Signs, Symbols, and Metaphysical Imaginaries

Abstract

‘We are missing,’ says Annie Dillard, ‘a whole class of investigators: those who interpret the raw universe in terms of meaning.’² By ‘the raw universe’ she means human experience in all its breadth — ‘all things cultural and natural.’ Although such a broad definition might at first glance seem useless, since it leaves out nothing, it is nonetheless an excellent place to start an inquiry into meaning in the world. This is partly because the concepts of culture and nature are explanatory markers, as it were; that is, they can be used, says Dillard, to delimit ‘the boundaries of interpretation which the West has accepted since the Enlightenment: man makes sense; nature does not’ (LF, 141). She thus also elicits the problem of what to make of ‘reality’ — which as Bruno Latour argues, needs to be approached in the first instance as an indissociable nature-culture, or better plurality of such nature-cultures, for if there is one nature-culture there must be many of them.

‘A debility and dimness of the imaginative power, and a consequent necessity of reliance on the immediate impressions of the senses, do, we well know, render the mind liable to superstition and fanaticism.’¹