A Symbol Is Not What It Represents

Human life is saturated with symbols.

Words stand for things, actions, relationships, and ideas.

Maps stand for places.

Numbers stand for quantities.

Icons stand for functions.

Money participates in systems of exchange and value.

Rituals can stand for memory, belonging, commitment, mourning, or celebration.

Symbols are powerful partly because they are not identical with what they represent.

A map can help us navigate because it simplifies a place.

The word 'tree' can be spoken without bringing branches into the room.

A wedding ring can carry meaning without containing the whole relationship.

Confusion begins when the representation is treated as though it exhausts the thing represented.

A metric becomes the value it was meant to indicate.

A title becomes the competence it was meant to signal.

A label becomes the person.

A religious or cultural symbol becomes the entire reality of the tradition for everyone who encounters it.

The correction is not to abandon symbols.

We could hardly communicate or coordinate without them.

It is to remember the gap.

A symbol points.

What it points to is always more than the symbol itself.