KOESTLER & BURKE ON SYMBOLING AND CONSCIOUSNESS
    What are the effects of the human capacity to symbol and thus to speak? As discussed in class, the symbol has peculiar powers (e.g., naming, negation, self-reference) not found in other sorts of meaningful signs. Since we seem to be the only animal that habitually makes and uses symbols, some of the peculiar characteristics of human consciousness-of-the-world might be found by thinking about them. Perhaps most notably, we can act on the basis of what's imaginary as easily as we can act on the basis of direct experience. We may not even be able to tell the difference.

 KOESTLER ON THE IMAGINARY AND THE REAL

Extract from Arthur Koestler's discussion of illusion in his 1964 book The Act of Creation. (Picador paperback: pp. 301-2.)

    The oldest and most fundamental of all tricks is to disguise people in costumes and to put them on a stage with masks or paint on their faces; the audience is thereby given the impression that the events represented are happening here and now, regardless of how distant they really are in space and time.  The effect of this procedure is to induce a lively bisociated condition in the minds of the audience. The spectator knows, in one compartment of his mind, that the people on the stage are actors, whose names are familiar to him; and he knows that they are "acting" for the express purpose of creating an illusion in him, the spectator.  Yet in another compartment of his mind he experiences fear, hope, pity, accompanied by palpitations, arrested breathing, or tears -- all induced by events which he knows to be pure make-believe.  It is indeed a remarkable phenomenon that a grown-up person, knowing all the time that he faces a screen onto which shadows are projected by a machine, and knowing furthermore quite well what is going to happen at the end--for instance, that the police will arrive just in the nick of time to save the hero-- should nevertheless go through agonies of suspense, and display the corresponding bodily symptoms.  It is even more remarkable that this capacity for living in two universes at once, one real, one imaginary, should be accepted without wonder as a commonplace.
 

 KENNETH BURKE: WORDS ACROSS THE ABYSS OF EXPERIENCE

 Extract from critic Kenneth Burke's 1963 paper "Definition of Man", which was reprinted in his Language as Symbolic Action. Burke proposes this (typically quirky) definition: "Man is the symbol-making animal, inventor of the negative, separated from his natural condition by instruments of his own making, moved by the sense of order, and rotten with perfection." This is from his discussion of the first phrase.

    The "symbol-using animal", yes, obviously.  But can we bring ourselves to realize just what that formula implies, just how much of what we mean by "reality" has been built up for us through nothing but our symbol systems?  Take away our books, and what little do we know about history, biography, even something so "down to earth" as the relative position of the seas and continents? What is our "reality" for today (beyond the paper-thin line of our own particular lives) but all this clutter of symbols about the past combined with whatever things we know mainly through maps, magazines, newspapers and the like about the present?  In school, as they go from class to class, students turn from one idiom to another.  The various courses in the curriculum are in effect but so many different terminologies.  And however important to us is the tiny sliver of reality each of us has experienced firsthand, the whole overall "picture" is but a construct of our symbol systems.  To meditate on this fact until one sees its full implications is much like peering over the edge of things into an ultimate abyss.  And doubtless that's one reason why, though man is typically the symbol-using animal, he clings to a kind of naive verbal realism that refuses to realize the full extent of the role played by symbolicity in his notions of reality.  In responding to words, with their overt and covert modes of persuasion,... we like to forget the kind of relation that really prevails between the verbal and the nonverbal.  In being a link between us and the nonverbal, words are by the same token a screen separating us from the nonverbal -- though the statement gets tangled in its own traces, since so much of the "we" that is separated from the nonverbal by the verbal would not even exist were it not for the verbal (or for our symbolicity in general, since the same applies to the symbol systems of dance, music, painting, and the like.)  A road map that helps us easily find our way from one side of the continent to the other owes its great utility to its exceptional existential poverty.  It tells us absurdly little about the trip that is to be experienced in a welter of detail.  Indeed, its value for us is in the very fact that it is so essentially inane.
    Language referring to the realm of the nonverbal is necessarily talk about things in terms of what they are not -- and
in this sense we start out beset by a paradox.  Such language is but a set of labels, signs for helping us find our way about.
Indeed, they can even be so useful that they help us to invent ingenious ways of threatening to destroy ourselves.  But even
accuracy of this powerful sort does not get around the fact that such terms are sheer emptiness, as compared to the substance of the things they name.