FOUNTS OF KNOWLEDGE PT. 2

At the end of Part 2, I said:

It seems evident that all of the "common words" Wheelwright lists are common because everyone knows basic representations such as "dog" and "sky" through what Russell calls "acquaintance." More complex chains of associations, however, can only be built up through a process of description. No sky has ever looked like the representation of the Greek Ouranos, but Greeks understood the idea of Ouranos through a process of describing the sky-god's nature-- though in some ways the word used by Kim Stanley Robinson, "discursive," may fit the topic better. This is also one of the terms utilized by Ernst Cassirer in his PHILOSOPHY OF SYMBOLIC FORMS, which I'll discuss somewhat in the next post.

The "acquaintance/description" duality appeared in the works of two philosophers I've often quoted, Ernst Cassirer and Susanne Langer. In Cassirer's LANGUAGE, he says:

Like thought, language must pass from the known to the unknown, from what is perceived by the senses to what merely thought...

While Langer's dichotomy of "the discursive" and "the presentational" has often influenced my own examination of symbolism. In this quote, Langer aligns her concept of presentational symbolism with the immediacy of sense-impression:

  "The symbolic materials given to our senses, the Gestalten or fundamental perceptual forms which invite us to construe the pandemonium of sheer impression into a world of things and occasions, belong to the 'presentational order'. They furnish the elementary abstractions in terms of which ordinary sense-experience is understood."-- Susanne Langer, PHILOSOPHY IN A NEW KEY, p. 98.

I discussed Langer's two forms of symbolism first in RULES OF ESTRANGEMENT PT. 3,  where I associated "presentational symbolism" with fantasies without an appeal of logic, while I associated "discursive symbolism" with fantasies governed by logical rules about what can or cannot happen. However, obviously the two constantly intertwine, not only in fantasy-literature but in all art, myth, and in human language itself. Prior to Kant, most European philosophers subscribed to what Cassirer called "the copy-theory of language," in which it was assumed that reason and logic guided the evolution of language. Toward the end of LANGUAGE, however, Cassirer naturally argues that the formation of language is as much aesthetic as logical.

...it lies in the very nature of language that each of these syntheses is not governed exclusively by theoretical but by imaginative factors as well, and that consequently, much of linguistic "concept formation" seems to be less of logical comparison and combination that of the linguistic fantasy... In so far as we can gain insight into them, the factors which guide language in its classifications seem closely related to primitive mythical concepts and classification"-- LANGUAGE, p. 297. 

So Cassirer offers a view of the interactions of what Langer calls 'the discursive" and "the presentational," though I would say that he does not explore  such interactions in depth, any more than does Langer. I believe that I've come up with an interesting take on the matter, courtesy of Jung's theory of archetypes.