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This is KZSU Stanford.
Welcome to entitled opinions.
My name is Robert Harrison
and we're coming to you from the Stanford campus.
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You're going to bother Christopher and Shawn and Michael Mamba
got your left for some of my flower beds, my poison, but I'm firing.
I don't know what a symbol is or even whether such a thing exists,
but I confess that I am taken by the charisma of the word,
which I associate with the redemption of the phenomenon.
When I hear the word symbol, things take on a subtle glow
as if a mystical light deep inside of them had been turned on.
I am definitely one of those who Paul Vallehi had in mind
when he declared, I quote, "I've known many people who have meditated endlessly
on this little word symbol to which they attributed an altogether imaginary profundity
and whose mysterious resonance they have tried to clarify."
And what I ask is wrong with an imaginary profundity.
And if a resonance is not mysterious,
what matters, what resounds in it.
I'll take a forest of symbols any day over the vegetable law,
and I would rather exchange gazes with a tree than stare at the gorgon's head.
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This other kingdom seems by far the best.
I mean, the one but there leads us into in his poem,
"Cuddhist-Pondance," or "correspondences."
Nature is a temple where living pillars sometimes emit confused words.
Man passes by through forests of symbols,
which observe him with a familiar gaze, like long echoes
confounded from a distance in an obscure and deep unity,
vast as the night or as clarity itself,
sense, colors, and sounds respond to one another.
Is nature like a temple?
No.
It is a temple.
Is a temple nature by analogy?
No.
Nature is a temple because it's trees or it's columns
preserve the aboriginal familiarity between things
that makes analogies possible.
When things correspond, when sense, colors, and sounds
respond to one another, they are already
bound or prebound by kinship.
In the forest of symbols, living pillars
observe the observer with a familiar gaze across a distance
that confounds echoes in an obscure and deep unity,
as Bodle Goh's on to say in his sonnet,
when perception undergoes a metamorphosis
in this transport of the mind and senses,
things all of a sudden look back at you
as if in recognition.
In Robert Muziel's novel, "Young Tourless,"
the adolescent protagonist tells a friend of his about something
that happened to him when he was a child.
I quote, "Once, when I was quite small,
I was playing in the woods at this time of evening dusk.
My nurse mate had wandered off somewhere.
Suddenly, something made me look up.
I could feel I was alone.
It was suddenly all so quiet.
And when I looked around, it was as though the trees
were standing in a circle around me,
all silent and looking at me."
Now that is a symbolic moment.
A symbol is not a thing.
It's a conspiracy among things.
Or better, it's a conspiracy among perceptions.
A conspiracy to reunify what habitual modes of perception
differentiate the five senses, for instance,
or body and mind, or part and whole.
Robert Muziel's narrator goes on to say about his young
protagonist, quote, "later, he was to be dominated
by a peculiar symbolic ability.
He could not help frequently experiencing events,
peoples, things, and even himself in such a way
as to feel that in it all, there was at once some insoluble
enigma and some inexplicable kinship for which he
could never quite produce any evidence."
That's what comes to my mind when I hear the word "symbol,"
something like a surplus of presence, of meaning,
or of intensity in things for which one
cannot produce tangible evidence, but which is palpably there.
Coleridge says of the symbol that it is,
"I quote, "characterized by a translucent
of the special in the individual,
or of the general in the special, or the universal in the general."
Whatever that translucent is, one cannot produce any evidence
of it.
You either perceive it, or you don't.
In that sense, it is akin to the Pauline definition of faith,
namely the substance of things hoped for,
and the evidence of things unseen.
It's not by chance that Coleridge's famous definition
of the symbol, which I just quoted occurs in the context
of his discussion of the symbolic nature of the Bible.
There's a copious literature on the nature of the symbol
from the Greeks to the romantics and beyond.
Today, on entitled "Pinions," we're
going to trace some of that history with our guest,
Nicholas Halme, a professor of English romanticism
at Oxford University, who is currently visiting here
at Stanford.
Nick has recently published a very interesting book
entitled "The Genealogy of the Romantic Symbol,"
published by Oxford University Press.
And I have invited him to speak with us today
on exactly that topic, the genealogy
of the romantic symbol.
Nick, welcome to the program.
Thank you for inviting me.
So Nick, we want to devote a good portion of our hour
talking about the romantic symbol as such,
but to fully appreciate what the romantics had to say
about the symbol.
We need to know something about his genealogy, as you call it.
So where would you like to begin?
Well, I think to state that the discussion of the symbol
is long and very contentious.
And this partly because the term and the concepts associated
with the term have had so many different meanings.
And you've referred to the mysteriousness, the surplus of meaning.
That characterizes the history of the word itself.
Umberto Echo is a wonderful moment in his book,
"Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language," which he
describes as one of the most pathetic moments in the history
of philosophical terminology, in which French philosophical
dictionary first published in 1926,
and reprinted many times for the next 40 years,
has an entry under the word "symbal," in which there are three
mutually exclusive definitions.
And then more extraordinarily, the collaborators
on the dictionary, a panda footnote, which is a transcript
of their own arguments about the definition of the term.
And in the course of that argument, they
add a further eight to the three that they've already given
in the text itself.
And so anyone who's writing about the word
has to confront that complex history.
But I think the origins of the term are fairly clear.
And in a sense, all of the subsequent meanings
can be seen to arise from the original sense
in classical Greece.
So what are we talking about that original sense
and try to go forward from there?
What was the original literal sense?
Well, the word "symbalone" in Greek,
"symbal," signified a token of some sort.
It could have been a fragment of pottery broken
and a half, a piece of cloth torn in half,
something of that sort.
But it was used to signify, to indicate
the participants in some sort of agreement.
For example, the contract--
so the people who participated in this contract
would have this token which showed that they were both
the parties to it.
Or similarly, rights to hospitality,
the guests and the host would each retain half of this token.
And so that subsequent generations of the family
could then present this token.
And it would ensure their rights to hospitality.
The point of it was that it made physical and visible
in a prior agreement.
So it was implied a kind of separation,
but a previous connection that enabled
a reconnection to take place.
That enabled a reconnection to take place
when the two pieces of the token, in that case,
would be brought together again.
And that's what I guess the etymology of the word "symbalone"
is in Greeks, is to be thrown together.
Things are thrown together.
That's right.
"symbalone" seemed together, "balline to throw."
There's a vestige of that ancient concept
in the practice of tearing a theater
when you go into a movie theater.
They tear your ticket in half.
It's a vestige of that ancient practice.
But already in the classical period,
it acquired a literary use, which was related to that--
were socially functional use.
And that is, as Omen, you find this, for example,
when Pinter's Olympian Odes, Aristotle's Finesis,
play the birds.
Iskullus's Prometheus on Bound.
And that is assigned a bird, for example,
another sign that the gods have given for man to read.
So was it identical in meaning or connotation to our word "symb?"
Yes.
It is a kind of sign.
That a sign would be the more generic category.
But it's a kind of sign and it implies a previous agreement
between gods and man.
But it also entails an interpretive dimension.
That is, not everyone can read the sign.
You have to understand the sign.
You have to recognize it and learn to read it.
So in those two ancient usages, one
as a token of identity or participation in a prior
agreement, and in this other one, which is as an Omen,
which we have to learn to read, you have the development,
the beginnings of what's developed into all the subsequent uses.
So the notion of contract is essential.
And I can't help but think of the covenant
in a different tradition.
Obviously, the Hebrew tradition there.
But it does bind two sides to an a common agreement
or contractual relation.
Throw them together in that sense.
Yes.
So circumcision in the Old Testament
is a physical sign of the covenant between God and man.
Or the rainbow is a sign of the covenant of God with man
after the flood.
So we have a physical manifestation of an agreement that
can't itself be manifested physically.
So when you say that all the subsequent theories and discussions
of the symbol have an origin in this Greek understanding
of the word, do you mean primarily this idea of a disconnection
and an eventual reconnection between two things?
That's the most basic aspect.
Yes.
Separation and a means of overcoming that separation
by reference to a prior unity.
But also the hermeneutic dimension, the interpretive dimension
becomes important and subsequent uses of the sign.
In subsequent-- and I'll already in the Greek usage
you're saying that it was already there.
Yeah, already at a literary usage in 5th century Athens.
Now in the Christian period, of course,
the symbol takes on a huge importance
for in the theological debates, especially
about the nature of the Godhead and of the relation
between the three persons of the Trinity
and the incarnation and so forth.
And can you say a few words about what happens to the symbol
when it's taken over by the church fathers
or theorizing in the context of Christianity?
Yeah, there's a very rich history in the use of the term
in theological connections, not only Christian,
but also pagan neoplateness.
And those, in fact, get taken over into Christianity
so that you have mystery cults and a neo-platonic mysticism,
you have used the symbol to denote.
On the one hand, signs that God is implanted in man,
which indicate our connections with us,
or signs in nature that God is implanted
that indicate a fundamental and inherent connection
between us and divinity so that we can return to divinity.
And on the other hand, we have the interpretive dimension,
which has taken over already from the ancient Stoics
who were interpreting Homer, said there are symbols
in Homer of what turns out to be stoic philosophy.
And in neoplatonism, similar to the interpretation
of Greek myths as symbol of symbols.
And Christianity takes over these senses of the term.
That's very interesting, because if the Stoics are
looking at Homer for symbols of what will then be stoic doctrines,
that means that they were already thinking
in terms of what the Christian tradition is known
as a typological interpretation, which
is one that is historically dynamic where you look at events
that take place in the past or in the texts that proceed
and see in them, intimations of or figural
announce pre-enouncements, pre-ludes of something
that will then be fully realized later in time.
And you're saying that the Stoics were already reading Homer
in this kind of symbolic way.
You already in Hellenist period.
So from the 4th century BC to the beginnings
of the Christian era, there's this practice
of systematic allegorical interpretation.
They use the word symbols, but it's fundamentally
allegorical interpretation, assimilating
the text of Homer into stoic philosophical tradition.
OK, because then, of course, the relationship
between symbol and allegory becomes a very vexed one
later on.
But you're saying that in this case,
it might be allegorical interpretation,
but they were calling it symbolic interpretation.
Yes.
And the distinction between symbol and allegory
doesn't occur until the end of the 18th century.
So the ancients made no such distinction.
But the idea was that you take something
that's of immense cultural importance,
the Greek, mess, scriptural text.
And you incorporate them into your own ideological
or theological philosophical context.
And the argument is that you're discovering things
that are already inherently there.
Correct.
And therefore, there is some way in which the literal meaning
of the text is not excluded or repudiated,
but it just acquires a surplus meaning
or kind of extra supplemental or fulfilled meaning,
in a fuller meaning by events that occur later in time.
Is that correct?
Yeah.
And so it's not merely a subjective interpretation.
The assumption is that these are objectively present.
They've been placed there.
They've been divinely instituted.
And of course, in the Christian tradition,
the typological reading of what
used to be called the Old Testament as an archive of figures
for events and characters in the Christian era,
which would be the fulfillment of these hour back
is very famous for this theory of the Figuudana.
And yet, of course, we don't typically
associate that with the word symbol.
At least I don't insofar as other words
have been used for, type, figure, allegory.
And is there something more specific about the use
of the word symbol on in the Christian theology?
Because I would imagine that it's the relationship
between the first person of the Trinity
and the second person of the God and the Son.
That would be-- that's the symbol of some kind of unity
that is also separate, but then promises a reunification
maybe at the end of time with the last judgment and so forth.
The typological sense is really a Protestant reading above all.
So it comes into use later.
But already in the fifth, sixth, sixth centuries,
AD, Christian interpreters are using it in a way that's not
unlike the original use that is to signify relation
of a membership of a group, a party to a prior agreement,
those who are entitled to salvation.
And it's used in the sense of the creed.
That is a profession of faith.
So the Latin word symbol on means primarily
profession of faith.
I believe in the one go on and so on.
So that's one sense in which it's used.
Another is in the mediation between God and man.
And this is allied with the Neoplatonic sense
that God has implanted these symbols of us,
which we can recall.
In the pagan tradition, it was through mystical incantations
of some sort.
In the Christian tradition, it's through the sacraments.
And so the Eucharist becomes a primary example of that.
That there is this connection, this symbolic relation
between God and man that Christ himself is instituted.
And we richly repeat.
So is a symbol and a sacrament, if not identical,
then very, very close in meaning in the Christian tradition?
In early Christian tradition, yes.
In the Protestant tradition, symbol
comes to mean something different.
Correct.
But, and it has a primarily negative connotation.
It means merely symbolic, merely a signifier
of the arbitrary, not to be taken substantially.
Because this is a great debate with the Protestant revolution
about what the status of the Eucharist is.
Is it the real body of Christ?
Or is it just a symbolic namely?
Is it just a sign of the body of Christ?
But that the real presence of Christ is not in the Eucharist.
It's just a symbol in the denigrated sense of the word symbol,
right?
Yes.
And in the Catholic tradition, it's the inherent presence,
the transformation of the bread and the wine
into the body and blood of Christ.
That's so important.
So there is that inherent connection
between the physical presence of the objects of the Eucharist
and the divine presence.
Protestant tradition then tries to minimize that.
And I will never, for the life of me, understand
why the Protestants would want
to get rid of the inherent presence of something
in the sacramental sense and why they would want to impoverish
the whole community through this symbolization
in the bad sense of the term.
But we'll leave that aside.
I haven't grown up in a Catholic tradition.
Why settle for a sign of the thing
when you can have the thing itself in its substance?
And I guess maybe it's vestiges of this upbringing
in my mind, which makes me so favorably disposed and partial
to this kind of rather slightly mystical understanding
of this symbol in the romantic period.
Well, I think the Protestants
distrusted the ritual of it.
And they emphasized a subjective understanding of faith
so that the profession of one's faith
becomes more important than the performance of the ritual,
which is needed to enact the mediation between God and man.
Yeah, but then it becomes a very brainy thing that is
using where the understanding is privileged as the medium
of access to God.
And it seems that the whole doctrine of the incarnation
is one in which if the divine has become human
or has taken on human flesh, a very ambiguous word
to be sure, the psalm out or the sark in Greek,
the-- it does seem to indicate that there's
some kind of sacralization of the material thing
that Jesus has become, which is the body.
And therefore, the body, if we're understanding it
in an expansive sense, it's where it's all happening,
not so much in the understanding and the interpretation.
And I mean, to relate to God strictly
through your intellect seems to me of one that takes--
it makes the arena of that relation much more abstract
and takes it in some sense out of the world that we dwell in.
Whereas for me, what appeals to me in a kind
of idealized Catholic notion is a constant attempt
to resacralize the world of the body and nature
and general, but the material as such.
So that we no longer see it as material,
but we see it as charismatic and self-transcendent.
And it's the assurance.
It's the empirical assurance of the divine presence.
Because in our fallen state, we don't have other assurance
of that.
And that's why it's a difficult issue for the Protestants
themselves.
I mean, Luther, for example, does not deny the real presence
of Christ in the bread and wine.
He just wants to explain it in a different way
from the Catholic tradition.
So that it doesn't--
bread and wine don't become completely transformed
into the body of Christ.
They coexist as bread and wine with the body and blood.
Whereas other reformers like sing, Leanne Calvin
were much more hostile to the notion of the real presence.
Well, obviously, a lot more to be said about the Christian
chapters of this genealogy that you deal with in your book.
And you have a lot more to say about that, obviously.
So I will refer our listeners to your book,
the genealogy of the romantic symbol
for a deeper discussion of the Christian.
But I think if we could kind of take the jump
into the romantic period, it's a big leap, I understand.
But it's not that big a leap because I gather that the primary
theorists of the symbol in the romantic period
have inherited the Christian understanding of the symbol.
To an extent-- and this was a controversial issue--
some people argue that they take over Protestant notions
of the Eucharist.
And that seems to me fundamentally incorrect.
Because for exactly the reason that you said
that the Protestant notions insofar as they minimize
the idea of the real presence reduce the Eucharist
to mere token and not a substantial token
of the divine presence.
Disenchant the world.
They reduce the significance of the physical
in its connection to divinity.
And you look at what the German or Antics in particular say.
They write about the Protestant Reformation
with Dizme, the German philosopher Friedrich Schallen, for example,
says it was historically necessary,
but it was unfortunate.
And it deprives us precisely of symbolism and mythology.
Who are the primary German theorists of the symbol
in this period?
Well, the first and foremost is good,
although in German literary criticism,
he's not usually considered a romantic.
In this context, he is an agreement with them.
And he and Friedrich Schallen, he and Friedrich Schallen
were in close communication between 1798 and 1803.
Gerta develops the idea of the symbol in its romantic form.
He's the one who first distinguishes it from Allegore
in 1797-98.
Then he passes this distinction onto Schallen,
and Schallen teaches it in his lectures
at the University of Jainum.
And then it gets transferred one way or another over to Samuel Taylor
Coleridge, whom you quoted at the beginning.
Great.
Well, I have a quote from Gerta, actually, that if you don't mind
Al Rieder because it does refer precisely
the distinction between allegore and symbol.
And maybe you can unpack what Gerta is saying in this passage,
which I'm actually getting from one of these glossaries
that I have on my shelf.
So Gerta writes, there is a great difference
whether the poet seeks the particular for the sake of the general
or sees the general in the particular.
From the former procedure, there ensues allegory
in which the particular serves only as illustration
as example of the general.
The latter procedure, however, is genuinely
the nature of poetry.
It expresses something particular
without thinking of the general or pointing to it.
Allegory transforms the phenomenon into a concept,
the concept into an image, but in such a way
that the concept always remains bounded in the image
and is entirely to be kept and held in it
and to be expressed in it, the image.
Symbolism, however, transforms the phenomenon into idea,
the idea into an image, and in such a way
that the idea remains always infinitely active
and unapproachable in the image
and even if expressed in all languages
still would remain inexpressible.
So first question, is allegory to be understood
as a one-to-one correlation between two different orders
of signification?
That's how the romantic's understood it.
It was fundamentally in 18th century now,
Shneb allegory, which you have a literal meaning
that points continuously and obviously
to a figurative level of meaning.
And the figurative is always more significant.
The literal is always subordinate to the figurative.
So it implies a very strict and rather reductive parallelism.
Right, and I don't want a backtrack here,
but Dante has a distinction between what he called
the allegory of the theologians and the allegory of the poets,
where he says the allegory of the poets
is the one that you just described.
So the romance of the rose is an allegory
for a kind of sexual erotic object or something.
Whereas the allegory of the theologians is the Old Testament
where there is an exodus, a literal exodus,
historically true event, but it also has a higher order
of meaning, but the literal and the figurative
are still bound together.
So I guess here, a good day speaking about the allegory
as the allegory of the poets, what Dante would call it.
But when he speaks about the symbol, what do you make
of this idea that it transforms a phenomenon into an idea
rather than into a concept and then that there's something
always inexpressible and underproachable in the symbol?
Yeah, he's articulating what becomes a central aspect
of romantic symbol of theory.
And that is, it's irreducibility to concepts.
It's uninterpretability.
It's pure meaningfulness rather than any collection
of particular meanings.
And it can't be interpreted.
And I think it's reflective of a desire
to discover meaningfulness precisely
where it's absent, where it's not intuitively present.
Gerrit has distinction between symbol and allegory
as I think been very unfortunate.
Both for our understanding of the romantics themselves
and for subsequent literary theory.
And it's been a vaccine problem ever since.
Of course, we have romantics themselves blame for it.
But it implies that these are two poetic modes
that are being contrasted.
And that really wasn't the case.
Gerrit also says of the symbol, everything
can be a symbol of something else.
And by pointing to itself points to everything else.
And he uses the term not just in literary context.
In fact, primarily not in literary context,
but in natural philosophical context,
is understanding of nature.
But he contrasts it with allegory, which
was understood at the time to be a literary mode.
And it creates-- it's a false comparison.
And I think, as I said, he's been most unfortunate
for the understanding of the term in the romantic period
itself.
It probably has a negative stimulus
from enlightenment semiotics, which makes
a rigorous distinction between signs and their meanings
and implies the dualism of the physical marker
and its abstract meaning.
Allegory is the literal-- in the 18th century,
that is, is the literary manifestation
of that idea of an artificial sign.
And so Gerrit who wants to posit a kind of representation
that isn't arbitrary, isn't motivated,
and isn't simply reducible to abstract concepts.
Well, Gerrit was also highly committed
to the study of nature and committed
to the notion of organic forms, where the reduction
to the part and the whole in an organism or in a plant
was crucial.
Did his concept of the symbol have something
to do with his understanding of organic form
in terms of the inseparability of the part from the whole
and vice versa?
It had everything to do with it.
The concept of the symbol is founded on an organic philosophy
of nature, and it's no accident that Gerrit
comes to the idea of the symbol after his trip to Italy
when he is looking at-- he's studying botany,
and he wants to find an original plant form
that manifests itself in all subsequent platforms.
And then that expands to an original phenomenon in nature
that then can be found manifested somehow
in all subsequent stages of development in an organism.
The orphan--
Does he find such an orphan phenomenon in Italy?
Well, he begins to articulate the theory of the symbol
precisely because he doesn't find the original plant,
the orb flaunts, the originary plant.
He looks for it, and then he concludes when he's
in the botanic garden in Palermo
that it isn't going to be found as such,
and he needs to rethink its relation,
and he begins to rethink it in developmental terms.
And then that's when the idea of the orb plant
becomes the orb phenomenon, and it becomes
the basis of a much more comprehensive organic theory
which he then discusses with shelling
and becomes the basis of shelling's own natural philosophy.
But really, the idea of the symbol for shelling
and for good is that of the organism itself.
How much of their concept of the symbol
has to do with the phenomenon?
In other words, manifestation, something
that comes into the realm of appearance,
and in so doing brings into appearance,
something that Kant might have referred to as the numinal.
Well, it's exactly that.
Because and Kant himself had anticipated this,
not with the use of the word symbol,
but with what he called an aesthetic idea.
And then he said metaphysical ideas of reason,
immortality of the soul, other ideas
can't be known empirically.
They're not objects of knowledge,
and yet they have to be the basis for our morality.
And yet we wish that there was some empirical manifestation
of these ideas.
Kant called this the aesthetic idea.
But because the premises of his philosophy
were so resolutely dualist, he couldn't actually
explain how this might occur.
The idea of the symbol is an attempt to explain
how that will occur, how the numinal becomes phenomenal.
Well, here, let's go into the naughty issues, Nick,
if you don't mind, because there was one thing
that you said earlier when you were characterizing good
this thing of the symbol, which for me sounded
a little bit dissonant because you said that there
is this symbol serves to at least promise a kind of surplus
of meaning that it was a kind of ultimately very
meaningful thing where something is not intuitively present.
Now, I understand that in Kantian terms,
where he says that there can be a lack of intuition
for certain concepts, and therefore those concepts remain
basically incomplete.
But I would imagine that you can look at it in a different way,
which is that the romantic--
English romantic pose could see that there's
such a surplus of things given in intuition.
And in the immediate perception and experience of phenomena,
but that it's precisely the inadequacy of our ideas
or of our concepts to contain them.
This is what the contemporary philosopher
and theologian Jean-Luc Marjean
calls the saturated phenomenon, that the phenomenon
is so saturated with a kind of intuitive surplus
that it's in excess of the apparatus of intentionality
and subjectivity to actually contain it.
And therefore, that would be the unapproachability
of the inexpressibility and excess rather than a deficiency
of intuition and intuitional givenness.
You use the word subjectivity now,
and that's exactly the issue because the romantic
wanted to posit a symbolism that was precisely not subjective
and couldn't be identified as intentional.
And that's why there is so sparing of examples
when it came to literary discussion of the symbolic.
And even in the discussion of natural examples,
they were much more interested in developing a theory of it
in order to condition our perception of elements
than they were of stating what symbols were in nature,
which objects were symbolic, which were not
how they were symbolic, and so on.
So it was in the absence of an ability
to see that excess of meaning that they
were developing the theory of the symbol in order to.
And in order to protect themselves from the charge
that this is merely meaning that's being imparted to
an object subjectively.
In his lectures on the philosophy of art,
shelling in 1802, 1803, addresses exactly this problem.
And he says, if any intention can be glimpsed in its meaningfulness,
the object itself is annihilated for us.
What's he mean by that?
That means that if we perceive a human intention
to lie behind the choice of an object as symbolic,
if we recognize it as subjectively created,
it no longer functions as symbolic for us.
It has to appear objectively present.
And that's why it had this foundation,
at least in romantic theory, of metaphysics of participation.
You spoke of a relation of parts and whole.
The idea is that in an organism, we are all parts of a larger
whole.
We can be understood only in relation to that whole.
Exactly the same thing applies in the theory of the symbol.
That the symbol is an ontological part.
It's an essential part of what it represents.
And Coleridge, for example, says this.
In the same work where you, from which you quoted,
is a discussion of the Bible, the statesman's manual of 1816.
He says, by a symbol, I mean not a metaphor or an allegory
or any other figure of speech.
So he's rejecting rhetoric altogether.
But an actual and essential part of that, the whole of which it
represents.
Yes.
And he, in the quote I read, which is not what you just read,
he does go on to say the symbol always partakes of the reality,
which it renders intelligible and which--
and while it enunciates the whole,
abides itself as a living part of that unity of which it is
the representative.
Exactly.
So there's an appeal to an inherent connection
between the symbol and its meaning.
And this is fundamentally metaphysical assertion.
So yeah, but yeah, I guess you're going to have to persuade me
that all the burden falls on meaning and metaphysical
representation, because if I read again that translucent
of the special in the particular--
let's say the species in the particular--
or the genus in the species and the universal in it,
why can I not say that in a plant that I see phenomenally,
there's a translucence of something that's more,
that does evoke its species, its genus, its biotic matter
in general?
Or let me shift the rules of the discourse.
Ezra Pound rewrites a poem in a persona
where he tells a woman in a voice, "I could not love the half so much.
Did I not love woman kind more?"
So if you take the particular woman there,
you say that what is loved is not that you're
loving woman kind and that the woman is just a particular kind
of access to the general.
But in the individual and in the particular,
there is a surplus which is intuitively given, not as meaning,
but as presence.
I guess we're going back to that same issue that--
in other words, does it have to always translate into idea?
I know that Goethe insists on the presence of the idea,
but can there not be something phenomenally given,
even in the intuitive mode, that points to the surplus?
And which therefore suffuses the phenomenon
with its own sort of phenomenological access?
It comes back to the question of subjectivity, though.
And as her Pound's case, you have to have an idea of what
woman kind is before you can make a kind of statement of that.
In other words, to recognize a part of something
as a part of something, you already
have to have an ocean of the whole.
And this goes back to the very ancient roots of the word
that there's this prior agreement which
makes the token of identity, of participation,
and the agreement comprehensible.
And what the rheumatics are trying to do
is lay down the philosophical foundations
that will provide that basis for seeing nature as symbolic.
There's a wonderful passage in a notebook of colorages,
in 1805, in which he's looking out
at the window, and he's in Malta at the time.
And he says, "I seem rather to be seeking as it
were asking a symbolical language for something within me
that already and forever exists than observing anything new."
Yet still, I always have an obscure feeling
as if a new phenomenon where the dim awakening of a forgotten
or hidden truth in my inner nature,
it's interesting as a word, a symbol,
which is logos, the creator, but that asking, seeking,
as it were asking for a meaning is exactly.
I think what is needed, before he can find the symbol,
he needs the assurance that there's something
it can be a symbol of.
And so you need a metaphysics that will help explain that.
I think that's what the rheumatics were trying to do.
And that's why I don't think they're
able to describe it in the symbol as they theorize it
in actual literary works, because it
wasn't yet present to them.
And they hadn't solved the question
of how you can create a literary work that
isn't risk the charge of merely being a subjective use
of a symbol.
The example that Shelley always falls back on
is that of mythology.
The figures of Greek mythology.
Of the gods?
Of the gods, exactly.
Why?
Because they've always existed.
No individual created them.
And so he formulates the project of a new mythology.
And he says, well, now we're going to create a new mythology
modeled on the old, but serving the needs of the new.
This will be the repository of the new symbolism.
But you can't create a philosophical mythology out
of nothing.
And so the project remains merely theoretical.
Well, this is a strong claim in your book
that the symbol in the way the rheumatics theorize it
does not exist, or they cannot produce any evidence for it,
or it's more of a doom to remain in the realm of theory
rather than in the world.
And you say that if it were to exist,
it would not refer to things or symbols in poems.
It would require a complete alteration
of one's modes of perception in order to have access to it.
And that appeals to me a great deal,
because first it reminds me of Blake, who put a lot of emphasis
on perception, and trying to--
when he says, when the doors of perception are cleanse,
the world will appear as it is infinite.
So it's not that the world is not over abundantly sacred
or the modes of perception have to be cleansed.
And I think that in Shelley's defensive poetry, which I had
occasion to reread because when I read about your book
on the Amazon page that you are calling for--
lifting the veil of familiarity on our concept
of the romantic symbol, the way Shelley calls for lifting
that poetry should strip the veil of familiarity
from the world.
Now, why can the symbol not be that which appears
or is rendered manifest or brought out of unconcealment
to use a high-to-garian term for it?
In that moment, when you strip the veil of familiarity
from the world?
Well, I think it's that it's significant that Shelley is saying
that we need to do that.
And we need to do that because we're not doing that already.
It's the declarative act that I find fascinating.
And for me, that's what signals that this is not an actual
object that they are finding in nature or in poetry or anywhere
else, that they are articulating the desire to find it.
It's the declarative act.
It's the act of instituting the symbols they want to find.
And that's still there in Baudelaire's correspondence.
It's not that they're merely the symbols.
It's that he's articulating there as a forest of symbols.
He has to tell us as a forest of symbols.
It's not intuitively evident.
Now, there's a parallel between the poetic project
of Shelley, words, words, and others.
And it exists exactly in that desire to reform perception.
The romantic theorists of the symbol are doing it in
theoretical terms.
Shelley, words, words, and others want to do it in practical,
as well as theoretical terms.
But it does have to do with reforming perception,
re-enchanting the world.
It can be seen as a kind of reaction against that
Protestant and enlightenment heritage in which the perceiver
and the perceived object seem completely alien.
And sundered one from the other.
Exactly.
Well, it's true that Baudelaire has to make the declarative
statement.
There is a forest of symbols and in that forest,
this and that takes place.
But if you read Le Flourdumal, the whole collection--
I mean, it's divided between E-dayal and spleen.
And spleen is that state of mind in which the world is completely
stripped of any symbolic self-transcendence in things.
It's a highly disenchanted, very literalized, materialized
view of objects in their kind of denuded, literal
signification.
Whereas there are moments that don't just declare, but actually
describe the E-dayal where there is a certain magic.
And it's certainly not a sustainable way of being.
And it's a sustainable state of mind.
There are exceptional moments.
But nevertheless, poetry, I don't think, would exist if there
had not been always these moments, exceptional moments of wonder,
where there is an intense presence of something that
reveals itself.
And Hambou has a year or a year and a half there where he's
writing illuminations, Yurumi Nacian and some poems where he
seems to be in immediate touch with some kind of symbolic
revelation of things that look so weird that when you read those
prose poems of his, it's hard for us with our habitual modes
of perception to understand what he's actually seeing, what he
saw there.
Likewise, the Theophanese in Greek mythology and other
moments of epiphany in the Christian tradition.
Every now and then, when the phenomenon manifests itself in
truly intense forms, things become symbolic, I think in the way
that you're described.
So I would agree with you that we cannot sustain, we cannot live
within the symbolic, except by exception.
But I'm not sure I want to go all the way and say that it's a
complete, unapproachable, empty idea of something that has no
correlate in actual experience.
Well, the correlation will be that there is an expression of
something that can't simply be reduced to a series of
meanings and some mysteriousness.
It is not an uninterpretability, but so much as an inexhaustibility
of interpretive possibilities.
And there's an underlying desire for meaning, for connections
between things, over-accom alienation, sense of alienation between
individuals in society.
That's, I think, the basic connections, the desire to discover
meaning to assure that the individual has a place in a larger
hole and is able to express that place somehow, find assurance of
that place.
Nick, I'm going to have to get you together with our friend and
colleague Tom Sheehan.
I did a show on Heidegger with him last year and we had the same
sort, it was the same sort of fault line.
I know he kept talking about design as this meaning, searching,
meaning, questing, meaning, making form of existence.
And I was trying to take the emphasis off the meaning and
try to get a back to presence.
And then that sense, I think that the two of you really
should come together and have fruitful discussion of that.
Now, I gather that one of the arguments you make in your
book is that the disenchantment of the world led to this attempt to
re-enchant it through the notion of the symbol.
But that sense, as you just said, it's not something that is readily
available in experience, if at all.
You look for other extraneous reasons why the romantics would
have been, have this nostalgia for a kind of symbolic
creation to the world.
And you find it in social and communitarian concerns or that they're
trying to make up for a sense of lost community of some.
Do I get you right on that?
Yeah, it's a form, various forms of alienation.
One, and it's a reaction against various forms of dualism.
Yeah, but I mean, thank God you don't have this kind of banal Marxist
reading of the whole discourse as super structural and that basically
is the alienation of the workforce and so forth and therefore it's just this kind of
epiphenomenon of the alienation from the means of production and so forth.
So, yeah, go on.
No, it's multifaceted for one thing.
But it's a reaction against mechanistic science that reductive
explanation of scientific phenomena, mathematical terms and
reduction of explanation of cultural phenomena and semi-autic terms, all of which imply
a fundamental bifurcation between a perceiving subject and a perceived object.
Constalism is another example of that in which the ideas of reason can never be known empirically
and yet, as Kant himself insists, we want them to be present empirically.
So it's an attempt to find an aesthetic basis for metaphysical ideas.
There is a social element to it as well in the German critic,
or philosopher Montfredne Fronk, has traced 19th century socialist ideas back to this project,
this romantic project of a new mythology, which is supposed to be socially cohesive
as they imagine the ancient mythology was, for example.
So it's a response, I think, dualism in various forms and a desire to overcome dualism.
But for me, the problem with it is that it's so resonatively theoretical.
So you don't believe that it was a successful attempt to overcome dualism.
I think Shelley himself didn't because he abandoned the idea of the new mythology and he
begins to look for symbols in the old mythology. So he turns to lecturing on religion and on mythology
rather than articulating its project. He says essentially that the new mythology will have
to wait for the further development of natural philosophy and so on.
So it's a project deferred, as it were.
And with all this, you don't mean to deny the existence of literary symbols in a maybe
different understanding of the notion of symbol because you're not particularly interested
in the literary symbol per se, but you wouldn't have any problems considering the great white
whale of Moby Dick a symbol, no?
No, it is a symbol, but it's a symbol that, and it's a symbol whose meaning is imprecise
is obscure, but clearly there's an excess of meaning in relation to the narrative, but
it's a symbol that Melville put there. And it's not the same thing as seeing a fig tree
as good to want it to do and seeing a fig tree and announcing that it's pregnant with meaning.
And in that regard one could specify a number of symbols in modern literature that do work
as an excess of meaning where they kind of overflow the narrative containment that they
were intended to have. And there's something gets away from this is where our colleague
Denise Gigante, right, her book on life and an organic form that even the monstrous becomes
something uncontainable in terms of an excessive literary vitality within certain works where
it would be closely associated with this symbolic and later understanding of it, I guess.
Yeah, and this later understanding can be seen to derive from the romantic one. It's
how, what would a literary manifestation be? Well, it's an idea of a mysterious, uninterpretable
symbol, but without the metaphysical substructure that the romantic concept had. And
it does survive in the 20th century. It's very influential. Yates, for example, articulates
an idea that on the face of it has a lot in common with colorages. And he says, "A symbol
is indeed the only possible expression of some invisible essence, a transparent lamp about
a spiritual flame." And then he distinguishes it from allegory, which he says is one of many
possible representations of an embodied thing and belongs to fancy and not to imagination.
So that's a very important vestige of the romantic concept.
Yeah, and I think also of Joseph Conrad in Lord Jim, when he sees Jim on a top of a hill,
and he says, "I don't know why he always struck me a symbolical." And then he goes on to
say how he rep, you know, there was something in him that was the embodiment of his
race and of his kind and of his, you know, the English and yet there was a shadow in the
light because he had this failing in his character. And then he, in heart of darkness,
he also speaks about the way Marlowe, Marlowe's tales are told differently than most people's
stories because there was always a kind of symbolic kernel to the thing. And I think that Conrad
is someone who was nourished on the symbolist, French symbolist above all, and there was
something that was decisive for the kind of novelist that I think he became.
So yeah, it's a kind of romantic symbol with diminished expectations. That's how I put it,
because it's confined to the literary sphere, and it doesn't make these
pretensions of arguing that the entirety of nature is symbolic.
That's great. That's a good place to conclude our discussion. So let me remind our listeners,
we've been speaking with Professor Nicholas Halmeve, who is on visit here at Stanford from Oxford
University. It's a professor of the literature of romanticism in British romanticism primarily,
but not only. And his book is the genealogy of the symbol recently out with Oxford University Press.
So, and you all stay tuned. Now Nicholas, I know that there's certain symbols in literature,
but I'm going to leave us with a song, which is, you know, that has a great symbol. It's called
The White Bird from an old Bay Area band called It's A Beautiful Day. So thanks for coming on.
This is Robert Harrison for entitled opinions. Please tune in next week.
Thank you. Bye-bye.
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