I’d like to introduce you to the paper “Portraying the Ineffable: The Growth of the Doctrine of Symbol in German Classical Philosophy, and Its Findings and Insights to Be Readopted,” which has been recently published by the journal “Disputatio: Philosophical Research Bulletin.”

Of late decades, the nature of symbol and its part in human creativity come increasingly into the limelight of philosophical discussions. However, the crux of the matter still remains obscure, while thorny points get even more entangled. And this seems to be conditioned by the scant notice taken of the origins of the concept, while as posterior views grow out of their precursors, it is very hard to overcome today’s discordances and one-sided approaches without mastering the classical heritage.

In spite of the weighty part the German classical philosophy has played in the making sense of symbol, its contribution is now on the margins of research. The works devoted to it contain, putting aside minor drawbacks, a number of serious flaws leaping to the eye. First, they have conspicuous oversights even with regard to the views of individual philosophers. So, Fichte’s teaching is almost never tied in with the symbolic, which makes an erroneous impression that it has nothing in common with symbols; Schelling’s vision of symbol as an anticipation of the path to the due – the genuine core of the German classic doctrine – is not spotted in an explicit form; and Hegel’s main contribution that consists in turning symbol into the primary language of creativity vague nascent ideas are formulated in also remains in the shadow.

Second, Hegel is semipermanently taken as a “terminus” beyond which nothing important has been added to the classical doctrine of symbol. Meanwhile, in writings of his “heirs” at least two key insights – into the subconscious origins of symbol and its personality “shell” – have been gained.

And third, the growth of the doctrine as a relatively consistent and integral whole has never been traced throughout with the aim of elicitation of its key ideas as guiding threads for further research. That not merely impoverishes the picture but – what is more harmful to theory – inevitably puts in the shade or even consigns to oblivion a number of worth-while findings and revelations.

To fill in these gaps and reconstruct the classical understanding of what symbol is, where it is derived from and what task performs as well as to outline the attainments still in vigor and capable of giving clues for new breakthroughs is the task of this paper.

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