The Primal Force in Symbol: Understanding the Language of Higher Consciousness

Rene Alleau's The Primal Force in Symbol: Understanding the Language of Higher Consciousness brings into English an intelligence of some interest. Not widely known on these shores, Alleau, along with other colleagues, has sought to reframe our relationship to symbols and symbology: what they mean, how they function, and what they imply in terms of experience, cognition, community and myth.   Initially a student of Gaston Bachelard, Alleau has focused his research on alchemy and the occult sciences and, in several instances, on their relationship to modern poetics. In doing so, and certainly with a bow to his mentor, he has found a methodology that derives from two sources: a critique of the logic of identify and an embrace of the logic of analogy. That the former has molded our intellectual traditions too much is clear; that the latter remains questionable to the former also is clear. And yet it is to this process, the analogical, that Alleau appeals as a primary axis from which to understand the forces in symbols and symbology. And it is by the analogical that Alleau depicts the relationships we seem to have lost in large part between the human, suprahuman and infra human, which myth and mythopoesis reveal through symbols.

As a thinker drawn to synthesis between various experiences and disciplines, Alleau also is cautious enough not to accept the constraints too often imposed upon them as definitive while using such constraints to effect. His vivacity here -- "every experience and every concept has meaning only as an experiential and conceptual increase" - may obscure for some readers the general point of his work, especially in regard to our current crises, where horizons seem less important than tangible gains. But, I suspect, for most readers drawn to Alleau, the larger frames of reference will prevail.

For Alleau, "symbolism - the use of symbols - is not a conceptual or predetermined process," which semiology alone can resolve. Nor should we reduce a symbol to an image that resides within it. Alleau's reasoning here is simple but not simplistic, and refers him again to an active sense of mythopoesis. At the same time, Alleau's hermeneutic, his very style of interpretation, entails an informed, dynamic appreciation of the lived context of ritual, without which all specificity is lost and further reflection becomes specious.

Integral with anthropological, poetic, and theological perspectives, this approach to the symbol and symbology offers a means that scholars, explorers, and cultural creators can profit from. How they do so, of course, is completely up to them, for the work is as much a provocation for original research as a clearing of accounts that have reached their surfeit.

The book progresses from the origin and semantics of the word symbol to the analogical, the syntheme, allegory, myth and rite, and concludes with a critique of the bourgeois philosophy of the symbol, as rooted in Hegel. Appendices recount the formation in 1962 of the Cahiers Internationaux de Symbolisme, a scholarly   forum for the diverse group of academics and professionals who contribute to it, and various other like meetings and colloquia. A final text by Gilbert Durand ends the appendices.

In concluding his book, Alleau quotes from a colleague, Dan Sperber, who puts it precisely: "Rethinking symbolism also means reconsidering the ideological frameworks of our sensibility." And thus this book, and hopefully others from Rene Alleau.