2. SYMBOLIC SCHEMES AND ILLUSTRATIONS OF THOUGHT
Before defining the symbolic schemes Flach distinguishes between them as follows:
1. Simple illustrations of thoughts which can appear, according to him, together with a symbolic scheme but which can never express more than one example.
2. Schematic representation of Messer (“It was neither lion nor tiger, I was aware of a hairy skin”). The symbolic scheme is not the image of a definite concrete object forming something indefinite.
3. Diagrams which represent schematically, for instance, which something is missing: schematic representations are therefore illustrations of somewhat hazy thoughts contain-the days of the week, the months of the year.
“What the diagram has in common with the symbolic scheme is the fact that the diagram represents spatially an abstract and unextended object. But there is nothing else here than a definite localization in space. This localization serves as a mooring, an attachment, an orientation for our memory, but plays no role in our thought.”
4. Synaesthesias and synopsies, that is, images aroused regularly by hearing proper names, vowels, etc.
5. Auto-symbolic phenomena. This is the name Silberer gives5 to hypnagogic visions that symbolize an immediately preceding thought. Flach recognizes two types of hypnagogic symbolization. The first contains symbols which are close to symbolic schemes. In the second there are simple illustrations of thought.
The essential distinction Flach draws between illustrations, schematic representations, diagrams, synaesthesias, auto-symbolic phenomena, on the one hand, and symbolic schemes, on the other, comes in the main to this: The former do not express thought, they are connected with ideation by external ties and are moreover quite loose (what is roughly known as ties of association), the latter are a direct product of thought and its expression on the level of the image. This amounts to admitting that there are images which have a symbolic function and others that have no function of any sort, whether as survivals, fortuitous connections, or stereotypes. Below the level of symbolic schemes Flach places the “engravings” of Binet.
We do not share his opinion. The image is a consciousness. If this principle is accepted what meaning does the association of ideas retain? Association occurs as a causal linkage between two consciousnesses: one consciousness cannot be aroused from the outside by another consciousness: but it arises by itself by its own intentionality, and the only tie that can connect it with the previous consciousness is that of motivation. Consequently we must no longer speak of automatisms and stereotypes. Binet and the Würzburg psychologists tend to construct the image, over against thought, as a phenomenon deprived of meaning. But if the image is a consciousness, it must have its own meaning, as does every other sort of consciousness. Its appearance in the course of thought is never the effect of a chance connection: it plays a role. This role is undoubtedly easier to determine in the case of the symbolic scheme than in that of the engraving. But if our premises are correct, there must be a function for all images which do not occur as schemes.
Diagrams are quite readily reduced to symbolic schemes. Flach almost admits this when, after having distinguished most diagrams from symbolic schemes and having denied them any other function than that of an “orientation for our memory,” makes an exception of diagrams whose structure betrays a dominant preoccupation of the subject. Apropos of a diagram representing the month of the year, for instance, when the subject was asked why three months were missing, the answer was: “Because in my childhood there were three months of anxiety out of every year.”
This diagram is evidently symbolic. But is this not the case with every diagram, although somewhat more discreetly so? For many subjects the months are completely given but arranged in an ascending, descending, broken, bent, straight, etc., order. All these arrangements have a meaning which corresponds most often to the way in which the year is divided by the professional vocation of the subject. In a word, the diagrams which represent the months or the days of the week for the subject express regularly the way in which the succession of the months or the days appear to the subject: that is, the year or the week appears in its concrete structure. The same is true of syntheses, that is, for those cases, for instance, in which a vowel arouses in the subject a certain color. Synaesthesia never occurs as the product of a pure association. The color occurs as the sense of the vowel.
“A man forty years of age, experiences very definite colors for a, o and u, but not for i; he understands that if need be the sound can be seen white or yellow, but he feels that in order to find it red one must have a distorted mind or a perverted imagination.”6
When Flourney tries to explain synaesthesias by what he calls “identity of emotional basis,” he does not take into account the sort of logical resistance one experiences when one attempts to change the color aroused by a vowel. This happens because the color occurs at the sound “in person” just as the “vague sea” occurs as the proletariat in person. Naturally what we have here is a consciousness which is more affective than intellectual and the image attributes the personal reaction of the subject to the vowel. Besides, it is hard to see why Flach, who admits the symbolic meaning of the color in his discussion of Experiment 14 (“arrangement … he had a dirty color, greenish grey”) or of experiment 21 (“Baudelaire … a spot of blue-green color, of the color of vitriol”) will not admit this in the case of synaesthesia. Moreover, what difference is there between experiment 21 “Baudelaire” and a simple synaesthesia, other than in complexity? No doubt that the symbolic scheme is generally built up as a spatial determination. But this is simply due to the fact that purely intellectual comprehensions are more readily translated into movements. Knowledge, as we have seen, directly impregnates kinaesthetic sensations. But there is also a comprehension “of the heart,” and it is this comprehension that expresses itself by synopsies.
Finally, it is fitting to show that images which present all the features of “engraving” can play the role of a symbolic scheme. This Flach himself recognized: when one of his subjects was asked to furnish him with a brief description of the philosophy of Fichte, he pictured “the self creating the non-self in order to go beyond it” as a worker pounding a wall with a hammer; and Flach is compelled to admit that this illustration of thought is functionally similar to a scheme.
So if we brush aside the phenomenon of auto-symbolism, which is so uncertain and difficult to investigate, a first examination leads to the following conclusions: first, that the realm of the symbolic scheme is wider than Flach assumes and we must admit into it all the neighboring phenomena which Flach tried to side-track; secondly, the distinction between scheme and engraving is not well marked: these are rather limited cases connected by transitory forms; they should not therefore be looked upon as exercising radically different functions.
We must, however, face the fact that when a scheme is compared to an illustration considerable differences are found between these two sorts of images. Let us suppose I am asked to define the historical period known as the Renaissance in a few words. It may happen that I produce an indefinite image of movement, something like a stream of water which expands and wanes; I may also see the opening out of a flower. In both cases we call my image a symbolic scheme. There is no doubt more in the second case than in the first: in addition to a symbolic meaning, the image has another meaning which can be grasped from without, as, for instance, if the subject makes a drawing of his image. But this supplementary meaning is not thought of for its own sake: in the degree to which it is conscious it is still a quality I confer upon the subject.
But I can also produce another sort of image: for instance: on hearing the word Renaissance, I may “see” the David of Michelangelo. The essential difference in this case is that David is not the Renaissance. We should also note that this difference cannot be verified from without. Only the subject can say whether the image is symbolic of the Renaissance or whether, in some way, it is a lateral image; only he can inform us if the David of Michelangelo is thought of for itself or as a symbol. Let us suppose that the David of Michelangelo is apprehended for itself. In this very apprehension there must be a particular intention, since it is the apprehension itself which could be symbolic. The symbolizing apprehension gives David the meaning of “Renaissance”; the non-symbolizing apprehension constitutes it as the “statue of Michelangelo to be found in such and such a museum in Florence, etc.” If my first aim was to give a brief definition of what I understood by “Renaissance,” I must recognize that my thought deviated. But this deviation could not arise on the level of the constituted image; it is on the level of the knowledge, at the very level of the process of ideation that the change of direction operates; and, this change, far from being aroused by the appearance of the image, is the indispensable condition for its appearance. It is therefore a spontaneous deviation which thought gives to itself and which cannot be the effect of chance or of some external compulsion; this deviation must have a functional meaning. Why has a thought which seeks to discover the content of the concept “Renaissance” made this hook, why has it delayed to form the image of that statue?
It is advisable that we undertake a description of how this image appears to me. We notice, first, that it occurs as linked by the unity of the same quest to the anterior productions of consciousness, in a word, this David does not present itself simply as such but as a step towards the understanding of the term “Renaissance.” And this very term of step is a rubric for the total of the contradictory meanings of the statue. In one sense, in fact, it presents itself as a unity among others, the collection of which constitutes the total extension of the term being studied. It is a point of departure for a systematic review of all the works of art I may know which were produced at the time of the Renaissance. But, from another side, the image attempts to hold us upon itself: in this very David I could find the solution of the problem I am investigating. David, without presenting himself explicitly as the Renaissance, pretends vaguely to conceal in himself the meaning of that period, as happens, for instance, when we say that by visiting the castle in Berlin one will understand the meaning of the Prussia of Bismarck. At the end of this pretension and, by a sort of participation, the envisioned statue can appear as being the Renaissance.
Only, this way of being the Renaissance cannot have the purity of that of a symbolic scheme. In the scheme, in fact, the spatial determinations have no other meaning than that of the concept they represent, or if, perchance, they have a meaning of their own (flower, the worker pounding with a hammer), this meaning has value only within the limits of the concept symbolized and as a more subtle means to make it appear. For David, on the contrary, the manner of appearing as David is wholly independent of the Renaissance. The very meaning of David as David goes back to a mass of ideas which cannot be of service here. This statue by Michelangelo presents itself to me as the David I have seen in the course of my journey in Italy, as the work of a sculptor some of whose other works I also know, as an artistic production which I can class among others, etc., and finally, as a unique event in my life, from the beginning of which I can reconstruct a whole atmosphere, a whole past epoch. All this is, of course, not specified, it is an affective meaning which could be developed. But it is enough for this David who, in some way, is or tends to be “the Renaissance” to appear also as something which can divert my thought and carry me far from my actual task, in short, as the correlative of a consciousness which can lose its equilibrium and slip perhaps into revery. So that the statue seems rather to be the Renaissance by a mystic tie of participation.
At the end of this brief description we arrive at the conclusion that the image as an illustration is produced as the first groping of a lower thought, and that the ambiguities concerning its meaning are due to the uncertainties of a thought which has as yet not risen to a clear vision of a concept. It seems to us, in fact, that our first response to an abstract question, even though it may correct itself immediately, is always—at least as an answer to the question—a lower response, at once prelogical and empirical. This response is at the same time without unity because the thought is uncertain and hesitates between several means—all of them insufficient—to produce a concept. Socrates asked Hippias: “What is Beauty?” and Hippias answered: “It is a beautiful woman, a beautiful horse, etc.” This answer seems to us to make not only an historical step in the development of human thought but also a necessary step (as well as the habit of reflection can curtail it) in the production of a concrete individual thought. This first response of thought naturally takes on the form of an image. Many persons, when questioned about the nature of Beauty, form an image of Venus de Milo, and this is as if they answered: “Beauty is the Venus de Milo.”
But this is only one of the aspects of the image as an illustration: it is formed in addition by an unintelligent thought, which rapidly attempts to cast the greatest amount of knowledges on the question presented; it is as if we were to say: “Beauty? Well: the Venus de Milo, for instance …,” without going any further because of the contradictory tendencies which make up the image. So here we see a second way that thought has of representing a concept for itself: it is simply the sum of the unities of the class it designates.
But the very fact that these knowledges (Venus de Milo, David, etc.) present themselves under an imagined form and not purely verbal indicates more and better. Place someone in a hall in a museum in which there are several masterpieces of the Renaissance and ask him to give you a short account of that artistic epoch and it is a safe bet that before answering he will cast a quick glance at one of the statues and paintings. Why? This he could not answer himself: it is an attempt to observe, to return to the thing itself and to examine it; it is the primary data of experience, a way of confirming a naïve empiricism which is also one of the lower stages of thought. In the absence of these masterpieces the reaction would be the same the statue of David would be evoked, that is, thought would assume the form of imaginative consciousness. Only thought itself does not know whether the object it presents to itself in such haste is beauty or only a sample of beautiful things or whether one could derive an idea of the concept “beauty” by examining it. The result of these uncertainties is an image which sets itself up for its own sake and also as a step in understanding. From this point on thought will suddenly leave this course by means of real understanding, and by a creative effort will consider the Renaissance itself as present in person: it is then that the scheme appears. It is then not the role of the image that changes, which is always the correlative of a consciousness; but the nature of the thought. From the onset of the image as an illustration, two roads are always possible: one by which thought loses itself in revery as it abandons its first assignment, and another which leads it to understanding as such. It is this ever-possible annihilation of thought at the level of the image that has impressed some psychologists like Binet and led them to the conclusion that the image was an obstruction for thought. But it is thought itself that is responsible for this unbalance of thought, and not the image.
5 Herbert Silberer, Der Traum, Stuttgart, 1919.
6 Cited by Flourney, Des phénomènes de synopsie, p. 65.