On Symbols (1960-1969)

"By a symbol I do not mean an allegory or a sign, but an image that describes in the best possible way the dimly discerned nature of the spirit. A symbol does not define or explain; it points beyond itself to a meaning that is darkly divined yet still beyond our grasp, and cannot be adequately expressed in the familiar words of our language." (Carl G Jung, "The Structure And Dynamics Of The Psyche", 1960)

"Language, in its origin and essence, is simply a system of signs or symbols that denote real occurrences or their echo in the human soul." (Carl G Jung, "The Structure And Dynamics Of The Psyche", 1960)

"Cybernetics is concerned primarily with the construction of theories and models in science, without making a hard and fast distinction between the physical and the biological sciences. The theories and models occur both in symbols and in hardware, and by 'hardware’ we shall mean a machine or computer built in terms of physical or chemical, or indeed any handleable parts." (Frank H George, "The Brain As A Computer", 1962)

"Science is the reduction of the bewildering diversity of unique events to manageable uniformity within one of a number of symbol systems, and technology is the art of using these symbol systems so as to control and organize unique events. Scientific observation is always a viewing of things through the refracting medium of a symbol system, and technological praxis is always handling of things in ways that some symbol system has dictated. Education in science and technology is essentially education on the symbol level." (Aldous L Huxley, "Essay", Daedalus, 1962)

"For Science in its totality, the ultimate goal is the creation of a monistic system in which - on the symbolic level and in terms of the inferred components of invisibility and intangibly fine structure - the world’s enormous multiplicity is reduced to something like unity, and the endless successions of unique events of a great many different kinds get tidied and simplified into a single rational order. Whether this goal will ever be reached remains to be seen. Meanwhile we have the various sciences, each with its own system coordinating concepts, its own criterion of explanation." (Aldous Huxley, "Literature and Science", 1963)

"It is always extremely difficult to express thoughts. Words and phrases are so many fretters by which our spirit is bound. Words are mere symbols of reality, and the written word is not more than a one-dimensional fl ow across the two-dimensional page of a three-dimensional book." (Charles-Noël Martin, "The Role of Perception in Science", 1963)

"The aim of science is to apprehend this purely intelligible world as a thing in itself, an object which is what it is independently of all thinking, and thus antithetical to the sensible world. [...] The world of thought is the universal, the timeless and spaceless, the absolutely necessary, whereas the world of sense is the contingent, the changing and moving appearance which somehow indicates or symbolizes it." (Robin G Collingwood, "Essays in the Philosophy of Art", 1964)

"This language controls by reducing the linguistic forms and symbols of reflection, abstraction, development, contradiction; by substituting images for concepts. It denies or absorbs the transcendent vocabulary; it does not search for but establishes and imposes truth and falsehood." (Herbert Marcuse, "One-Dimensional Man", 1964)

"Thus a word or an image is symbolic when it implies something more than its obvious and immediate meaning. It has a wider ‘unconscious’ aspect that is never precisely defined or fully explained. […] As the mind explores the symbols it is led to ideas that lie beyond the grasp of reason." (Carl G Jung, "Man and His Symbols", 1964)

"[…] it took men about five thousand years, counting from the beginning of number symbols, to think of a symbol for nothing." (Isaac Asimov, "Of Time and Space and Other Things" , 1965)

"Specific procedures of universe-maintenance become necessary when the symbolic universe has become a problem. As long as this is not the case, the symbolic universe is self-maintaining, that is, self-legitimating by the sheer facticity of its objective existence in the society in question." (Peter L Berger, "The Social Construction of Reality", 1966) 

"There is nothing that can be said by mathematical symbols and relations which cannot also be said by words. The converse, however, is false. Much that can be and is said by words cannot successfully be put into equations, because it is nonsense." (Clifford A Truesdell, "Six Lectures on Modern Natural Philosophy", 1966)

"The symbol is the tool which gives man his power, and it is the same tool whether the symbols are images or words, mathematical signs or mesons." (Jacob Bronowski, "The Reach of Imagination", 1967)

"Symbolic interactionism rests [...] on three simple premises. The first premise is that human beings act toward things on the basis of the meanings that the things have for them. [...] The second premise is that the meaning of such things is derived from, or arises out of, the social interaction that one has with one's fellows. The third premise is that these meanings are handled in, and modified through, an interpretative process used by the person in dealing with the things he encounters." (Herbert Blumer, "Symbolic Interactionism", 1969)