ABSTRACT
When we designate language, myth, and art as “symbolic forms,” there seems to lie in this expression the presupposition that they all, as determinate spiritual modes of configuration, go back to an ultimate, originary-stratum of the actual that is beheld in them only as through a foreign medium. The philosophy of symbolic forms is not concerned exclusively or even primarily with the purely scientific, exact world-comprehending, but rather with all the tendencies of world-understanding. It seeks to apprehend these tendencies of world-understanding in their diversity, in their totality, and in the inner differentiation of their manifestations. Bergson’s theory is perhaps the most radical rejection of the value and justification of symbolic forming that has ever emerged in the history of metaphysics. This act of forming now appears as the real veil of Maya. A self-awareness of life is possible only if it does not simply remain absolutely within itself.
