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The Return Of Symbols

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 September 2024

Donald Nicholl
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Extract

Those chosen to judge the ‘Political Prisoner’ competition in London disagreed about the respective merits of the different entries. But on one point they were unanimous: that merely factual models (of prisoners looking out from behind barbed wire, for instance) are quite inadequate; and that only something symbolic is capable of re-Presenting the reality of the political prisoner situation. Their insistence that it requires a symbol, not a mere photographic reproduction or sign, to re-present reality is but one example of that search for adequate sym- bols in which the most sensitive minds of our times are engaged. The number of those engaged in this search, and the intensity of their efforts, is easily under-estimated because the persons concerned do not fall into the customary political, religious or artistic categories; and so one fails to observe what they have in common until one becomes aware oneself of the search that is on.

Type
Research Article
Information
Life of the Spirit , Volume 8 , Issue 88 , October 1953 , pp. 175 - 178
Copyright
Copyright © Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers. 1953

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References

1 ‘The Water and the Fire', by Gerald Vann, O.P. (Collins, pp. 187; 12s. 6d)

2 This is the theme of Kurt Goldstein in his Human Nature in the Light of Psychopathology; and the Professor of Psychophysiology at Paris, pro fessor Soulairac, confirms this viewpoint: ‘it is the symbolic function which constitutes the essential difference between the human and the subhuman act'. (Limites de I'humain, p. 118.)

3 Though the making of scientific theory, also, is just as likely to come to an end unless the symbolic function of the human mind is again recognised. Every major scientific discovery has been initiated by some great scientist giving his mind room for symbolising and ‘myth'-making; once the great scientist has-deepened our insight it has then been possible for the technicians to come along and exploit its riches.

4 The conditions of these people was well summed up in a phrase first applied to Voltaire: ‘His mind was a chaos of clear ideas'.