[xmca] symbol sign and creativity

[Larry Purss <lpscholar2@gmail.com>]

Larry, Francine, Your topic of cultural creativity and synergy is
fascinating. Questioning  if creativity is always conflictual or
if creativity can be seen as a process of mutual synergy.

On another thread the topic of the 1933 paper on play and its
centrality within developmental trajectories  [of imagination and
creativity] is also currently being discussed. There is a synergy between
these topics.

 I chose to begin a new thread as I want to explore another synergy in
discussing imagination and creativity but leave a space for the main topic
of cultural creativity.
This new thread on creativity and imagination questions how  *signs* and
*symbols* are implicated in notions of imagination and creativity.
Language as signs, language as symbols.  How are they different and how are
they the same??

Joel Weinsheimer suggests that after Kant [though not Kant himself] art
came to be considered neither supplemental to nature nor imitative of
nature, but rather antithetical to nature. Coincident with this
post-Kantian development in aesthetics was a corresponding significant
REVERSAL in semiotic terminology, for the mind's SYMBOL-makig capacity
BECOMES its meaning or FORM-giving function [called its symbol-making
capacity]

However this capacity, [forming the formless & giving meaning to the
meaningless is also what has been identified *as* the function of the
SIGN.  In this neo-Kantian usage *symbolic form* is synonymous with *sign*
It is this use of *symbol* in the sense of *sign* [as a function of symbols
being created by the intellect itself]] that Gadamer puts in play.

This reversal [an epochal rversal] replaced the concept of the image by
that of the sign. This reversal of howwe view thought and language [the
being of language] has reduced the symbol to the level of the PURE sign
[pure arbitrariness]
Do we need another reversal where we RE-claim the symbolic to language as
distinct from language as sign?

Larry
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