#hypotyposis

[anaxerneas]

Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment

[anaxerneas]

I would also like to think that some of the sentences in these essays are so put together that an insight into a form of appearing is not just discussed in them, but is actually accomplished when they are read.

Robert Sokolowski, Introduction to Pictures, Quotations, and Distinctions

[anaxerneas]

A radical difference between symbol and allegory has been definitely established by Romantic theorists, who have, however, dangerously identified the symbolic with the aesthetic.

Originally, a symbol was produced by the mutual relationship of two pieces of a coin destined to acquire their full purport through their actual or potential rejoining. In other sorts of signs the signans becomes irrelevant at the moment at which its signatum is caught (the signans is thrown away, so to speak); instead, in the signs that Romantic philosophers and poets called symbols, the signatum acquires its full purport only in so far as it is continually compared to the physical presence of its signans.

Schelling identifies works of art with symbols because they are hypotyposes, self-presentations, and, instead of signifying an artistic idea, they are that idea in themselves. There is no “semantic” interpretation of a work of art. Schelling distinguishes schemas, where the general provides us with an understanding of the particular, from allegories, where the particular provides us with knowledge of the general; in aesthetic symbols both procedures are at work simultaneously.

In the same line of thought, Goethe says that allegories designate directly, whereas symbols designate indirectly (1797: 94). Allegories are transitive, whereas symbols are intransitive. Allegories speak to the intelligence, whereas symbols speak to perception. Allegories are arbitrary and conventional, whereas symbols are immediate and motivated. A symbol is an image which is natural and universally understandable. Allegories employ the particular as an example of the general; symbols embody the general in the particular. Moreover, symbols are polysemous, indefinitely interpretable; they realize the coincidence of contraries; they express the unexpressible, since their content exceeds the capability of our reason:

"Symbolisms transform the experience into an idea, and an idea into an image, so that the idea expressed by the image remains always active and unattainable and, even though expressed in all languages, remains unexpressible. Allegory transforms an experience into a concept and a concept into an image, but so that the concept remains always defined and expressible by the image."

In this sense the aesthetic and the symbolic come to coincide definitely, but they define themselves in terms of each other, in a circular way. As a matter of fact, Romantic aesthetics does not explain the semiotic strategy by which, in the poetic use of languages, particular meanings are conveyed: it only describes the effect that a work of art can produce. By doing so, Romantic aesthetics flattens the concept of semiosic interpretation (which undoubtedly acquires a particular status in aesthetic texts) into the one of aesthetic enjoyment. On the other hand, semiotics can explain the phenomenon of symbolic mode, but it cannot fully explain aesthetic enjoyment, which depends on many extrasemiotic elements.

Umberto Eco, On Symbols

I find one of Peirce's brief definitions of the icon relevant here (and Eco does note in this paper that Peirce uses "icon" where others would use "symbol"):

…an Icon is a mere image, a vague form. It makes no distinction between its Object and its Signification. It exhibits the two as one.