Schelling distinguishes schemes, where the general provide us with the understanding of the particular, from allegories, where the particular provides us with the knowledge of the general; in the aesthetic symbols, both procedures are at work simultaneously.
In the same line of thought, Goethe says that allegories designate di-rectly, whereas symbols designate indirectly (1797; 1902— 12:94). Al-legories are transitive, whereas symbols are intransitive. Allegories speak to the intelligence, whereas symbols speak to perception. Allegories are arbitrary and conventional, whereas symbols are immediate and moti-vated. A symbol is an image which is natural and universally understand-able. Allegories employ the particular as an example of the general; symbols embody the general in the particular. Moreover, symbols are polysemous, indefinitely interpretable; they realize the coincidence of the contraries; they express the unexpressible, since their content ex-cedes the capability of our reason:
Symbolisms transform the experience into an idea, and an idea into an im-age, so that the idea expressed by the image remains always active and unattainable and, even though expressed in all languages, remains unex-pressible. Allegory transforms an experience into a concept and a concept into an image, but so that the concept remains always defined and ex-pressible by the image. (1809-32; 1926, n. 1112-13)
In this sense the aesthetic and the symbolic come to definitely coincide, but they define themselves with each other, in a circular way.
As a matter of fact, Romantic aesthetics does not explain the semiotic strategy by which, in the poetic use of languages, particular meanings are conveyed; it only describes the effect that a work of art can produce. By doing so, Romantic aesthetics flattens the concept of semiosic in-terpretation (which undoubtedly acquires a particular status in aesthetic texts) into the one of aesthetic enjoyment. On the other hand, semiotics can explain the phenomenon of symbolic mode, but it cannot fully ex-plain the aesthetic enjoyment, which depends on many extrasemiotic elements.
In a work of art, the expression is indefinitely interpretable, because the interpreter can continually compare it with its content and with the whole of his encyclopedic competence, but such a semiosic in-terpretation represents only one among the various aspects of aesthetic openness. A work of art can be aesthetically interpreted in many ways, because we compare its meanings (interpreted in the semiosic sense) with the individual structure of the token expression that conveys them. By displaying further and further new and uncoded possible relationships between these two planes, the work of art elicits also nonsemiosic reac-tions, such as synesthesiae, idiosyncratic associations, more and more refined perceptions of the material texture of the conveying expression.
To interpret semiosically means to know better and better the possibilities of the encyclopedia; to interpret aesthetically also means to know more and more intus et in cute the details of an individual object. In Hjelmslev’s terms, the semiosic interpretation has to do with forms; the aesthetic one has to do with substances. Thus if one uses the term symbol to describe the aesthetic experience, one has then to avoid the same term for other forms of ‘symbolic’ understanding, as, for instance, those that take place in mystical experience (where the mystic gets something beyond his own visionary experience).
The Romantic tradition is, instead, very ambiguous in this regard. Influential theorists of symbolism such as Creuzer (1810- 12) speak of symbols as “epiphanies of the Sacred.” The basic ideas of the estab-lished religious doctrines spring from symbols that act as a light beam coming from the depths of the Being (ibid., vol. I, p. 35). However, the same Creuzer says that a Greek sculpture is a plastic symbol, thus show-ing an oscillation between the idea of symbols as unattainable and tran-scendent revelations and symbols as the self-evident presence of the art-istic value embodied in a physical form. Is the Romantic symbol the instance of an immanence or of a transcendence?
4.4. The symbolic mode
4.4.1. The Hegelian symbol
A radical attempt to distinguish the symbolic experience from the aes-thetic one was performed by Hegel (1817) in his philosophy of the fine arts.
The Hegelian symbol represents the first stage of artistic creativity (which dialectically progresses from symbolic to classical and to romantic art). “Generally speaking, symbol is some form of external existence immediately present to the senses, which, however, is not accepted for its own worth, as it lies before us in its immediacy, but for the wider and more general significance which it offers to our reflection. We may con-sequently distinguish between two points of view equally applicable to the term: first, the significance, and, second, the mode in which such a significance is expressed. The first is a conception of the mind, or an object which stands wholly indifferent to any particular content; the latter is a form of sensuous existence or a representation of some kind or other” (ibid., vol. 2; Eng. tr. p. 8).
In symbols the correlation between signifier (expression) and signified (significance) is not a conventional one (the lion is a symbol for strength because it is strong); nevertheless, the motivation determining the correlation is in some way undeter-mined. The lion, for example, possesses qualities other than mere strength, and these qualities do not become relevant to the symbolic purpose.
It is exactly this selection or reduction of the relevant qualities that provides for the ambiguity of symbols. Hegel refuses the idea of aesthetic symbolism as expressed by Creuzer: “In this sense the gods of Greece, insofar, that is to say, as the art of Greece was able to represent them as free, self-subsistent, and unique types of personality, are to be accepted from no symbolical point of view, but as self-sufficient in their own persons” (ibid., p. 21). The symbolic mode arises as a form of pre-art only when men look at natural objects as if they suggest some-thing universal and essential, without a strict and absolute identity be-tween expression and significance. In these first stages of the artistic activity, when men try to spiritualize nature and to naturalize the uni-versal, fantastic and confused results are produced; symbolic art experi-ences the inadequacy of its images and reacts to the sentiment of their limits by deforming them so to realize an excessive and merely quantita-tive “sublimity.”
Hegel outlines carefully these phases of symbolic activity (unconscious symbolism, symbolism of the sublime, conscious symbolism of the com-parative type of art); through which mankind progresses from the sym-bols of Eastern art and religion to Western fables, parables, and apologues, to the allegory, the metaphor, the simile and the didactic poems. What is important, however, in Hegelian perspective, is the re-fusal to put together the symbolic and the artistic. The symbol always displays a certain disproportion, a tension, an ambiguity, an analogical precariousness.
In “genuine symbolism,” the forms do not signify them-selves; rather, they “allude to,” hint at a wider meaning. Any symbol is an enigma, and “the Sphinx stands as a symbol for symbolism itself” (ibid., p. 83). In primeval symbolism a symbol has a meaning but it is unable to express it completely. The meaning of a symbol will be fully expressed only by the comparative mode of art, but at this point one is witnessing the dialectic “death” of the symbolic mode which transforms itself into higher and more mature forms of rhetorical expression. Hegel’s whole argument is extraordinarily lucid, at least in distinguishing the symbolic from the aesthetic at large as well as from the rhetoric. Hegel helps us in outlining a symbolic mode as a specific semiotic phe-nomenon in which a given expression is correlated to a content nebula (see Eco 1976, 3.6.10).
4.4.2. Archetypes and the Sacred
Jung’s theory of symbols as archetypes clearly outlines a notion of the symbolic mode as characterized by an analogy between expression and content and by a fundamental vagueness of the expressed content.
Jung (1934) opposes the personal unconscious to the collective one, which represents a deeper, innate layer of human psyche and which has contents and modes of behavior that are more or less the same every-where and in all individuals. The contents of the collective unconscious are the archetypes, archaic types, universal images, representations collec-tives: lunar, solar, vegetal, metereological representations, more com-prehensible in myths, more evident in dreams and visions. Jung is ex-plicit in saying that these symbols are neither mere signs (he uses the Greek technical word sêmeîà) nor allegories. They are genuine symbols precisely because they are ambiguous, full of half-glimpsed meanings, and in the last resort inexhaustible.
They are paradoxical because they are contradictory, just as for the alchemists the spirit was conceived as senex at iuvenis simul, an old man and a youth at once. If the archetypes are indescribable and infinitely interpretable, their experience cannot be but amorphous, undetermined, and unarticulated. Symbols are empty and full of meaning at the same time, and in this sense the experience of the mystics, which is strictly concerned with symbolic visions, is a paradoxical one. As also Scholem (1960) remarks apropos of Jewish mys-ticism, mystical thought
