Everything is a symbol therefore everything is culture

“A little learning

is a dangerous thing

…”

 Alexander Pope

I’m not here, and perhaps I wouldn’t have been able, to explain the word “symbol” linguistically. It is a word of a certain age and comes from the ancient Greek and means “identity card”, (Wikipedia). I use it, in this article, as an idea, interpretation, concept, knowledge, culture and, above all, I use it as our second nature: the first is natural, the second cultural. We’ll deal with it in this article.

I repeat the title: “Everything is a symbol, therefore everything is culture”, therefore human. Outside of the human, everything is nature, a phenomenon whose origins and substance are and remain a question mark, and a question mark is even the one who is writing here. Instead, if nature is seen in human terms, then everything becomes personal interpretation, subjectivity, sense and nonsense. Instinct, honesty, falsehood, arrogance, beauty, science, killing, on the other hand, are culture, therefore symbol, therefore human.

As far as we know, no other species on Earth except homo-species has ever expressed his thoughts in written or spoken words. Only the homo-species did it. The world and the universe are his story, his biography.

In what follows I’ll propose the “symbol” as a fundamental and unique idea of our second nature: culture.

Let’s start like this: man is the world, but the world is not man. The world is just an interpretation of man. There are certainly other worlds in the universe, but we don’t know them. Man is therefore a symbol, a symbol crowned with meanings all conceived and expressed by himself. The world and the universe are an image of man encapsulated in phenomena transformed into signs or symbols.

We know that neither celestial, nor terrestrial, or marine animals have ever expressed themselves in spoken or written judgment regarding their doings, only man has done so, only he speaks of the world and of those who live in it, but the world doesn’t speak of man, would have said Immanuel Kant. Or, if you prefer, man knows culture, but culture doesn’t know man. The symbols bear the name and the meaning that man gives them, not vice versa. The tree, in nature, has no name, no meaning, it is just an object, a phenomenon, a body, a substance like many others; the same goes for the bird, the insect, the stars, the sky, thus, for the homo-species, all these phenomena become symbols, therefore, in a unique word, man.

Symbology is a definition of concrete and abstract phenomena described and substantiated by the human being. Science, anthropology, geometry, all real and unreal symbols are created by the human species. The moon is a real object so a real symbol; mathematics, instead, is an unreal symbol. Both concepts, mathematics and the moon, are a definition of the species-homo. Without the latter they wouldn’t exist.

The world is a subjective, individual expression, description, argument. Man, whether he knows it or not, lives in a universe sculpted entirely by him. Only man is the conscious subject of his doing and being. It is he who gives sense and meaning to every atom and every creature or phenomenon in the whole universe. Everything is seen and marked by man. The universe is an idea, a representation, an interpretation of man. In short, the world is man and man only and we, perhaps, haven’t yet understood it!

Is there any difference between the symbols? Yes, there is. The symbols that describe real phenomena are truer than those symbols that describe unreal things: I see the goat, but I don’t see the conscience. We can reduce everything to a thought of man, therefore to a single universal symbol created by man: the universe is human, otherwise doesn’t exist.

Symbolically we are gods, other gods don’t exist. Indians, Egyptians, Greeks, Europeans, South American gods are inventions created by man. To believe and talk about gods and goddesses today is to spit nonsense and vulgarity on ourselves.

All of our narration is nothing than our narration: we who narrate and paint ourselves. The history of the homo-species is gathered in a single symbol: the symbol of the homo-species.

This discovery, the discovery that we are just a symbol, a symbol and nothing else, is alarming, but also something artistic and positive: we understood finally and definitely who we really are!

When we say that everything is a symbol, we really mean it. Man is the father and creator of the symbol, therefore of the world, of the universe, of the first particle, of the whole that surrounds him at 360 degrees. He is the Symbol (the capital S fits here) of symbols. The species, history, philosophy, science, cosmology, technology, particles, everything from a to z, is a symbol, an invention of man to give himself, consciously or unconsciously, a sign of recognition or whatever you like to call it.

If we desire to understand the world we live in, we must understand the meaning of the “Symbol”, because this is the soul, the heart and the brain of the whole universe and of life. The universe is us but not us the universe.

The symbol is an irreducible concept, clear and total in all the imaginable and unimaginable visions and interpretations that one could make of it. It encloses everything about our life, our history and how we see ourselves and of other phenomena.

All what we are and think of ourselves, has to do with us and only with us. We are temporary signs and we identify and recognize ourselves as symbols.

The discovery that man is only a symbol is also, till today, the most important discovery that humanity has made in all of its history. There are no more myths, gods, fairy tales, fiction, because, with this new discovery everything has become a symbol, hence man. The world is a theatre, says Shakespeare, and man is its Symbol and its Actor.

The copyright of “Everything is a symbol, therefore everything is culture,” is mine. Thank you, and thank you for reading me.