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BIRTH OF THE SYMBOLIC THOUGHT

Licia Filingeri

Emerging of the ability of symbolization, with regard to our species, is a moment of very great importance.

The symbolization, process by which an idea stays in the place of another, or its proprieties are transferred from the one to the other, also in lack of verbal language, allows knowledge and sharing of informations in an increased sphere of people, and therefore it assumes the role of modulator of the same associative life.

The symbolisation can be defined as the capability to derive abstract concepts from perceptual informations coming from all sensorial modalities, as already lightened by sovietic psychologist Lurija, organizing conceptually the concrete informations and executing on these symbolic operations.

Swiss psychologist Piaget suggested that the origin of the conceptual system was in sensory-motor interiorized schemas.
Today we know that the understanding of the meaning does not have its localization only in the neocortex; verbal and not verbal channels of elaboration are equally important.

With regard to the cognitive development, we know that not verbal perceptive codified informations , on the basis of perceptive and sensory-motor procedures, beginning from categorization and/or confrontation, ready to be in their turn described again through verbal language, are prematurely described in patterns of images.

We dispose of semantic categories and concepts based on not propositional images, extrahing a subset of informations from what received : the sensory categories form the basis of abstract concepts: it is a true sensory analysis based on a innate mechanism apt to the sensory analysis, perceptively searching characteristics of regularity . Such schematizations, according to J. Mandler (1992), precede the verbal language , and are independent from it.

The categorization, preliminary requisite of the conceptualization, is a much efficient mental operation in order to organize the thought, in how much facilitates recording, retention, elaboration and restitution of complex informations.

If it is true that a part of the cognitive structure of the man was (and is) constituted according to intuitive and analogic procdure, is equally true that, in parallel with this modality, must be developed a symbolic organization with other tasks, like demonstrated from the existence of religious rituals, beginning from the graves and their modalities and the production of stone sculpture, tied to a religious ritual instance.

The frame in which this process it is inscripted is constituted, ab originis, from the need of organization and social communication, which implies also a menagement of the emotions . From the more recent studies, we know that representational prototypes of emotions, as images, group the subsimbolic experiences, preceding the verbal language, in classes functional to the interpersonal communication. Therefore, the mental representations are shaped on the basis of informations, memorized and organized in categories and modules.

According to the researches of W.Bucci on the multiple code, we want to support here the hypothesis that the man, at his origins, elaborated perceptions, coming from the inner or external world, in not verbal subsymbolic modality, through prototypic images, like metaphors of the schema of the emotion, prototypic not verbal symbols correlated to the emotion (Cfr. W. Bucci, 1997) .

It is possible therefore that the man has begun to categorize images, dividing inductively the world around himself in basic categories, like organic and inorganic, as categories immediately evident in virtue of theyr permanent and essential characteristic , as the life for generation and the end of its material characteristics for death.

We know besides that the psychology of the gender Homo has, like its peculiar and characteristic connotation, a representational system, in which the conscious motivations insert themselves at genetic level, modifying the gene and therefore changing fondamentally the evolution, beginning from the Hominid.
As exemple, we can here remember that, between these adaptive conscious informations, there are the homicide, the killing people having informations precious for the conservation of the individual, information about suicide, with the necessity to feel emotions of reference like contempt.

Which evidences of symbolic thought at the beginning of the mankind?

The neurosciences have supplied evidences that the differentiation of the cerebral areas connected with the language (area of Broca and Wemicke definitively identifyied in the endocranium of Homo habilis), is to this purpose of the greatest interest.

This has opened the road to a cultural behavior that, as it is known, demands abstraction ability (and therefore to plan intentionally, extending the present moment) and the simbolyzation, that in its turn enriches of meant and value the cultural realizations, beginning from those techniques (functional symbolism, against the spiritual).

The man creator of tools and art, and with that in a position to communicating the personal inner world, appears therefore since the origins, possessing the cognitive instruments and creating materiallythrough these.

The custom to bury the dead men, instead abandoning of the corpse unburied, is strong indication of symbolic thought, closely correlated with the emotional life. We know from the remains that such ritual came enriched from ulterior cures lend to the crpses after the death, as the use of cover the body or the skeleton with precious red ocher.


Some examples.
In Africa,at Blombos Cave, 200 miles East Cape Town, Christopher S.Henshilwood, archaeologist of the South African Museum of Cape Town and professor associated to the University of State of New York, Stony Brook, with Francesco d' Errico of the Institute of Preihistory of Talence, France, and other scholars, ( see Henshilwood, 2001) found remains of 70000 years ago.
These remains demonstrate symbolic thought; near boneses of animals fine worked in order to make tools and tips of arrow (activity that reveals the presence of concepts preliminary to the execution, moreover of abstract thought), have been found 8000 red ocher pieces, some of which recorded with signs of symbolic character, manifestation of abstract and creative thought, and, obviously, of the presence of a language for thinking and comminication.
According to Henshilwood, "Symbolic thinking means that people to are using something to mean something else. The tools I give not have to have only practical purpose. And the ocher might be used to decorated their equipment, perhaps themselves. That is to symbol of something else, which we don' t understand. These But it suggests that people must have had articulate speech to conceive and communicate such symbolism." (New York Times, december 2, 2001)

At Qafzeh Cave, Israel, have been found human remains of Homo sapiens of 90000 years ago, painted with red ocher, with 71 ocher pieces: the discoverers, between which Erella Hovers ( Institute of Archaeology of the European University di Jerusalem ), have stressed the symbolic behavior, pointed from the association of the red color with the death.
Also Sally McBrearty( Department of Anthropology of the University of the Connecticut in Storrs, U.S.A ) asserts that the working of ocher in this cave adds evidence to "the very great antiquity of the color red as symbolic category." (see < Stone Age Code Red: Scarlet symbols emerge in Israeli cave ; see also An Early Case of Color Symbolism Ochre Use by Modern Humans in Qafzeh Cave by Erella Hovers, Shimon Ilani, Ofer Bar-Yosef, and Bernard Vandermeersch.).


In the Khavcekh cave, Israel ( see < How old is symbolic thinking? ), have been found human boneses covered of red ocher ; the discoverers have inferred the presence of symbolic thought., on the basis of the association with the colors (dating: 100000 years ago).It is a testimony of the presence of symbolic transcendental in rapport to a concrete plan, as can be the fabrication of a tool, in order to place itself in a pure speculative and emotional area, in which the hypothesis regard the fundamental question of the man about the sense of his existence and his destiny beyond the vicissitude of this ground.
T.W.Deacon (Boston University, U.S.A) says that the regulation and defense of the reproductive aspect of the human life would be the motivating force, that has made to release the resort to the symbolic thought. Just the " exclusive requests of the competition and reproductive cooperation [... to create ] the preconditions of our peculiar shape of intelligence" (Deacon , T.W., (1997), The co-evolution of language and the brain, N.Y., Norton & Company, inc, p.394 it. translation). The social behavior, for being universally knewn and condivisibile, has had necessarily to be translated in symbolic shape, beginning from the necessity to safeguard the reproduction and survival of the couple and the progeny, otherwise indiscriminate, defenseless and adrift. We can say that it has been been a strongest push based on an egoistic altruism.
Such strong requirement is expressed and knewn by the social community, still before settling of the verbal language, through redundant actions, that with their recursivity could made understand and remember taboos and borders of every kind, in a word, is emerged the necessity to resort to ritualized, transmissible and comprehensible actions by all.

So, the resort to the symbolic thought could be configured in the sphere of a problem of communication , also in absence of a same verbal language condivised; like relation between meaning and meant , bridge between the mental and material representationl, symbol exactly used like concrete object, therefore made common, socially shared and immediately comprehensible.
Therefore, with informative, closely cognitive purpose (cognitive), so to speak with functions of "moderator" of the emotions (see Licia Filingeri The running of the time in the mental and material representation of the paleolithic man ,October, 2002).

But, to the other head of this ideal continuum of the symbolic, we find, from the beginning, the maximum of the trascendence, with the use of the symbol in order to express and to realize the idea of the sacrality, once again to understand like attempt to modulate too much intense and often not manageable emotions, as attested from the presence of boneses of the defunct painted of red ocher to ritual aim and of sculptures in stone, representation of divinity.

Beyond that in the rituals of cult, the symbolism appears then also in the paleolithic art, to them closely tied.


In Germany, the Hohle Fels cave ( Swabia), Nicholas Conard ( University of Tübingen ) (see Palaeolithic ivory sculptures from southwestern Germany and the origins of figurative art. Natures, 426, 830 - 832, 2003. <) has found three statuines carved in ivory , 2 cm height, going back to 30000 years ago.



Fig.1: Hohle Fels Cave, Ulm . Half feline, half man

Such works of art do not only demonstrate the technical ability of these ancients inhabitants of the valley of the Danube, but also their symbolic thought, once again activated from rituals of cult. No matter in fact of animals of which these populations were fed: for how much it cannot be inferred exactly if they are magical animals or other type of representation (a horse head, an aquatic bird, a half feline and half man creature ), sure these sculturine are tied with rituals, like all the sculpture of the Paleolithic. They testify the presence of an elevated degree of symbolic thought.

It can therefore be said that the symbolic representation, since the origins, appears full of transcendental values that have to do with the affective sphere, values that, from always, we share with our far ancestors.



BIBLIOGRAPHY

BUCCI, W., (1997), Psychoanalysis and cognitive science, Guilford Press, NY

CONARD, N. J., ( 2003), Palaeolithic ivory sculptures from southwestern Germany and the origins of figurative art. Nature, 426, 830 - 832

DEACON T.W., (1997), The co-evolution of language and the brain, Norton & Company, inc, N.Y.

HENSHILWOOD, C. S. et al. (2001), Emergence of modern human behaviour: Middle Stone Age engravings from South Africa. Science

LURJIA, A.R., (1973), Come lavora il cervello.Introduzione alla neuropsicologia, Il Mulino, Bologna

MANDLER, J., (1992), How to build a baby:II Conceptual Primitives, Psychological Review, 99, 587-604