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These files are maintained strictly for historical reference, research, and recordkeeping purposes,
and the content has not been altered or updated since archiving.
Content on this site may not meet current digital accessibility standards.
If you require an alternative, accessible format of any information found on this site,
please contact Bruce Jones, bjones@ucsd.edu to request an accommodation.
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 __________________________________________ _____ xmca mailing list xmca@weber.ucsd.edu http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca