One of the more remarkable achievements in the evolution of humankind is how we learned to communicate through symbols. We convey messages others understand through language, images, and gestures.
The term symbol originates from the Greek word symbolon, meaning token or sign. Symbols represent, stand in for, or suggest something else, such as an idea or object.
Anthropologists and sociologists define symbols as “representative forms of thought.” For Robert Sapolsky, “Symbols serve as a simplifying stand-in for something complex. (A rectangle of cloth with stars and stripes represents all of American history and values.) And this is very useful. To see why, start by considering basic language—communication without a lot of symbolic content.”
Symbols bridge the gap between what we experience as reality in the physical world and what we imagine this experience is or could be. Symbols link the abstract world of ideas and the imagination with sensual experience. In other words, unlike other species, human beings have adapted to the physical environment by creating a dimension beyond physical reality – a symbolic universe that reaches beyond the external reality of the natural world.
Humans have learned to separate experience from meaning. Symbols function in society because they provide a sense of belonging, social cohesion, aesthetics, authority, and identity. Berger & Luckman (1966) define the symbolic universe as “a set of beliefs “everybody knows.” “As an ideological system, the symbolic universe “puts everything in its right place.” It provides explanations for why we do things the way we do. Proverbs, moral maxims, wise sayings, mythology, religions and other theological thought, metaphysical traditions, and other value systems are part of the symbolic universe.”
Through association, memory, extrapolation, innovation, and imagination, symbols make this possible. Moreover, humans developed the cognitive powers of higher-level consciousness, such as introspection, contextualization, innovation, intuition, proposition, and deduction. For instance, the creation and use of tools or the ability to build a fire are signs of the emergence of higher consciousness in humans.
In other words, our ancestors, beginning about 1.9 million years ago, encountered radical changes in how they experienced reality and how to interpret its possible meanings. Wendy Doniger suggests that the emergence of higher-level consciousness in humankind led to making “cognitive sense out of chaotic data provided by nature.” As the primitive brain evolved, the capacity to use symbolic forms such as language and images to think abstractly emerged.
Sapolsky believes, “We evolved a uniquely dramatic means of separating message from meaning and intent: lying. And we invented aesthetic symbolism; after all, those 30,000-year-old paintings of horses in Chauvet cave are not really horses. Our early use of symbols helped forge powerful bonds and rules of cooperation as human societies grew increasingly complex and competitive.”
No other animal on the planet has the capacity to use symbols as extensively as humans (Donald, 1993). “Because there are innumerable things beyond the range of human understanding, we constantly use symbolic expressions and images when referring to them (ecclesiastical language, in particular, is full of symbols). But this conscious use of symbolism is only one aspect of a psychological face of great importance: we also produce symbols unconsciously and spontaneously in our dreams.” (Carl G. Jung, Man and His Symbols). For Joseph Campbell, a symbol can also be an agent that directs and evokes energy.
J.E. Chirlot suggests prehistoric cultures considered the rhythms of life to be found in daily routines, the natural world, and on a spiritual level. The use of symbols was an essential step in the evolution of human consciousness – one that allowed humans to express intangibles.
Symbols connect us to recognizing the world outside of our immediate self-ness. In prehistoric times, the sun, moon, planets, and stars were symbolic and sacred because they offered a sense of order in an otherwise chaotic world.
Richard Heath observes, for example, “The variations of the Moon become an interesting and important phenomenon to people who live largely outdoors…The fact that the human female reproductive cycle has a natural synchronization to the Moon’s phases…” (p. 30).
About 50,000 years ago, human beings began to mark the solar cycle, the sun’s rising and setting, and the Moon’s orbit, on bone — our ancestors began to count the passage of time. Symbolically, such acts demonstrate the evolution of human consciousness. The sun and Moon were no longer merely physical objects in the sky but possessed a duality symbolized by the opposition — night/day, dark /light, winter/summer/ male/female. Symbolic stones were placed strategically to create solar calendars as an aide memoire of the cosmic universe (Heath, p. 37).
Worship, rituals, and rites are symbolic because they point toward something beyond our physical presence. In his essay, “The Archaeology of Symbols,” John Robb points out, “Many powerful symbols in any culture are the commonest things: bread, water, houses, the river, and the hills beyond. Powerful symbols are not irrational and ethereal but are often highly rationalized and concrete: Money is a symbol rather than mere gold, paper, or numbers in an account. Nor can the symbolic aspect of these things be magically separated from a logically prior economic or material use; indeed, much of our modern, supposedly rational economy is structured by massive efforts to protect symbolically important the environment, the small farm, the family home.”
Symbols unify abstract thoughts together with the reality of living experience. Although this definition may seem anemic, it demonstrates symbolic thinking that preoccupies the human psyche. Humans are fallible when accounting for origins, function, and context in which symbols are used. As observers, we must learn to detach ourselves from the emotions that lead us to pronounce judgment and promulgate opinions about a sign or symbol. We must recognize that symbols have histories — many of which are overlooked and misunderstood. For instance, meaning is lost when a cultural artifact becomes arbitrarily introduced into another culture with no experience of its symbolism.
Symbols visually represent a system of signs that connects the creator of a sound, word, gesture, or image to the interpreter. Any interpretation of a sign or a symbol aims to unpack its meaning – to understand the culture, ideological, and religious ideals that give it power and influence.
Hurford notes, “A symbol embodies a relationship between a signified (some concept or intention) and a signifier (the actual signal, a noise or a gesture).” Directly and indirectly, a signifying symbolic form system reflects a society’s underlying beliefs, attitudes, moral values, and spiritual practices. Ultimately, signs and symbols act as bridges from the material world to the abstract. Symbols tie thought to action, regulate social experience, promote self-expression, shape individual and cultural identity, and represent power and authority.
What can we learn from exploring signs and symbols? By appreciating the relationship between the human condition and symbolic forms such as language, art, mathematics, or music, we become more aware of who we are and how we think, feel, and act.
For traditional societies, night and day, the movement of herds, access to water and shelter, calamity, and the seasons inextricably bound peoples to the natural world. Over time, the world changed as humans developed a sense of self-awareness and higher-order consciousness. People began to assign meaning to experiences and dreams. Humans learned to solve problems, make sense of emotion, rationalize fear and desire, assess and survey, plan, and organize in numerous ways. Without oversimplifying the significance of symbolic forms, it is possible to explore some of the stages of human consciousness, such as the human propensities for innovation, imagination, symbol-making, rites, language, and myth. These stages coincide with particular epochs or eras.
Understanding the importance of signs and symbols is complicated by many factors, such as culture, history, ideology, and religious belief. The challenge in understanding symbolism extends beyond the “science of the concrete” and observable, the pitfalls of fallible historical assumptions, the formalism of aesthetic beauty, or the irrevocability of religious beliefs.
By 8,000 B.C.E., Sumerians developed a system of wedge-shaped designs on clay tokens to keep track of grain transactions. In Egypt, 5,000 years later, scribes and artists ornamented great halls and tombs with hieroglyphics to recount stories of gods and kings. As civilizations emerged worldwide, people found more innovative and efficient ways of organizing and expressing themselves using symbols. Today, we take the presence of symbols as a naturally occurring part of life. Still, the capacity to create representations or signs that virtually stand in for or approximate something else is extraordinary.
However, linguists attempt to unlock the meaning of symbols in different ways, such as through philosophy, history, religion, anthropology, or semiotics. Every theorist utilizes the most appropriate tools to solve hypotheses or answer particular questions about phenomena.
As human consciousness developed, self-awareness and higher-order consciousness increased. Over time, the separation between sensory experiences and the meanings people began to assign to them changes. Langer believes, “Every society meets a new idea with its own concepts, its own tacit, fundamental way of seeing things; that is today, with its own questions, its peculiar curiosity.”
“Symbolic consciousness is a world created from symbols that evolved to language and writing that allowed humans to express their inner world with the outer world. Just as today, all words are symbols for something much deeper. Our self-awareness allowed us to create a symbolic world in order to pass on information, ideas, and mythology. We began to create a world around us to symbolize what has existed within.” – Brenneman
In the 1980 film, “The Gods Must Be Crazy,” an African bushman encounters an empty Coke bottle that has just fallen to earth after being discarded from an airplane above. As the bushman attempts to explain the incident to his tribe, all sorts of inferences about the significance of the bottle are clear.
From a Euro-centric perspective, the object is immediately recognizable as a part of our consumer culture. Still, for the so-called primitive bushman, the bottle is an object of curiosity and mystery.
“Human languages contain tens of thousands of arbitrary learned symbols (mainly words).
No other animal communication system involves learning the component symbolic elements afresh in each individual’s lifetime, and certainly not in such vast numbers” (Hurford, 2004). Scholarly research suggests signs and symbols occupy an essential space in the history of our evolution (Russell, 2016; Donald, 1993; Cassirer, 1946). As Merlin Donald explains, human beings developed an external memory – a cave wall lined with the imaginative art of its inhabitants may be analogous to a computer’s hard drive loaded with poetry and pictures. No longer were peoples reliant merely on gestures and guttural speech.”
Although we may experience the same event or view the same object, our responses will never be the same. Humans are sentient creatures that rely not only on vision, hearing, taste, touch, and smell to make sense of the world but also on subjective factors such as ego, propositions, arguments, personal truths and feelings, cultural tastes, beliefs, and memories. For Carl G. Jung, symbols represent the unknown and something difficult to define. Like our ancestors, we rely on symbols in many ways. When the meaning of a symbol is shared and interpreted as relevant and culturally significant, it becomes part of a system of knowing. Words in a book, paintings on walls, mathematical equations, or signs on a restaurant door can all solicit attention from our consciousness – symbols make us aware of where and who we are.
Ultimately, symbols act as referents for expressing experience. In many forms, symbols communicate more effectively than words. Cassirer, in his book “Language and Myth,” observes, “… All mental processes fail to grasp reality itself, and to represent it [experience], to hold it at all, they are driven to the use of symbols.”
Using symbols goes beyond the classical definition of humankind as rational beings – we are emotional, superstitious beings subject to delusions and the construction of mythologies to justify our existence and experience. We develop conceptual languages to convey ideals and express thoughts, feelings, and affections. For Cassirer, human beings are enveloped in “linguistic forms, in artistic images, in mythical symbols or religious rites that he cannot see or know anything except by the interposition of this artificial medium [symbolic activity].
Hovers et al. believe symbols reflect the logic of our thought processes. Look around, and you will recognize that almost everything you see is a sign – an object that primarily represents or stands in for something else.
Researchers suggest humans routinely use symbolic behavior to refer to “things in the world.” Further, “The referential powers of symbols are derived from their positions in an organized system of other symbols.” These allow the recognition of higher-order regularities, enabling symbolic predictions.
References:
Kazan, C. (2010). Earth 1.2 Millions Years Ago: Human Population, 18,500. The Daily Galaxy, Proceeding from the National Academy of Sciences. Retrieved from http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2010/01/earth-pop-18500-humans-an-endangered-species-12-millions-years-ago.html
Donald, M. (1993). Human cognitive evolution: What we are, what we are becoming. Social Research. Vol. 60(1). Spring 1993). Retrieved from http://cogweb.ucla.edu/Abstracts/Donald_91.html
Hurford, J.R. (2004). Human uniqueness, learned symbols and recursive thought. European Review. 12(4): 551-565. Retrieved from http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~jim/europeanreview.html
Russell, P. (2016). Evolution of human consciousness. Spirit of Now. Retrieved from http://www.peterrussell.com/SCG/EoC.php
Jung, C.G. & Franz, M. (1964). Man and his symbols. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday.
Heath, R. (2007). Sacred number and the origins of civilization. Rochester, Vermont: Inner Traditions Press.
Chirlot, Dictionary of Symbols
Robb, J. (1998). The Archaeology of Symbols, Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol. 27, pp. 329-346.
Doninger, W. (1995). In Myth and Meaning, Claude Levi-Strauss. New York: Schocken.
Sapolsky, R. (2013). Metaphors are us, Nautilus, Retrieved from http://nautil.us/issue/1/what-makes-you-so-special/metaphors-are-us
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