The corporeal dimensions of prayer before icons are often attributed to superstition, antiquated beliefs, or a “graced” function of metaphysical participation. In contrast to this, I develop a phenomenological analysis of corporeal substitution as a real possibility of ordinary experience, for an absent person we love strongly can come to presence in a thing before us and provoke a corporeal response. Guided by the story of the acheiropoieton, the “icon made without hands,” I show how the structure of this ordinary human practice is altered when elevated to prayerful substitution, and through its repetition over time, this allows the icon to serve as a means of communion for the believer across both visual and corporeal dimensions.

The aim of this chapter is to show how objects of beauty in the world indirectly exhibit the supersensible “without,” that is, the Idea of the highest good. This I take is the meaning of Kant’s claim that beauty is a “symbol of morality.” The fact that the experience of beauty serves as a sign that the world may be hospitable for the realization of the highest good can have a merely psychological significance, namely, that of maintaining the existent moral disposition. Yet, the significance of this sign can move beyond its merely psychological effects insofar as it reinforces the view that the final end must be the end of nature. The experience of beauty renders the Idea of the highest good objectively real in a special way, which adds the cognitive dimension to aesthetic experience that is best explained in proximity to Kant’s notion of practical cognition.

The underlying proposition, that translation is a model or homologue of ecological action, involves the rejection of notions of preservation and conservation. For their own continuing health, ecosystems need to be conducted in the same spirit as a translational act. The chapter then turns to Uexküll’s concept of Umwelt and its apprpriateness to translational thinking; then to its legacy in biosemiotics. How, then, does translational language achieve that perlocutionary ability to re-immerse us in the environment? Through the cultivation of idiolect and alternity (Steiner), and of situatedness and presentness of the voice, particularly in articulation, paralanguage and rhythm, which envelope the verbal with the non-verbal and allow the human to slide towards the non-human. Equally language must be coaxed in the direction of the indexical, iconic and onomatopoeic, more flexibly understood; and language must be translated into forms and shapes unfamiliar to itself so that it can explore other models of psycho-perception. Arguments in the chapter are exemplified in translations of Hugo, Saint-John Perse, Heredia, Baudelaire and Hopkins.

Though a priest at Delphi, Plutarch resolutely refuses to give us what we would most like to have: an insider’s view of the oracular shrine and an account of the religio sacerdotis. What he does tell us about varieties of religious belief is largely negative (On Superstition), and the corresponding positive account is difficult to reconstruct. He has, however, a commitment to inquiry and to the interrogation of the polyvalent symbols of religion and of myth. Reductive solutions are rejected, along with any interpretations that would lead to a decrease of piety. In the myths that he creates for his own dialogues, in imitation of Plato, he generates his most characteristic and memorable rhetorical exercises in the sublime. Once misleadingly branded "theosophical essays," these myths are in fact virtuoso display pieces that show Plutarch at his best as a writer and educator.

This chapter focuses on the power of words and images. It introduces basic concepts that are pivotal in verbal, visual, and multimodal communication. First, it discusses writing in the digital age and explores the media linguistic mindset that is required in rapidly changing digital environments. Furthermore, a set of sixteen key practices of focused writing and writing-by-the way in the newsroom and beyond are presented. The second part of the chapter covers theoretical concepts of visual communication by addressing different approaches to reading images. One pivotal approach is social semiotics – a grand theory that can be applied to all kinds of semiotic material used for communication. This approach is complemented with concepts from other semiotic traditions as well as rhetorical and critical theories about images and their effects on the users. In addition, certain questions related to multimodal communication and related key concepts are discussed. The chapter concludes with the main message that all forms of human communication are multimodal.

This chapter analyzes a very different sense in which “demythologization” is sometimes used: referring not to the wholesale abandonment of mythological narratives but to their fragmentation and deformation as individual characters are ripped out of their narrative context in order to function as stand-alone symbols. Prior scholarship has consistently conflated the two phenomena. For critical leverage here I analyze the development of particular genres of sarcophagi, such as those showing frisky sea creatures, while also stepping outside the funerary domain to consider questions of narrative and allegory raised by sculpture in the round and ensembles of domestic wall paintings.

This chapter explores the prominence of the arts and their cognate vocations in near-future fiction, and how they act as a way of scaling up the domestic near future to appease the spatial demands of planetary ecological emergency. In Arcadia by Lauren Groff (2013), art acts like myth and climate events in Chapters 1–2, shrinking climate change to the scale of the body. However, in The History of Bees by Maja Lunde (2015) and 10:04 by Ben Lerner (2015), the artwork models the social totality, though this entails both an authoritarian overwriting of individual identity and the desertion of narrative and history. Such a totality suggests Romantic theorisations of the symbol, situating the domestic near future in a literary history in which the symbol has been a compensatory device for a revolutionary history that has painfully faltered. Blade Runner 2049 (dir. Denis Villeneuve, 2017) both provides a glimpse of this revolutionary dynamic and an exemplary desertion of it, as it moves away from an opening centred on latent class solidarity and revolution to become a quest adventure to locate the domestic near future, vested in an artist and their parent–child relationship.

This new collection enables students and general readers to appreciate Coleridge’s renewed relevance 250 years after his birth. An indispensable guide to his writing for twenty-first-century readers, it contains new perspectives that reframe his work in relation to slavery, race, war, post-traumatic stress disorder and ecological crisis. Through detailed engagement with Coleridge’s pioneering poetry, the reader is invited to explore fundamental questions on themes ranging from nature and trauma to gender and sexuality. Essays by leading Coleridge scholars analyse and render accessible his extraordinarily innovative thinking about dreams, psychoanalysis, genius and symbolism. Coleridge is often a direct and gripping writer, yet he is also elusive and diverse. This Companion’s great achievement is to offer a one-volume entry point into his incomparably rich and varied world.

This new collection enables students and general readers to appreciate Coleridge’s renewed relevance 250 years after his birth. An indispensable guide to his writing for twenty-first-century readers, it contains new perspectives that reframe his work in relation to slavery, race, war, post-traumatic stress disorder and ecological crisis. Through detailed engagement with Coleridge’s pioneering poetry, the reader is invited to explore fundamental questions on themes ranging from nature and trauma to gender and sexuality. Essays by leading Coleridge scholars analyse and render accessible his extraordinarily innovative thinking about dreams, psychoanalysis, genius and symbolism. Coleridge is often a direct and gripping writer, yet he is also elusive and diverse. This Companion’s great achievement is to offer a one-volume entry point into his incomparably rich and varied world.

In Chapter 5, I look at how revelation is understood in Catholic theology. There are two fundamental approaches to understanding this concept: the propositional ('static') and the relational ('dynamic'), which are sometimes at odds with one another. While propositional accounts provide the conditions of possibility (and impossibility) for conversations about God’s revelation to take place, and provide principles against which the discernment of truth can be evaluated, propositions can harden and become brittle as they are brought into new contexts. When this happens, the symbolic nature of all talk of God is forgotten, and the literal sense is brought to the fore. Propositions are weaponised and used in authoritarian ways to resist difference and change. This alienates the church from the culture/s in which it is embedded, making some of its choices and actions inexplicable and others indefensible. I then consider the relationship between revelation and tradition more closely. I argue that the proper work of developing tradition is not to defend propositions that have ceased to promote authentic reflection on revelation in dialogue with the context, but to renew what lies at its heart.

This chapter will argue that the ontological categories that we require for understanding meaning and meaning composition in natural language cannot be exclusively proxied by external objects in the world or judgments of truth. In other words, a set of metaphysically justified ontological objects is not what is required for natural language ontology, and the latter field should be considered a distinct philosophical and analytical exercise. The chapter takes as its central empirical ground the meaning of ’nonfinite’ verb forms in English. Paradoxes relating to the English progressive and passive constructions will be examined to show that lexical conceptual content needs to be defined more essentially, and that the integration of such essentialist content into forms which ultimately have extensionalist import requires the reification of the symbol qua symbol and the explicit representation of the utterance situation.

This chapter dwells on the beauty of a woman’s hair and explains the cultural value attached to the head. The hair is seen as an agentive part of the body, crucial to the wholesome understanding of the entire human framework. It can distinguish gender. For example, the Kojusoko hairstyle is “forbidden” for men. Furthermore, Kojusoko (meaning “face your husband”) is not only known for distinguishing between gender, but also for describing women. The discipline and values inherent in the message being expressed are the typical moral standards of the Yoruba. Besides the gender role and message being conveyed by hairstyles, hairstyles also express spiritual connotations. For example, there is traditional importance to the loose state of the hair of a mourning woman. Other occasions include “naming, cult festivities, pageantry, and celebrations.” With pictorial evidence, the chapter emphasizes how hair shows age, identity, religion, political status, or social categorization and differences in the styles adopted at executing the patterns and drawing the lines, as well as the length used.

This chapter beams the light on the artistry achievements of Africans and signifies their “flourishing culture.” The major aspect of artistry being celebrated is sculptures. From this chapter, one is able to deduce that the carvings are such that “Yoruba history and culture can be perceived, interpreted and understood” through them. They manifest in many forms (materially), such as bronze, clay, stone, and wood, all of whom were discussed to fully understand and appreciate the creativity inherent in the African culture before and after colonialism. With several references to specific sculptural works and pictorial evidence, mostly from his personal collection, the author describes how Yoruba sculptors (Gbenagbena or Gbegilere) translate and manipulate natural elements and past-but-relevant happenings into artistic objects. Also discussed is the measure of a sculptor’s worth, which cannot be defined by Western currency but by the level of creativity and beauty apparent in his artwork, some of which depict African cultural ideas, principles, and attributes, such as Omoluabi, Iwapele, Didan, and Idogba. The chapter extensively discusses the importance sculptors place on the head, and also defends African sculptures against Western criticism.

Retraces how Cassirer transforms Kant’s transcendental philosophy into a philosophy of culture in The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. First, Cassirer abandons Kant’s notion of the category and instead models his conception of the symbol on the schema from The Critique of Judgment (2.1). Second, he understands such symbols as constituting not only the theoretical, practical, and aesthetic sphere, but all cultural domains, including myth, language, and the human sciences (2.2). This forces Cassirer to adopt two conceptions of objectivity: a constitutive conception that pertains to each cultural domain (or ‘symbolic forms’) and a regulative conception that befits human culture as a whole (2.3).

The chapter focuses on Kant’s rather surprising claim that although we cannot have any direct cognition in metaphysics, we can nonetheless have “cognition by analogy” of things such as God and the world-whole. While Kant says relatively little about what this involves, the essay makes the case that cognition by analogy, and in particular the symbolic cognition of God, shows that Kant’s account of how we meet the criteria for cognition is far more flexible than is typically recognized. The analysis of Kant’s use of analogy more generally widens the scope of how we as humans, who are at once sensible and intelligible, stand in relation to the world of experience.

This chapter begins with a discussion of the Hegelian background to Marx’s thought and then attempts to situate him in the radical German emigration in Paris, Brussels and London, between 1843 and 1850. Until the summer of 1850, Marx continued to believe that a working-class uprising in France would provoke a revolutionary upheaval that would engulf Europe. In Class Struggles and The 18th Brumaire, Marx draws lessons for the German working class from the defeats of the French proletariat between 1848 and 1851. He does so by systematically contrasting the world of historical reality, the class struggle, and the realm of shadow and illusion in which historical actors fancy that their speeches and parliamentary manoeuvres make a difference. He explains brilliantly how Louis-Napoleon could have appeared as a saviour to the impoverished small peasantry. What is most striking about these essays is their rhetorical power – the literary skill with which Marx evokes the ghosts and shadows, the dreams, riddles and masquerades that constitute the realm of ideology and illusion. Marx’s essays on 1848–1851 give substance to his theories of ideology and false consciousness and do so in a way that fuses the spellbinding power of the imagery with the spell-banishing power of the historian.

Moral progress is understood religiously as the hope that despite our having begun from evil, we can make ourselves well-pleasing to God. This hope rests on the hope that we have undergone the change of heart, which is symbolized in rational religion as faith in the Son of God or the ideal of humanity well-pleasing to God. Understanding this requires further investigation of the role of symbols and analogy in religion, which was discussed in Chapter 1. The hope to become well-pleasing to God is threatened by three difficulties, two of them based on doubts that we have undergone the change of heart or can sustain it in our lives, and the third (and greatest) based on the fact that we began from evil and have incurred a guilt we cannot wipe out. The hope to become well-pleasing to God therefore depends on God’s decree of grace. We can understand this in terms of God’s forgiveness – not the forgiveness of a debt but God’s willingness to accept our change of heart as an atonement making us morally receptive to his freely given mercy.