Notes on Symbolism and Reality, by Olavo de Carvalho

In Olavo de Carvalho’s Notes on Symbolism and Reality, from his Philosophy Seminar, he addresses the concept of symbolism and its relation to reality. He critiques the reductionist methodologies often used in deciphering symbols, namely the ethnological, psychological, and esoteric methods. Olavo argues that these methods tend to divert attention from the nature of the symbol itself, and instead focus on the causes behind symbol production. His proposed approach to understanding symbols calls for a suspension of systematic interpretation efforts until a more comprehensive understanding of the nature of the symbol is achieved. He emphasizes the significance of recognizing the distinctiveness between symbolic and non-symbolic meanings ascribed to words, graphics, objects, and entities.

Olavo then delves into what he terms the “rotational perspective,” which underpins the act of knowledge itself. He emphasizes that every step actualized in consciousness implies the virtualization of others, leading to a structure of knowledge that is more akin to a rotating perspective. He adds that this structure is fundamental to the very nature of thought, perception, and the very being of things. He insists that neither abstract thought nor sensory perception can wholly know anything in an instant or as a whole. Rather, our understanding or knowledge of something comes in parts, with some aspects coming to the fore while others recede into the background.

Finally, Olavo confronts the idea of unity in relation to sense and the perception of reality. He posits that the fragmentation of the world into supposedly pre-categorical “data” is a fallacy that is either the result of pathological states of ego division or efforts of imaginative abstraction. Olavo argues that the unity and meaning of the world are given, not constructed, and that the task of philosophy is to record and defend the intuitively perceived world from dissolution. He also addresses the implications of the expectation of continuity beyond death as a necessary condition of human action, asserting that the general movement of the cosmos impacts all human experiences.

Notes on Symbolism and Reality

Olavo de Carvalho

Handout from the Philosophy Seminar

December 25, 1997

These notes served as the basis for the lectures of the Philosophy Seminar in January 1998, where they received extensive oral development. — O. de C.

1. Natural symbolism

There are three commonly used methods for explaining symbols:

1st The ethnological method, which refers to the intentions and values of a particular culture or several cultures in comparison.

2nd The psychological method, which refers to the more or less permanent structures of the human psyche.

3rd The esoteric method (sometimes also called traditional, in the strict sense that René Guénon gives to the term), which refers the symbol to a suprahuman intentionality.

These three methods are reductionist: the first two, explicitly; the third, implicitly. They reduce the symbol to a veil, to a disguise: implicit cultural norms in the first; unconscious desires or fears in the second; metaphysical realities in the third.

None of the three, therefore, answers the question: What is the symbol? Pretending to answer it, they replace it with the question: What is the symbol a symbol of? And, having told us what is symbolized, they pretend that we accept this as the concept of a symbol—as if a person asked about the meaning of words and were given a list of the things they name.

These three methods divert our attention from the phenomenon of the “symbol” as such and direct it toward the real or supposed causes of symbol production, sliding from what to why—the classic expedient of someone who doesn’t know what they’re talking about. This does not mean, of course, that everything these theories have to say about the causes of the symbol is irrelevant or false; it simply means that it lacks sufficient foundation and that this foundation could only be found precisely in the investigation that these theories evade and seek to replace, which is the investigation of the quid—the first of all investigations, if not in chronological order, at least in logical priority.

In other words, these three methods implicitly assume that an interpretation of symbols, as long as it is closed within a more or less complete, coherent, and well-founded system, is in itself a sufficient elucidation of the nature of the symbol—a confusion similar to someone who takes the exhaustive interpretation of a poetic work—or even of several—as a sufficient answer to the question: What is poetry? Now, it can happen, unfortunately, just the opposite: that the elucidation of the nature of poetry ends up challenging all these interpretations, however exhaustive and coherent they may be, and however supported they may be by scientific knowledge, revealing in them something like a parallax, a deviation from the axis of attention in relation to the center of interest of the object, a concentration of questions on similar, associated, or neighboring objects, a metabasis eis allo genos, as often happens in scientific investigations that are not sufficiently anchored in a critical-philosophical consciousness of the complexities and peculiarities of the object under investigation.

The strategy I propose for approaching the symbol will adopt, as a methodological starting point, the following rule: any systematic effort of symbol interpretation must be put in parentheses as merely hypothetical until a sufficient elucidation of the nature of the symbol is achieved. This elucidation, in turn, must be independent of any previously given interpretive or causal-explanatory key or system, no matter how elegant, complete, or prestigious it may be.

As the initial object of investigation, I will admit nothing more than the raw fact that there are words, graphics, objects, entities, to which humans attribute a special type of meaning called “symbolic,” different from another type they call “non-symbolic.” This is a fact of historical and cultural order. The belief implied in it refers to a duality of modes of meaning. Our first task will simply be to verify if this duality is possible and, if possible, what it can consist of.

2. The rotational perspective

1. Each term signifies a constellation of actualizable intentions. In the usual course of thought, these intentions remain latent and in a germinal state, compressed as it were within the envelope of the term. We only actualize them when we have a special reason to do so. A question, a doubt, can invite or compel us to unfold the meanings we suppose to carry in some obscure corner of our “interior.” Then, sometimes, we find that they are not there; they are gone, or the enumeration is not as complete as we expected.

2. This merely potential character of the signifying intention reveals to us that, in ordinary communication, the expressive and communicative functions of language (K. Bühler) prevail widely over the denotative function, which we count on only as a reserve bank on which we write check after check without checking the balance.

3. Analytic philosophy aims to overcome the “imprecisions” of everyday language by explicitly bringing to the extreme the latent intentions and meanings and subjecting them to philosophical criticism. But isn’t a certain latency and imprecision inherent in the very nature of thought, perception, and the very being of things? A complete explication of all meanings can only be achieved in the form of an ideal system of concepts and judgments, which, in turn, will not be actualized in consciousness all at once, but part by part, while the other parts remain latent in the background. In other words, the consciousness we have of this system itself has the structure of rotational perspectives that we observe in ordinary psychic life and in ordinary communication: a concept comes to the fore, while the others recede into the background, disappearing as actual contents of consciousness to become compact schemes of merely actualizable contents.

4. Thus, a logical chain is no more knowable in an instant and as a whole than a house or a landscape. We have to traverse it, and when in the end we believe we know it “as a whole,” what remains in our hands is nothing more than a simplified scheme, that is, a power to reactualize in time the traversed chain. “Knowing” a reasoning means being able to reproduce it sequentially; it does not mean reproducing it in its entirety and with all the details in an instant without duration.

5. Every step that is actualized in consciousness implies the virtualization of the others, their withdrawal to the deposit of the merely actualizable.

6. This is what I mean by “rotational perspective.” It is the structure of the act of knowledge itself, whether it is knowledge through the senses or mere thought.

7. It is, on the other hand, the very structure of phenomenality as such: no object, no being, can present itself to a particular cognizing subject in the instant totality of its aspects. It is an illusion to think that the purely ideal object can do so. The very concept of a “square” only presents itself to me in the compact summary of a term, and not in the complete unfolding of the properties it includes. Both abstract thought and sensory perception have the structure of a rotational perspective: the cognizing subject encircles the object as much as he encircles the concept, and does so precisely because its focus of attention is surrounded by the latencies of innumerable objects, concepts, and signs.

3. Given, meaning, and unity (I)

The perception of the world as a collection or heap of “things” or mere “data” without an ultimate spiritual connection presupposes an observer devoid, on his part, of his own spiritual connection, of the inner link between sensation and meaning, consciousness and action, before and after—a stupid observer, in a state of hypnotic division and almost catatonic paralysis. It is curious, or more properly absurd, that the fragmented “world” captured by this deficient perception is taken as the norm of “reality” and the measure for assessing the validity of the inner connection that we grasp in the universe. The effective perception of reality requires, to the highest degree, the supreme faculties of synthesis, which reveal to us, beyond the very physical unity of the world, the unity of a “meaning” of the world toward which all conscious acts of a person in the world converge, even the most minimal ones. The Kantianism and other schools that take the pure sensory data as “reality” and reduce all synthesis to a subjective contribution that the mind makes to the world ignore that a world without unity could not be “given” to any subject for it to order according to its a priori categories because every ordering presupposes the conscious unity of the subject, and this unity is only realized precisely in the moments of optimal cohesion when the world appears to it as one, not as a fragmented heap of sensations. The fragmentation of the world into supposedly pre-categorical “data” is only achieved by two means: through pathological states of ego division or through personal efforts of imaginative abstraction; in the first case, the subject is functionally separated from itself; in the second, hypothetically and, in short, pretentiously. The “data” are not prior to meaningful synthesis; on the contrary, they are obtained through the abstracting division of the latter, either as residues of hallucinatory drowsiness or as mere fanciful forms of a world constructed by the imagination. The famous “data” are, in short, constructed, and the ultimate spiritual unity of the world, instead of being constructed, is given. That is why all attempts to construct it (or even reconstruct it) through mental creations, whether in art, science, or metaphysics, fail. True metaphysics does not construct a world; it is not constructive metaphysics; it is a discursive grounding of the spontaneously perceived unity of the world. Hence, the failure of every attempt to “express” the ultimate meaning; it is the presupposition of every expression; it is supremely perceived, never constructed; and inevitably, we only express what our mind constructs. It is an illusion to deduce from the inexpressibility of meaning its inapprehensibility. It is inexpressible precisely because it is eminently apprehensible, because it is “the” apprehensible as such, while all other apprehensibles are apprehensible in it and by it, and thus expressible.

Because it does not belong to the pragmatic world that we construct with our actions, nor to the imaginative world that we construct with our art, science, etc., it ends up appearing, to first-instance philosophical reflection (reflection on culture, on the world constructed by humans), as a remote and distant “x” to which we could only arrive at the end of a journey that begins with the sensible “given.” But it is an optical illusion that inverts the order of reality; meaning is not reached, for it is the presupposition of perception itself and, moreover, of reflective inquiry. The aim of this inquiry is not to reach meaning but to recover, at the discursive level (thus intersubjective), the initial and intuitive certainty of meaning. The goal is to make this initial and fundamental certainty the common heritage that humans possess only as living individuals, not as social speaking beings, plural in the variety of their roles and languages. In the course of this recovery, many disasters happen that separate humans from the recollection of meaning and lead them to imagine that they can construct meaning from the data, or that they can find meaning starting from meaningless data, or that they can prove the nonexistence of meaning or the abysmal separation between the given and meaning, or that they do not need meaning and can live among pure data. Such is the panorama of the history of philosophy.

These considerations go a little beyond what is usually called “realism.” Realism only affirms the reality of the world. They affirm that the reality of the world is a given, and that the spiritual unity and meaning of the world are also inseparable from it. Reality, world, and meaning cannot be constructed, whether by the philosopher or by culture; they can only be perceived intuitively, assuming that intuition presupposes a cognizing subject endowed with an optimal self-conscious unity at the moment of the intuitive act. The entire work of philosophy—and of culture—is to record the intuited world and defend it, through discursive faculty, from dissolution. And it is the discursive faculty itself, constitutively dual and self-antagonistic—dialectical, in short—that threatens it with dissolution; dual because of the duality of its operations (signification and supplementation), dual because of the duality of its functions (thinking and communicating).

4. Given, meaning, and unity (II)

The immediate perception of the meaning and unity of the world, to which I refer, is simply the immediate knowledge we have about what we are doing in it at that precise moment, and where we intend to go next, and where we intend all our actions to ultimately lead. Without this foreknowledge, we would be unable to take the next step. It would be foolish to imagine that a person takes their next step independently of any consideration of what comes after—a solitary, atomistic next step. “Living in the moment” is just a literary figure of speech. Those who say that they “live the moment” do so against the backdrop of a whole conception of the universe, which necessarily includes an expectation of continuity. So much so that, if informed of their imminent death, their next moment would be quite different from what they would experience if they were told, on the contrary, that the object of their desires awaits them in the next room.

The expectation of a continuity that extends beyond death, whether in the form of a celestial life or in the form of the mere temporal permanence of the world after our departure from it, or in any other form one imagines, is a conditio sine qua non of human action and is implied even in our most minimal and everyday actions. But this diversity of imaginations and assumptions only reflects the variety of individual reactions to an experience that is one and the same in all human beings: the experience of the general movement of the cosmos, which goes in some direction and carries us along. This experience can be consciously lived, most likely in childhood, but in general, it becomes unconscious precisely because it is the most constant and uninterrupted human experience, the foundation and condition of any and every particular experience.

5. Unity and unities

However, if the unity of the world is given and the unity of each known entity is only potential, actualized partially and step by step through rotational perspective, an immediate conclusion follows: each known entity is only one and only an entity as an imago mundi. The partial unities extract their unity from the total unity.