Jung
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Derived from a Greek root meaning "to put together,"
a symbol
may be defined as a "manner of representation
in which what is shown (normally referring to something material) means,
by virtue of association, something more or something else
(usually
referring to something immaterial)" (PEPP).
Barfield's use of
symbol
or
symbolism
does
not differ dramatically from the normal meaning. Witness, for example,
the following passage from "Poetic Diction and Legal Fiction":
Sometimes the element of comparison
[characteristic of metaphoric language generally] drops still farther out
of sight. Instead of saying that A is like B or that A is B, the poet simply
talks about B without making overt reference to A at all. You know, however,
that he intends A all the time, or, better say that you know he intends
an A; for you may have a very clear ideas of what A is and even if you
have got the idea, somebody else may have a different one. This is generally
called "symbolism." (RM 45)
Questions about the origin and nature of the symbolic
lead inevitably to questions about the evolution
of consciousness, and it is for that reason that Barfield's attention
is lead to consider them. And so we find Burgeon contemplating the history
of symbolism and consciousness in Worlds Apart on at least two occasions:
The ideas or images which have arisen
from . . . subliminal . . . processes are just those which have the characteristics
of symbols, Ritual, myth, Jung's "archetypes,"
poetic metaphors, and a good deal else
have been ransacked and examined from this point of view, because the thing
they all have in common is symbolic significance. And it is characteristic
of a symbol that it has more than one meaning, often many meanings, sometimes
contrasted and even opposite meanings, which are somehow reconciled within
it--just the sort of thing, in fact, that can happen in the mind, but not
in the material world from which the symbols are taken. Symbols are always
of the inner world. (46-47)
At first a whole generation was quite satisfied
that the Greek myths, for example, were simply statements about external
nature--"highly figurative conversation about the weather," as Farnell
puts it. Another generation interprets them as mainly statements about
the unconscious mind. Obviously they were both and neither. Go a little
way farther back: dip into the Vedas and you often no longer know whether
you are reading about birth and death, summer and winter, or breathing
in and out. Why? Because symbolic language--and all language is symbolic
in origin--can signify all these rhythms at the same time. (120-21)
See in particular
Worlds Apart, passim,
Poetic
Diction, passim, "Poetic Diction and Legal Fiction" (RM
44-64). |
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