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English / Greek · symbolon

symbol

A token of recognition, later a word that had to carry too much.

Because “symbol” names radically different relations in semiotics and depth psychology, and confusing them changes what we think we are seeing.

Greek

σύμβολον

symbolon · token, tally, watchword, omen

From συμβάλλειν, to throw or put together. Liddell and Scott give a working range: a mark or token of identity; the broken tally whose matching half proved a relation (the tessera of guest-friendship); a contract; a watchword; sometimes an omen. Convention and recognition are in the root. Not originally a mystic object.1

Plato later used σύμβολον for the comic myth of halved humans seeking their other half. That is a literary scene, not a lexicon proving cosmic union. Folk etymology that hears “together-throw” as metaphysics skips the ordinary Greek.

Peirce

A symbol refers to its object by virtue of a law, usually an association of general ideas: habit, convention, the interpretant. The word pipe does not resemble a pipe. Take away the learned habit and the character that makes it a sign is gone.2

Same word. Different office.

Jung

In the definitions of Psychological Types, a symbol is the best possible expression of something not yet fully known. A sign stands for something known. A living image whose meaning is not exhausted by a caption is closer to this office than to Peirce’s.3

Jung’s symbol is not Peirce’s symbol. Collapsing them makes every convention feel numinous and every numinous image feel merely taught.

Misuse

Folk etymology that hears ‘together-throw’ as proof of cosmic union. The Greek is more ordinary, and more interesting.

Is this standing-for taught, or still unfinished?

Notes

  1. Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1940), s.v. σύμβολον.
  2. Charles S. Peirce, “What Is a Sign?,” in The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, ed. the Peirce Edition Project, vol. 2, 4–10 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998).
  3. C. G. Jung, Psychological Types, trans. H. G. Baynes, rev. R. F. C. Hull (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), §814–29.