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A Imaginação Simbólica
Cada vez que se abordan los problemas del símbolo, del simbolismo y su desciframiento, se presenta una ambigüedad fundamental. El símbolo no solamente posee un doble sentido: uno concreto, propio, y el otro alusivo y figurado, sino que incluso la clasificación de los símbolos nos revela los “regímenes” antagónicos bajo los cuales se ordenan las imágenes. Más aún: el símbolo no sólo es un doble, ya que se clasifica en dos grandes categorías, sino que incluso las hermenéuticas son dobles: unas reductivas, “arqueológicas”, otras instauradoras, amplificadoras y “escatológicas”. Es que la imaginación simbólica es negación vital de manera dinámica, negación de la nada de la muerte y del tiempo. Esta esencia dialéctica del símbolo se manifiesta en muchos planos, y Gilbert Durand la examina partiendo del psicoanálisis freudiano y llegando a la teofanía, para encontrar a la imaginación simbólica confundiéndose con la marcha de toda la cultura humana. Pues es en el irremediable desgarramiento entre la fugacidad de la imagen y la perennidad del sentido que constituye el símbolo donde se refugia la totalidad de la cultura de los hombres, como una mediación perpetua entre su Esperanza y su condición temporal.
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First published January 1, 1964
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
June 20, 2021
Y bienvenidos al mundo de los símbolos, ¡explore y maravíllese!
July 24, 2023
This booklet offered me an entry into the work of Gilbert Durand, an author I was not previously acquainted with and whom I discovered, I seem to remember, through fleeting references in the writings of esotericist scholar Antoine Faivre. Most of Durand's work seems not to have been translated and is only accessible in the original French. He was born in 1921, became a decorated French Résistance fighter during WWII, went on to study with Gaston Bachelard to become a highly respected authority in the field of cultural anthropology and mythology. For the best part of his career he held an academic chair in sociology and anthropology at the University of Grenoble II. In the 1960s he founded the Centre de Recherches sur l'Imaginaire (CRI). The 'imaginary' and the 'imaginal' are Durand's distinctive areas of research. His seminal work is his book Les structures anthropologiques de l'imaginaire, published in 1960. The shorter work I'm reviewing here appeared in 1964 and can be read as a sort of summary of or introduction to the main opus.
Durand's project is grounded in his observation that "the basic disease from which our culture may be dying is man's minimization of images and myths, as well as his faith in a positivist, rationalist, aseptized civilization." (quote taken from a translated essay by Durand in B. Sells, Working with Images: The Theoretical Base of Archetypal Psychology). In response, Durand develops an approach to apprehend the role of images, symbols and myths in human societies. L'imagination symbolique is a compact introduction to Durand's symbology, which functions as the theoretical principle underlying all mythologies.
In the introductory chapter Durand provides an outline of his symbology. Symbols are a subset of the broader category of signs. Signs facilitate an indirect representation of the world. Symbols more specifically establish a link between a human lifeworld and a referent that is inaccessible to human perception (say, the afterllfe, or the unconscious, or any transcendental entity that cannot be directly apprehended). The relationship between symbol and referent is therefore epiphanic. A symbol can be gestural (ritual), linguistic (myth) or iconographic (image). Characteristic is the play of redundancies in the relationship between sign and referent: a given symbol can incarnate a wide range of 'qualities', and, vice versa, the transcendental realm can infuse all aspects of our sensible reality. It is through this play of redundancies that the fundamental inadequacy between sign and referent is being negotiated.
Chapter I offers a succinct historiography of what Durand calls 'Western iconoclasm', i.e. the process of marginalisation of symbols in our culture. Platonism was an apogee of symbolic imagination. The fundamental problem addressed by it was the link between the sensible world and the world of Ideas and it leveraged a symbolic function to mediate between these two realms. In the centuries that followed this symbolic imagination was progressively censored by Christian dogmatism, Aristotelian conceptualism and, finally, Cartesian scientism. Durand sees this process as initiated and sustained by the desire of a religious orthodoxy to prohibit the prerogative of personal gnosis, to eliminate the mediating function of Woman, and to quash human freedom to literally make meaning as part of a concrete spirituality. The Roman Catholic Church wanted to avoid personal enlightenment in favour of an uncritical internalisation of dogmatic truths.
Chapter II deals with the rediscovery and of the imaginal in our times, initially in form of the reductionist hermeneutics of the emerging disciplines of psychology (Freud) and ethnology (Dumézil, Lévi-Strauss). These approaches tried to fit symbolic imagination into a prosaic intellectualism with a bearing on the psychoanalytic and the (functionally or linguistically) structuralist respectively.
In Chapter III Durand highlights 20th century attempts at a more "instaurative" hermeneutics. He devotes a few pages to the work of Ernst Cassirer, who developed a symbolic anthropology based on Kant's legacy. His perspective is evolutionary and considers myth as a propaedeutic and ultimately degenerated form of symbolic imagination. But Cassirer still sees science as the provisional summit of the unfolding process of symbolization that is characteristic of humanity. Durand disagrees with this assessment. It was Jung who restored symbolisation, activated in the particular form of symbol-archetypes, to its proper mediating function between consciousness and the collective unconscious, hence becoming the engine of the process of individuation. A dynamic and 'poietic' (i.e. generative) relationship between symbol and world - at micro and macro levels - is also at the heart of Bachelard's symbolic cosmology. Durand's project takes its cue from this nodal insight and sees his work a basically an extrapolation and generalisation of Bachelard's attempt to build a world wherein human beings might feel truly at home.
In Chapter IV Durand outlines his main ambition to restore the symbolic imaginary as the main driver behind psychosocial homeostasis, at the individual and at societal level. To explain this he posits a dialectic between a diurnal and a nocturnal symbolic regime. Anthropologically this plays out at psychophysiological, pedagogical and cultural levels. Symbolic imagination keeps these antagonistic forces more or less in balance. If it doesn't we are faced with all kinds of pathologies. The more intricate this dialectical play is, the more an individual or a community is able to engage on a path of integrative transformation. To make sense of this process human beings need to rely on an hermeneutics. Following Paul Ricoeur and acknowledging the reality of six centuries of commitment to a positivist project, Durand accepts that we need both the Freudian hermeneutics of demystification as the Bachelardian hermeneutics of remythisation. But the latter carries more weight, as "there exist non-faustian societies, without scientific researchers and psychoanalysts, but there are no societies without poets and artists, without values." There is also an ethical choice implied. The so-to-speak Freudian way roots in the brutal acceptance of our mortality. Remythisation is eschatological, lets hope carry us beyond our horizon of our mortality.
Chapter V retraces the ambit of Gilbert Durand's project of an 'open' or 'opening humanism'. Symbolic imagination is a dynamic process of meaning making, of confirming the reality of transcendence in a world incarnated in mortal flesh. This vitalising function of symbolic imagination, through its diurnal-nocturnal dialectic, manifests itself at different levels: the biological, the psychosocial, the planetary and anthropological and the transcendental. "The totality of human culture is encompassed by the irremediable rift between the fleetingness of the image and the perennity of the meaning constituted by the symbol."
One cannot be but enchanted by the enormous breadth and breath of this compact book and by its fundamentally empowering message.
Durand's project is grounded in his observation that "the basic disease from which our culture may be dying is man's minimization of images and myths, as well as his faith in a positivist, rationalist, aseptized civilization." (quote taken from a translated essay by Durand in B. Sells, Working with Images: The Theoretical Base of Archetypal Psychology). In response, Durand develops an approach to apprehend the role of images, symbols and myths in human societies. L'imagination symbolique is a compact introduction to Durand's symbology, which functions as the theoretical principle underlying all mythologies.
In the introductory chapter Durand provides an outline of his symbology. Symbols are a subset of the broader category of signs. Signs facilitate an indirect representation of the world. Symbols more specifically establish a link between a human lifeworld and a referent that is inaccessible to human perception (say, the afterllfe, or the unconscious, or any transcendental entity that cannot be directly apprehended). The relationship between symbol and referent is therefore epiphanic. A symbol can be gestural (ritual), linguistic (myth) or iconographic (image). Characteristic is the play of redundancies in the relationship between sign and referent: a given symbol can incarnate a wide range of 'qualities', and, vice versa, the transcendental realm can infuse all aspects of our sensible reality. It is through this play of redundancies that the fundamental inadequacy between sign and referent is being negotiated.
Chapter I offers a succinct historiography of what Durand calls 'Western iconoclasm', i.e. the process of marginalisation of symbols in our culture. Platonism was an apogee of symbolic imagination. The fundamental problem addressed by it was the link between the sensible world and the world of Ideas and it leveraged a symbolic function to mediate between these two realms. In the centuries that followed this symbolic imagination was progressively censored by Christian dogmatism, Aristotelian conceptualism and, finally, Cartesian scientism. Durand sees this process as initiated and sustained by the desire of a religious orthodoxy to prohibit the prerogative of personal gnosis, to eliminate the mediating function of Woman, and to quash human freedom to literally make meaning as part of a concrete spirituality. The Roman Catholic Church wanted to avoid personal enlightenment in favour of an uncritical internalisation of dogmatic truths.
Chapter II deals with the rediscovery and of the imaginal in our times, initially in form of the reductionist hermeneutics of the emerging disciplines of psychology (Freud) and ethnology (Dumézil, Lévi-Strauss). These approaches tried to fit symbolic imagination into a prosaic intellectualism with a bearing on the psychoanalytic and the (functionally or linguistically) structuralist respectively.
In Chapter III Durand highlights 20th century attempts at a more "instaurative" hermeneutics. He devotes a few pages to the work of Ernst Cassirer, who developed a symbolic anthropology based on Kant's legacy. His perspective is evolutionary and considers myth as a propaedeutic and ultimately degenerated form of symbolic imagination. But Cassirer still sees science as the provisional summit of the unfolding process of symbolization that is characteristic of humanity. Durand disagrees with this assessment. It was Jung who restored symbolisation, activated in the particular form of symbol-archetypes, to its proper mediating function between consciousness and the collective unconscious, hence becoming the engine of the process of individuation. A dynamic and 'poietic' (i.e. generative) relationship between symbol and world - at micro and macro levels - is also at the heart of Bachelard's symbolic cosmology. Durand's project takes its cue from this nodal insight and sees his work a basically an extrapolation and generalisation of Bachelard's attempt to build a world wherein human beings might feel truly at home.
In Chapter IV Durand outlines his main ambition to restore the symbolic imaginary as the main driver behind psychosocial homeostasis, at the individual and at societal level. To explain this he posits a dialectic between a diurnal and a nocturnal symbolic regime. Anthropologically this plays out at psychophysiological, pedagogical and cultural levels. Symbolic imagination keeps these antagonistic forces more or less in balance. If it doesn't we are faced with all kinds of pathologies. The more intricate this dialectical play is, the more an individual or a community is able to engage on a path of integrative transformation. To make sense of this process human beings need to rely on an hermeneutics. Following Paul Ricoeur and acknowledging the reality of six centuries of commitment to a positivist project, Durand accepts that we need both the Freudian hermeneutics of demystification as the Bachelardian hermeneutics of remythisation. But the latter carries more weight, as "there exist non-faustian societies, without scientific researchers and psychoanalysts, but there are no societies without poets and artists, without values." There is also an ethical choice implied. The so-to-speak Freudian way roots in the brutal acceptance of our mortality. Remythisation is eschatological, lets hope carry us beyond our horizon of our mortality.
Chapter V retraces the ambit of Gilbert Durand's project of an 'open' or 'opening humanism'. Symbolic imagination is a dynamic process of meaning making, of confirming the reality of transcendence in a world incarnated in mortal flesh. This vitalising function of symbolic imagination, through its diurnal-nocturnal dialectic, manifests itself at different levels: the biological, the psychosocial, the planetary and anthropological and the transcendental. "The totality of human culture is encompassed by the irremediable rift between the fleetingness of the image and the perennity of the meaning constituted by the symbol."
One cannot be but enchanted by the enormous breadth and breath of this compact book and by its fundamentally empowering message.
August 4, 2015
În acest eseu, Gilbert Durand prezintă, pe de o parte, pledoaria pentru simbol/imagine, în contextul iconoclasmului occidental, înțeles în sens larg, iar pe de altă parte, tendința actuală de a a revaloriza imaginea și Imaginarul, ca sursă transcendentala. Trecând prin Aristotel,Freud,Jung, Levi-Strauss,Bachelard,Kant,Sartre s.a, autorul ne familiarizeaza cu destinul imaginii simbolice, această cenușăreasa a cunoașterii.
June 9, 2024
Gilbert Durand w swojej książce analizuje symbolikę, definiując symbole jako podzbiór znaków, które pośrednio przedstawiają rzeczywistość. Symbole łączą ludzki świat z nieuchwytnymi dla percepcji bytami, takimi jak życie pozagrobowe czy nieświadomość. Durand śledzi historię marginalizacji symboli w zachodniej kulturze, wskazując na platonizm jako szczyt symbolicznej wyobraźni, którą później cenzurowano przez chrześcijański dogmatyzm i kartezjański scjentyzm.
Współczesne próby przywrócenia symbolicznej wyobraźni obejmują prace Freuda, Junga i Cassirera. Jung przywrócił symbolizację do jej właściwej funkcji, pośrednicząc między świadomością a nieświadomością zbiorową, stając się motorem procesu indywidualizacji. Durand podkreśla również znaczenie kosmologii symbolicznej Bachelarda.
Durand argumentuje, że symboliczna wyobraźnia utrzymuje psychospołeczną równowagę na poziomie indywidualnym i społecznym, poprzez dialektykę między diurnalnym a nokturnalnym reżimem symbolicznym. Uznaje potrzebę zarówno freudowskiej hermeneutyki demistyfikacji, jak i bachelardowskiej hermeneutyki remityzacji, z większym naciskiem na tę drugą, ponieważ "nie ma społeczeństw bez poetów i artystów". Symboliczna wyobraźnia jest dynamicznym procesem tworzenia znaczenia, potwierdzającym transcendencję w świecie wcielonym w śmiertelne ciało, i jest kluczowa dla ludzkiej kultury.
Współczesne próby przywrócenia symbolicznej wyobraźni obejmują prace Freuda, Junga i Cassirera. Jung przywrócił symbolizację do jej właściwej funkcji, pośrednicząc między świadomością a nieświadomością zbiorową, stając się motorem procesu indywidualizacji. Durand podkreśla również znaczenie kosmologii symbolicznej Bachelarda.
Durand argumentuje, że symboliczna wyobraźnia utrzymuje psychospołeczną równowagę na poziomie indywidualnym i społecznym, poprzez dialektykę między diurnalnym a nokturnalnym reżimem symbolicznym. Uznaje potrzebę zarówno freudowskiej hermeneutyki demistyfikacji, jak i bachelardowskiej hermeneutyki remityzacji, z większym naciskiem na tę drugą, ponieważ "nie ma społeczeństw bez poetów i artystów". Symboliczna wyobraźnia jest dynamicznym procesem tworzenia znaczenia, potwierdzającym transcendencję w świecie wcielonym w śmiertelne ciało, i jest kluczowa dla ludzkiej kultury.
November 3, 2024
Me parece una excelente introducción al campo de lo imaginario y simbólico. No ahonda tanto en alguna metodología como tal, pero sí presenta la postura de Durand (es decir, quienes lo anteceden y sus propuestas, así como su perspectiva en torno al imaginario en los distintos momentos históricos y desde las distintas ciencias)
April 20, 2020
:3 :D
July 15, 2024
Niet alles begrepen maar veel bijgeleerd, het scherpte mijn manier om naar (bepaalde) kunst te kijken alleszins aan, wat precies mijn bedoeling was...
September 6, 2023
Răsfoiesc prin bibliotecă și dau peste această carte. N-am mai deschis-o de muuuuult, a trecut un secol de la prima lectură. Mă întreb imediat dacă-mi mai amintesc ceva din ea. Bizareria e că îmi amintesc un lucru precis și, am impresia, destul de interesant. Ucigașul îngerilor a fost Descartes. Ce înseamnă asta? Găsiți un răspuns mai jos. Oricum, mă declar mulțumit. Tot am rămas cu ceva. Din alte cărți nu rămîi cu nimic, nu mai ții minte nici măcar titlul.
Sprijinindu-se pe Henri Gouhier, unul dintre comentatorii cei mai prestigioși ai lui Descartes, Gilbert Durand afirmă, în Aventurile imaginii, că Evul Mediu se stinge în momentul în care dispar îngerii. Iar îngerii dispar cînd gîndirea prin intermediul simbolurilor (examinată și de Johan Huizinga în capitolul XV din faimoasa lui lucrare Amurgul Evului Mediu, intitulat „Declinul simbolismului”) este înlocuită de raționamentul rece al epocii moderne.
Dar ce sînt îngerii? Nu știm cum arată, fiindcă Biblia nu-i descrie niciodată. Asta nu i-a împiedicat pe teologi să-și imagineze structura lor „somatică”. Îngerii îndeplinesc o funcție de mediere, sînt vestitori și purtători de mesaje (ca în Bunavestire), leagă lumea de sus cu lumea muritorilor, îi veghează.
Îngerul e chiar „simbol al funcţiei simbolice însăşi”, care e aceea de a media, afirmă Durand. Simbolismul metafizic (alegoric) este acum, în vremea lui Descartes (1596 - 1650), complet epuizat. Odată cu simbolismul, îngerii înșiși se retrag. Sau sînt alungați. Gilbert Durand scrie „Aristotelismul medieval, cel ieşit din Averroes şi de la care se reclamă Siger de Brabant şi Ockham, este apologia ‘gîndirii directe’, opusă tuturor atracţiilor gîndirii indirecte” (ale gîndirii prin analogie).
Şi încă un citat (ultimul, astăzi!): „Această alunecare către lumea realismului perceptiv, în care expresionismul – chiar senzualismul – înlocuieşte evocarea simbolică, este foarte vizibilă în trecerea de la arta romanică la arta gotică. Primăvara romană a văzut cum înfloreşte o iconografie simbolică moştenită de la Orient, dar această primăvară a fost foarte scurtă faţă de cele trei secole de artă ‘occidentală’, artă numită gotică. Arta romanică este o artă ‘indirectă’, în întregime de evocare simbolică, faţă de arta gotică atît de ‘directă’”.
Sprijinindu-se pe Henri Gouhier, unul dintre comentatorii cei mai prestigioși ai lui Descartes, Gilbert Durand afirmă, în Aventurile imaginii, că Evul Mediu se stinge în momentul în care dispar îngerii. Iar îngerii dispar cînd gîndirea prin intermediul simbolurilor (examinată și de Johan Huizinga în capitolul XV din faimoasa lui lucrare Amurgul Evului Mediu, intitulat „Declinul simbolismului”) este înlocuită de raționamentul rece al epocii moderne.
Dar ce sînt îngerii? Nu știm cum arată, fiindcă Biblia nu-i descrie niciodată. Asta nu i-a împiedicat pe teologi să-și imagineze structura lor „somatică”. Îngerii îndeplinesc o funcție de mediere, sînt vestitori și purtători de mesaje (ca în Bunavestire), leagă lumea de sus cu lumea muritorilor, îi veghează.
Îngerul e chiar „simbol al funcţiei simbolice însăşi”, care e aceea de a media, afirmă Durand. Simbolismul metafizic (alegoric) este acum, în vremea lui Descartes (1596 - 1650), complet epuizat. Odată cu simbolismul, îngerii înșiși se retrag. Sau sînt alungați. Gilbert Durand scrie „Aristotelismul medieval, cel ieşit din Averroes şi de la care se reclamă Siger de Brabant şi Ockham, este apologia ‘gîndirii directe’, opusă tuturor atracţiilor gîndirii indirecte” (ale gîndirii prin analogie).
Şi încă un citat (ultimul, astăzi!): „Această alunecare către lumea realismului perceptiv, în care expresionismul – chiar senzualismul – înlocuieşte evocarea simbolică, este foarte vizibilă în trecerea de la arta romanică la arta gotică. Primăvara romană a văzut cum înfloreşte o iconografie simbolică moştenită de la Orient, dar această primăvară a fost foarte scurtă faţă de cele trei secole de artă ‘occidentală’, artă numită gotică. Arta romanică este o artă ‘indirectă’, în întregime de evocare simbolică, faţă de arta gotică atît de ‘directă’”.
September 19, 2019
Relido em setembro de 2019.
Não entendo por que motivo eu não lembrava de ter feito essa leitura em 2015 (provavelmente porque estava lendo muitas coisas ao mesmo tempo). Gostei demais da abordagem clara que vai da iconoclastia ocidental, passando pelo tratamento redutor do símbolo (especial psicanálise freudiana e antropologia social) até chegar às hermenêuticas fundadoras, como Bachelard, muito bem sintetizado. As estruturas antropológicas do imaginário também são explicadas, ñ sei se de modo satisfatório... é complicado resumir aquilo tudo.
Não entendo por que motivo eu não lembrava de ter feito essa leitura em 2015 (provavelmente porque estava lendo muitas coisas ao mesmo tempo). Gostei demais da abordagem clara que vai da iconoclastia ocidental, passando pelo tratamento redutor do símbolo (especial psicanálise freudiana e antropologia social) até chegar às hermenêuticas fundadoras, como Bachelard, muito bem sintetizado. As estruturas antropológicas do imaginário também são explicadas, ñ sei se de modo satisfatório... é complicado resumir aquilo tudo.
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