기호의 역전

Abstract

This paper explicates “symbolic reversal,” and shows how it works within an experientialist picture of symbolic experience. According to experientialism, our experience comprises physical and symbolic levels, and the latter is grounded in, and strongly constrained by the former. As such, symbolic experience presents an extended facet of physical experience. Any symbolic experience involves “symbolic mapping,” in which we, the creator and/or interpreter of the signs map part of our experiential content onto some perceptible object, and thereby understanding and experiencing the object “in terms of” the mapped part of the experiential content. The perceptible object thus becomes a “signifier,” the object of symbolic interpretation. It follows from this that the matter of signs is a matter of symbolic experience, not of an event or a phenomenon out there, and that we are the master of symbolic experience. However, a symbolic structure itself remains just another part of the interpreter’s experiential content, until it finds a medium which animates it to work in the perceptible world. Ironically, the medium has to be one of us, who created the symbolic structure, and thus the creator is reversed to become a “server” of the structure. I call this phenomenon “a symbolic reversal.” However, apparently innoxious symbolic experience sometimes ends up with distorting, or even nullifying the very ground of the symbolic structure, the physical ontology. I suggest that the only way to escape this conundrum is to turn back to the very ground where all the symbolic structures grow out from. Only then can we say a symbolic structure is a bad one, insofar as it distorts and/or nullifies the physical ground, where our brains, bodies, environments are interacting