more vague in certain ways, but these ways of relating to the world symbolically, those in fact provide the foundation for explicit discursive language. And so we can't think that there's something pure and scientific about statements and that everything else is something that we can't make sense of, something that is extra--no, we have to understand. So, for instance, one of the things that I know Cassirer in his political philosophy is going to make out of this is like ritual, mythological thinking, scientific thinking; these are all kind of on a spectrum. And what happened, you know, he has an analysis--this is all like as World War II is just happening--is when people do what the Nazis did, for instance, they're regressing to like ritual, magical thinking. And so to see them not merely as different types that can't be related to each other, but that they are part of a single system in its various strata--I think it's worth pointing out that I'll call the simplified computational model that Wes just presented--I think that you make a modification to that to understand the kind of things she's talking about with ears and eyes, you know, generating symbols in their datum. And that's not that your higher-order brain functions are processing these bits of raw sense datum, but rather that in the model that I would have is that is actually closer to the way most computing systems work is that there are various levels of processing going on. And so the idea that you're part of your brain function, you know, your eyes are extensions of your brain cells sticking out into the world, and that you're pre-processing with your eyes and identifying objects and the notion of symbols that there's different levels of processing activity and the notion that your senses would be directly related to this kind of early processing that happens that is has that fundamental symbolic character that's prediscursive and such that discursive activity happens on top of that, I think is very much in line with a computational model of the mind. I think it's a more refined understanding of how that processing symbolism is working.
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We have these nice analog instruments, right, sticking out of our brain.
Yep. The difficulty is it would be great if the brain were like a big piece of wax, and what passed through the eyes just ended up as a kind of impression on that. Instead, confusingly, it gets transformed into electrical pulses along wires, which is very confusing if we're going to say that abstraction happens at the level of the senses. It seems to me that we're just talking about a kind of analog receptivity, right, the image that's cast on the um retina, or however we want to put it, and you know, ultimately, I think it kind of pushes us towards a kind of Hegelian idea that symbolism is and structure are just out there in the world, and we are structured beings, and so we are, you know, in a way directly in touch with that. We get rid of all this thing-in-itself and primary, secondary quality, all that stuff; we just do away with all that, and there's there's the world, and it really is structured, and we really are, for various reasons, capable of being in touch with that structure, however we, you know, ultimately want to--want to talk about the mind. So, but the important thing is is that there's something symbolic about visual forms. Would you make a difference distinction between abstract and symbolic in this context?
She connects them, and I mean we can get to the details later on, but she will say abstractions by the eye and ear are genuine symbolic materials, the media of the understanding. This will ultimately form the basis for discursive reasoning, like visual forms are not themselves discursive, but they have the necessary ingredients in them to form the basis of discursive--the potentiality for discursive reasoning.
Yeah, discursive symbolism.
Yeah. Yeah. She sounded very much like a constructionist at some place, you know, when she's talking about, right, she--page 74--there's no such thing as the form of the real world. So there are multiple patterns that one can lay on, and I think this was all straight out of Wittgenstein's *Tractatus* that he talked about sort of a sieve that you could put the various atomic facts through, and even though I don't think she believes in atomic facts, it's definitely that model of--brings up James's blooming buzzing confusion. What is the world in itself? It's blooming buzzing confusion, and the act of symbolism is the act of picking out a thing, distinguishing of this from that, and that is just what is the first step in communication in any form of civilization whatsoever. That actually is the whole process of symbolization, that it's this sort of ontological act.
Yeah. And that section, I didn't relate it back to Wittgenstein, but which she talks about mathematics or physics or something and says, you know, it's a pattern, but it's not the only pattern, and the problem is fetishizing it to say that anything that doesn't fall under the rubric of physics somehow isn't a meaningful reflection of the world. So and that made me think when we talk about patterns--I don't know, do you guys remember when we did Lacan where we read the guy?
Sure. We talked about Lacan somewhere in that text. I think there was talking about creating patterns, the symbolic quarter on top of the real.
Yeah, and that there's kind of like an infinite variety of ways that you could do that. That resonated with me in that section.
I like that you point out, Seth, is emphasizing meaning as opposed to something like truth or whatever in here, because I think that that's also what she's getting at that by talking about this pre-discursive mode, the turning point is meaning, not something like truth or correspondence or anything like that. And I really liked her distinction between something being significant. If you ask how did language come about, people needed it, right? We needed to tell each other where the buffalo is so we could coordinate uh, but she actually makes this, and she's quoting a lot of, you know, the signs of her day, anthropology of her day, that okay, yeah, so this is the beginning of chapter five where she stresses that no, actually, what makes humans different from apes who can use tools, who could signal to each other that you know there's food over there or whatever, they can do a lot of sort of communication, but none of that amounts to actually having a word really represent an object, right? It can only sort of help to point out an object, and it's the fact that humans babble as babies, it's play that we play with words, and you think about your kid just loves to just point at stuff and name it and then to maybe use those words later to bring the thing to mind, and this is a, you know, just something that animals do not do, because whenever they are using a sign, you know, it always has a specific use in that moment, and it's only because we have this sort of different sense of play that she says that's when things can actually gain significance. There's a denotative aspect to the symbol which is not there in the sign, right, and it can be used to talk about--about things that are not there.
So for a dog, right, a bell can be a symbol that dinner is about to arrive.
A sign, sorry. You say that for a dog a bell can be a sign that dinner is about to arrive, and the sign in a way is, you know, it's an association; it's something like behavioral conditioning where some one thing seems to be causally related to another or correlated in some way so that I can use it predictively, and the same thing goes for, you know, so for instance, if a dog can learn to associate a name with a person, and you say James, and the dog gets excited because the dog knows that's its master, and James means master must be near or something like that.
To use these to like as a way of doing anthropology in a philosophically sophisticated way, both of them think that symbolism is the new key for unlocking human behavior, for actually doing work in the humanities.
Because the overall drift of history has been scientism—has been trying to use the methods of physics, and you know, we're going to do experiments, we're going to gain facts and use those in the social sciences. They each have a story, like our casino, about why this has not worked out well; why this is not given a sophisticated, scientifically respectable account of anthropology or anything else you would want to say about the human condition, certainly not about philosophy.
And so I guess this is a question that we have not read enough of either book to answer well enough, but we can make some guesses at this in part two. And if you want to hear part two, you need to become a Partially Examined Life supporter. You can see a few different ways of doing that at partiallyexaminedlife.com. Support our next episode is going to move further into this book, not quite reaching the stuff on art; we're going to talk about myth, religion, ritual, with chapters six and seven from this book, also chapters six and seven from Urgent Cassirer's essay on man, which cover the same topic, and then we'll do Langer on art in the third installment.
So I hope you're enjoying this because there's quite a bit more to come. To make your own topic suggestions, reach out to us at pe@partiallyexaminedlife.com or comment on the blog post associated with this episode at partiallyexaminedlife.com. Supporters can now reach out to us through Discord, where, incidentally, I'm also posting the reading selections as we decide on them. But for everybody, there's also Facebook, there's Twitter, there's Instagram. Follow us all the ways that you can, and please share these episodes with your friends. And if you can give us a nice rating and review on the Apple Podcast, iTunes store, or wherever you listen to this, thanks and good night. Good night. Good night. You