The Language of Symbols: Keys to Meaning
On 24 November 2022, I took part in a panel discussion, on the occasion of World Philosophy Day, on the theme “The Language of Symbols: Keys to Meaning” The intent was to explore how symbols shape our lives and how we may productively engage with them. The event was organised jointly by New Acropolis India and Bangalore International Centre.
The evening was structured by three questions posed, with each panellist offering a short response to each question. This was followed by an open session that fielded questions from the audience. A video of the full discussion can be seen here.
I share below, the three questions and the responses I offered.
Q1: What are the symbols you work with? Connected to your life/ work? How do you use architecture to connect to the sacred?
First, I need to briefly cover why we are driven to construct and use symbols. This springs from a unique feature of humans: a sophisticated capacity to be reflexive, empowering us to think about ourselves and the world we inhabit. We consequently feel compelled to record those thoughts, first in language, and then further through symbol systems that extend beyond our bodies. This leads to two innate traits within us.
The first is the compulsion to decode and comprehend our universe through symbols: a capacity first defined with clarity in the mid-18th century by the Italian jurist and philosopher, Gianbattista Vico. He said you can only fully understand something you have made yourself, so humans can never fully understand the world. Therefore, we understand it by remaking it in our own way through symbols. We develop the mandala, or the Sri Yantra, as a means of understanding our cosmos, both physical and divine. At an everyday level, we comprehend our culture through symbolic forms like dance, music, and painting.
The second trait is that symbol systems empower a memory that ranges beyond our personal lifetimes, breeding the impulse to concretise and immortalise, through symbols, values we believe to be transcendental. We do this intuitively as parents, seeking to inculcate our children with exalted values, pointing them toward the art forms, idols, texts, and other symbols we want them to hold as significant. And we encapsulate value in artistic forms such as writing, art, dance, and architecture.
These two capacities demand that an architect has an obligation to a sacred purpose of architecture: to offer a means of decoding the world we inhabit and an access to transcendental value. But, I should also recognise that my modes of working, as an architect, depends on using symbols. I produce designs using symbols such as sketches, drawings, models, computer simulations, and so on. I call them symbols because, just as the word “tree” is a symbol representing a tree while bearing no physical relationship to it, the symbols deployed in the design process are meant to represent the physical and sensorial experience of inhabiting architecture while holding no direct correspondence with it.
To connect the two, I find a suggestion of architectural critic and historian, Joseph Rykwert, extremely useful. Rykwert suggests we think of design as an act of translation, we translate from the language of design process into the language of experiencing space. And then he makes a significant assertion. We all know that translation is more than the mere deployment of dictionaries. A consequence of this is the act of translation requires a far greater fluency in the language one is translating into than the language one is translating from. For example, if I need to translate a poem from English into Hindi, I need to know enough English to appreciate the original poem, but translation demands I be a fluent and masterful poet in Hindi.
So, I must seek fluency in the language of embodied experience, realising that a substantive part of what makes it valuable (beauty, joy, wonder, love, etc.) are dimensions that are impossible to define, but are unquestionably known as tangible manifest reality when experienced. And the way to access this is through interrogating my own body as a site of these experiences, validating their value in the resonances I find in others.
Sadly, this is not the way most architects operate. They tend to get trapped within the symbolic language of design process which depends on a relatively static imagery seen through focused vision, losing touch with how experience unfolds over time, depends on peripheral vision, employs all the senses, and quests for transcendence.
This suggests an approach to symbols in general: we must remember we symbolise in multiple language, avoid fixing meaning within symbols, and our engagement with symbols must be a discerning act of translation. As living embodied beings imbued with sacred value, we must never escape a personal responsibility to translate our symbols into what constitutes our innate core.
Q2: Not all of us are artists — how can we develop an eye or even the sensitivity to recognise symbols that we come across in our lives and understand their meaning? How can we learn the language / what does it need for us to develop? And is this something that can be developed?
We are all artists! It is modern education that schools us out of this belief. Look at how school education works: particularly the difference in the modes of kindergarten and primary school versus those at higher levels.
In these earlier grades, the child is characterised by the impulse towards play and wonder, which are embodied modes of exploration, and has not yet acquired the ability to step out of these modes into abstract and disembodied forms of learning. At this stage, there is no choice but to make art and play as primary modes of learning. Children learn by drawing, making clay models, techniques of collage which explore how things can come together, enacting and storytelling, and all this demonstrates how innate the impulse to art is.
By middle school and high school, we are schooled to lose faith in those modes, to think of them as childish and unsophisticated, to devalue art and privilege abstract reasoning. In effect, we are trained to distrust our own bodies putting primary faith in external references.
To escape this trap, we must ask ourselves two questions.
The first question is, “What does art represent?” The conventional belief in the intention of the artist is erroneous. What art offers, what all powerful symbol systems offer, is exactitude: a precision of expression that remains consistent. This stands in opposition to the chaotic and constant change of life. Art is a means of resisting the inherent decay, the entropy, of life. This resistance allows us to use art, and all symbols, as an anchoring focal element of a contemplative effort to measure who we are and what the world is. The intentions of the artist, the claims of the art critic, the assertions of the priest of symbols, are irrelevant here. What matters is the way we personally use symbols to discover ourselves and the world, a process that must continue through our lives.
Which brings us to the second question, “What do our bodies represent?” At one level we are physical beings, constituted by physical particles all bound by the laws of physics. Yet, by some force that science is yet to explain and will probably never explain, these particles cohere into a consciousness that can dream, play, love, wonder, think, dance, create, and so much more. And we shape this consciousness through the conversations we have with what is around us: with other people and with the symbols around us.
When we accept a schooling that teaches us to distrust our bodies and turn to external references, we cut ourselves off from this primordial source of energy and creativity. But when we allow this consciousness free play to critically and rigorously engage with people and symbols around us, we not only escape the traps of narcissism, we leverage the freedom gifted to us by our birth to evolve toward what the philosopher Morris Berman called ‘a participating consciousness’, one that is entwined with the magic, agency, and joy of the world — a far cry from the ego-based consciousness we are schooled in that steps away from the world.
Have faith in yourself, in the innate artist within you, in the consciousness you are blessed with, and persist in the conversations of discovery you can have with people and symbols. As you persist, you will become more skilled at it, just as when you play tennis for the first time you struggle to get the ball to move in the direction you want, but tenacious practice endows you, over time, with the necessary skills.
That will be the joy of your evolution. The scholar of myth, Joseph Campbell, taught us that we make a mistake in thinking we seek the meaning of life, for what we truly seek is the rapture of being alive. And we feel this rapture when we learn how to find in symbols, in the world, in our companions, echoes of our innermost being.
Q3: Any advice on making this part of our lives, how do we work with symbols as path to bridging from idea to practical? How can we be inspired by them practically?
I would resist this schism of the ideal versus the practical. It is a false dichotomy steering us toward unnecessary compromise. My advice is to be alert to two traps, and the two are closely intertwined.
The first trap is a politics of power whose orthodoxy will tell you that meaning is fixed in the purity of a certain history or geography, a certain interpretation of divinity, a certain set of symbols, with the only potential for a fulfilling life lying in abiding by these fixed meanings, and any entity that contradicts this stable meaning is something to be feared and expelled from your life.
The second trap is an academic convention that schools you toward hanging your hat on an abstraction of external references, and consequently teaches you to distrust the wonder of your own presence.
These two traps school you to discard the innate impulse you had as a child to wonder and play as means of exploring the unknown, claiming this is a naivete you must discard, urging you to seek false refuges of certainty whose borders you are hesitant to cross. If you can be alert enough to escape these two traps, you will find the challenge is not formidable, for all you must do is unleash an inner ability present since your birth: your consciousness, the freedom, autonomy, and agency it carries, and your innate impulse to validate and vitalise it by seeking in the symbols and people around you the image of your innermost being.
This ongoing and intimate equation with symbols will allow you to confidently navigate the unknown without fear, for the grounding of your inner being within the world gives you that ability. You become like the tribal who can wander into an unknown part of a deep forest yet feel confident of finding a way back through an acquired ability to read the signs: the stars, the sun, the wind, the sounds, and smells of the forest, and more. And the symbols you enfold into your life are a resource of additional guides that can be used, just like in the children’s tale of Hansel and Gretel who drop a trail of pebbles when led into a forest to be abandoned and use this trail to find their way home.
As your ability to read the signs enhances over time with practice, as your consciousness participates further in the world, it expands to apprehend an inherently generous world that keeps offering new possibilities. You will discover new symbols, new readings within the same symbols, new dimensions of yourself, new worlds.
This spirit of the world is eloquently conveyed in a prose passage from the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke. He talks of memories here, but the same argument applies to symbols. Rilke writes, “And yet it is not enough to have memories. You must be able to forget them when they are many, and you must have the immense patience to wait until they return. For the memories themselves are not important. Only when they have changed into our very blood, into glance and gesture, and are nameless, no longer to be distinguished from ourselves — only then can it happen that in some very rare hour the first word of a poem arises in their midst and goes forth from them.”
