[313] even historical scenes can become symbols for something which transcends the immediate situation. Now this about visual symbols,^a or symbols in visual arts. Let me also speak of plastic or sculpture, namely bodies, either human bodies or non-representative bodies (you can find them in all modern museums) which do not represent naturalistically any special body (only from very far away), but which represent the standing of the body in space and the infinite possibilities of spatial extension. They are a reality, but they are at the same time something which points beyond the immediately given here. Now you will hear more about this in a little different context later on.

I now come to symbols^b in poetry^c. In poetry we have words, but words with their meanings. Now if words communicating meanings are used, then we come immediately to something which must be added, namely in a poetic language, it is not the mere definable meaning which a word has, but it is the mass of connotations which a word always brings with itself. Only in the reflective symbolism of mathematics, mathematical logic, calculating physics, etc., do we have the reduction of symbols to signs, to signs which are everything they are in terms of their definition, and beyond this they are nothing. LIVING language is always more than the immediate meaning of the words. And my main criticism of a philosophy which demands of us to use only words which are as much defined and as exclusively defined as mathematical signs and signs of symbolic logic, [is that it] deprives philosophy of the possibility of mediating an image of reality, which a philosophy always wanted to do.