Let us ask, therefore: What can the value or meaning be of a mythological notion which, in the light of modern science, must be said to be erroneous, philosophically false, absurd, or even formally insane? The first answer suggested will no doubt be the one that, in the course of the past century, has been offered many times by our leading thinkers. The value, namely, is to be studied rather as a function of psychology and sociology than as a refuted system of positivistic science, rather in terms of certain effects worked by the symbols on the character of the individual and the structure of society than in terms of their obvious incongruity as an image of the cosmos. Their value, in other words, is not that of science but that of art: and just as art may be studied psychologically, as symbolic or symptomatic of the strains and structures of the psyche, so may the archetypes of myth, fairy tale, archaic philosophy, cosmology, and metaphysics.
This is the point of view that Professor Rudolf Carnap has presented in the chapter “The Rejection of Metaphysics,” in his University of London lectures, Philosophy and Logical Syntax, which were published in 1935. There he states that metaphysical propositions “are neither true nor false, but expressive.” They are like music, or like lyric poems, or like laughter. And yet, he states, they pretend to be representative. They pretend to have theoretical value–and therewith, not only is the reader or hearer deceived but the metaphysician also. “The metaphysician believes,” wrote Dr. Carnap, “that in his metaphysical treatise he has asserted something, and he is led by this into argument and polemics against the propositions of some other metaphysician. A poet, however, does not assert that the verses of another are wrong or erroneous; he usually contents himself with calling them bad.” 8
C. G. Jung, in many passages, has drawn a distinction berween the terms “sign” and “symbol,” as he employs them.
The first, the sign, is a reference to some concept or object, definitely known; the second, the symbol, is the best possible figure by which allusion may be made to something relatively unknown. The symbol does not aim at being a reproduction, nor can its meaning be more adequately or lucidly rendered in other terms. Indeed, when a symbol is allegorically translated and the unknown factor in its reference rejected, it is dead.9
I believe we may say that, in general, the symbols of science and of symbolic logic are, in this sense, signs; and the figures of art, in this sense, symbols.
Joseph Campbell (Flight of the Wild Gander, 98-9) - See more at:
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