A L F R E D N O R T H W H I T E H E A D
___________________________________________________from SYMBOLISM, ITS MEANING AND EFFECT
(1927)
Language
To exemplify the inversion of symbol and meaning, consider language and the things meant by language. A word is a symbol. But a word can be either written or spoken. Now on occasions a written word may suggest the corresponding spoken word, and that sound may suggest a meaning.
In such an instance, the written word is a symbol and its meaning is the spoken word, and the spoken word is a symbol and its meaning is the dictionary meaning of the word, spoken or written.
But often the written word effects its purpose without the intervention of the spoken word. Accordingly, then, the written word directly symbolizes the dictionary meaning. But so fluctuating and complex is human experience that in general neither of these cases is exemplified in the clear-cut way which is set out here. Often the written word suggests both the spoken word and also the meaning, and the symbolic reference is made clearer and more definite by the additional reference of the spoken word to the same meaning. Analogously we can start from the spoken word which may elicit a visual perception of the written word.
Further, why do we say that the word 'tree' — spoken or written — is a symbol to us for trees? Both the word itself and trees themselves enter into our experience on equal terms; and it would be just as sensible, viewing the question abstractedly, for trees to symbolize the word 'tree' as for the word to symbolize the trees.
This is certainly true, and human nature sometimes works that way. For example, if you are a poet and wish to write a lyric on trees, you will walk into the forest in order that the trees may suggest the appropriate words. Thus for the poet in his ecstasy — or perhaps, agony — of composition the trees are the symbols and the words are the meaning. He concentrates on the trees in order to get at the words.
But most of us are not poets, though we read their lyrics with proper respect. For us, the words are the symbols which enable us to capture the rapture of the poet in the forest. The poet is a person for whom visual sights and sounds and emotional experiences refer symbolically to words. The poet's readers are people for whom his words refer symbolically to the visual sights and sounds and emotions he wants to evoke. Thus in the use of language there is a double symbolic reference: — from things to words on the part of the speaker, and from words back to things on the part of the listener.
When in an act of human experience there is a symbolic reference, there are in the first place two sets of components with some objective relationship between them, and this relationship will vary greatly in different instances. In the second place the total constitution of the percipient has to effect the symbolic reference from one set of components, the symbols, to the other set of components, the meaning. In the third place, the question, as to which set of components form the symbols and which set the meaning, also depends on the peculiar constitution of that act of experience.
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