ABSTRACT

In examining the relationship between symbols and experience, distinguishing terms is crucial. If human reality is mediated through symbols, then it may seem obvious that all experience is symbolic and that this chapter need therefore do little more than stress that fact. When I look out of my window on a sluggish Sunday afternoon in rural Australia, I see a broad sunlit street, my car parked in the shade of an elm by a brown picket fence around an unkempt garden featuring a lawn that badly needs a mow. It is easy to assimilate this vision to the idea that we are always experiencing symbols. Physiologists have shown that there is never enough information in the light hitting our eyes to determine what we see. So our brains are forced to make assumptions about reality in order to make good the gaps in the sensory flow. Vision creates rather than reflects reality.1 Thus perception is a testament to the symbolizing function that underpins all human mentation, whether in language, science, myth, religion or art. Added to this are a variety of possible cultural resonances, from the Sixties, for example, the idea of a “lazy Sunday/ sunny afternoon” being celebrated in pop classics by the Small Faces and the Kinks.2 And what about that unmown lawn? For an American, the “picket fence” may add nuances. Then the description itself is verbal and all words are symbols, aren’t they? So, to the extent that my words conjure up anything beyond the page in a reader’s mind, this proves that symbols constitute experience.