or, How Thinking Non-Literally Is Not a Lie But Integral to Knowing Reality
“People need dramatic examples to shake them out of apathy, and I can’t do that as Bruce Wayne. As a man I’m flesh and blood. I can be ignored. I can be destroyed. But as a symbol? As a symbol I can be incorruptible; I can be everlasting.”
—Batman Begins
Fiction and representational art are not literal, and so many famous people have said half-jokingly that fiction and representational art are “lies.” In his book Sein Language, Jerry Seinfeld quipped that he appreciates how bookstores are divided by section “into fiction and nonfiction. In other words, these people are lying, and these people are telling the truth. That’s the way the world should be.” Likewise, in an interview for the May 1923 issue of The Arts, Pablo Picasso said, “We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand...” Similarly, in Minima Moralia, Frankfurt school neo-Marxist Theodor Adorno pronounced, “Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth.”
- Our ancestors came to experience and interpret sensory stimuli in a manner they knew to be nonliteral. That is how symbolism arose.
- It is through this cognitive process that we have gained a greater understanding of what happens literally.
Not Literal and Not Lying
A lie is told under the following circumstances. Person 1 presents to Person 2 some claim that is not true literally but which Person 1 intends for Person 2 to interpret as the direct literal truth. Fiction honestly presented as fiction — and this includes performances by stage magicians — does not consist of lies, as the art is not presented as the literal truth. Yet I will argue in this essay that though artworks are not the literal truth, an art piece resonates with you when you interpret it as dramatizing some principle that you interpret as being true literally.
There is an entire profession or discipline of artists who are tasked with depicting reality for the purpose of providing scientific understanding. A wildlife painter is supposed to paint animals and their environments accurately. Our knowledge of extinct prehistoric animals is far from perfect and complete. But the job of “paleo-artists” is to portray prehistoric animals in a manner that is up-to-date and consistent with what is known at the time about these beasts. A well-shaded painting of a Tyrannosaurus with three fingers on each hand might be quality art, but it would not be quality paleo-art; the T. rex having three fingers on each hand instead of two is a glaring inaccuracy to scientists.
Let’s say that for a book that is to be educational for children, an artist provides a detailed and accurate painting of a male lion.
Symbolism occurs when X is not Y literally but X still represents Y in your mind. As noted in Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, symbols are inherent to the use of concepts. A concept is an abstracted symbol representing all particular instances of an entity or event, all grouped together by their shared traits relevant to that which defines the concept. The concept “dog” encompasses all dogs that have ever lived and will ever lived, both ones you have observed and ones you haven’t, and includes all breeds. The concept “dog” is symbol for all dogs that exist literally. And the word “dog” symbolizes, in your mind, the concept of “dog.”
And it’s not the case that these words are only for communicating oneself with others. Rather, you gain clarity from introspecting to yourself with these words. Languages are sometimes presumed falsely to be no more than tools of communication. But first they are tools of thought, of thinking to oneself. You use words to communicate with others but, even more importantly, you use them to communicate with yourself. Symbols are inherent in this. Symbols are integral to rational thought itself.
You may remember the silly painting of a pipe that has the caption “This is not a pipe.” By that, the painter meant it is not a pipe literally; it is a symbolic representation of a pipe.
There is great variation in how precise symbols can be in how they depict the entities they represent. The word snake does not come very close in providing a visually accurate representation of a snake, but a wildlife photograph of one usually does. Both of those are symbols. Earlier I mentioned a drawing of a T. rex that inaccurately places three fingers on each hand. That is a symbol of a T. rex, but that symbol is less preferred by scientists than a drawing that more accurately places two fingers on each hand. That some symbols are less accurate than others is not a fault of symbolism per se. In the marketplace of ideas and communication, the symbols that are inadequate in how closely they represent the truth can be replaced by ones that do it better.
When our ancestors discerned that animals are capable of camouflage, that was a big deal in the history of epistemology. It meant our ancestors came to an important realization. That was that someone can interpret and experience a sensory stimulus in a manner other than what is happening literally. In the case of the chameleon in front of you escaping notice, what is happening literally is that the chameleon is in front of you. But, in your interpretation, it as though the chameleon were absent. It matters a lot for our ancestors to come to understand that someone can interpret and experience a sensory stimulus in a manner other than what is happening literally. That is because that is what a symbol is. It is what happens when you are engrossed in an exciting work of fiction. If you are engrossed in an adventure novel, you react emotionally as though you were there on the adventure. But what happened literally was that you spent hours staring at a series of standardized markings on sheets of paper.
If a camouflaged animal successfully escapes your notice, then you never learn that this particular interpretation of the event was different from what happened literally. By contrast, when you read a novel that you love, you know consciously that the events described did not happen literally. But, in both instances, the interpretation and the experience of the sensory stimulus were something other than what happened literally.
When I first wrote the above, I thought I might have been the first to make that connection. However, in a 1998 book on popular science, biological anthropologist and neuroscientist Terrence W. Deacon also argues as much.
Accurate chemical formulae discovered by scientists are all symbols. But they convey what happens literally. The formula showing how the chemical reaction between hydrogen and oxygen creates water is a symbol. But that is also what happens literally.
By definition, symbols are nonliteral. But, when used properly, they help us understand what happens literally. That is the true funny irony in this: the fact that we can experience and interpret stimuli in a manner that is nonliteral has given our species has an unprecedentedly complex ability to comprehend what happens literally.
Our Ancestors Coming to Realize That They Can Interpret Sensory Stimuli in Ways Other Than Literal
How our ancestors came to understand symbols might have gone this way. There are animals that camouflage to avoid being eaten by predators. Jackson’s chameleons are an example. When an animal in front of you has camouflaged successfully, it means that you are looking at the animal literally in front of your face and yet you do not notice it. Rather, you misinterpret the animal as part of the scenery. And, of course, fiction is also not literal but only literary. Yet I argue that, to the degree that you are emotionally attached to an artwork, it largely rests upon your interpreting some aspects of the artwork you do deem to be true literally.
How Good Fiction Is True
When I was in the fifth grade, my teacher waxed enthusiastically about how fiction is rich with symbolism. However, I still did not comprehend what that meant. When someone talked about symbolism in art, I thought it meant the artist being pretentious and purposely hard-to-understand.
What came to mind was a hipster splashing a blotch onto a canvas and announcing, “This is the human condition. This spatter of paint dramatizes the capitalist oppression of the masses.” But symbolism does not have to be that way. Alternatively, a deliberate symbol in a story is especially successful if it can be taken at face value as just part of the story while, on another level, it can be recognized as demonstrating something deeper at work. A case study in such symbolism is in Citizen Kane. Charles Foster Kane is married and he keeps getting richer. But his emotional bond to his wife is weakening. We are treated to a montage that shows, over the years, Kane eating dinner with his wife at a long table. Each spouse is on the other end of the long table. Every time this happens, the table is longer and Kane is shown being even more callous toward his wife. If we take this only straightforwardly, it makes sense: we see that as Kane gets richer over the years, he can afford to purchase an even longer table. But this represents something more abstract: the growing length of the table represents the growing emotional distance between Kane and his wife.
Both because of the aforementioned obscurantism of many “modern artists,” and because I made the conflation that only that which is literal is real and true, I thought that symbols were all “fake” and too far from being straightforward. That is a variant on the fallacy discussed in the opening of this essay.
But when what you know to be a work of fiction is emotionally gripping to you and sticks with you, it is because you implicitly interpret that story to be true on a deeper level. My go-to example is the movie Back to the Future. We know that in real life, you cannot travel back in time in a DeLorean. But, in real life, people do have a difficult time relating with their parents and do wish there was a way to be able to meet them on mutual terms. In real life, nerds are subjected to bullying. Confronting these issues directly is usually so painful that we prefer to avoid them.
But when explorations of these issues are repackaged in a more-fantastical setting, that creates some degree of psychological distance that makes it more manageable, mood-wise, to confront them. George McFly does not exist on a literal level. But his story is a symbolic representation that gives us an idea of how we can address the topic of bullying: either continuing to submit to the bullies or stand up to them. The latter approach is riskier but it is ultimately more meaningful.
The first part of what Picasso said is misleading. Art is not a lie. Art is a symbolic representation. And not all symbolic representations are lies, just as an accurate painting of a male lion is not a lie even if the painting is not based on any one particular male lion. And when an artwork stirs your emotions, it is because you interpret it as a symbolic representation that faithfully conveys a principle that is true.
When a cherished memory of an artwork lingers in your mind, it is because, at least on some emotional level, you judge it implicitly as using symbols to convey a truth about human psychology.
Science communication consists of using nonliteral means to elucidate on what happens literally. Likewise, when you enjoy artwork, it is because, on some level, you experience it as a nonliteral means of dramatizing what you interpret to be true literally.
As you are not Galileo literally, but your situation might become comparable to his in the relevant context, the use of Galileo as a symbol can convey to you and others the literal nature of your situation. Once again, presentations that are nonliteral can convey accurately a fact that is literal.
Yes, as words are tools of cognition and comprehending reality, that applies to language as a whole. I could eat something that kills me. My meal could poison me or cause me to choke to death. But in the end, it is the case that I eat to live. Likewise, people often use language to tell lies. But as language is instrumental to knowing reality at all, it is ultimately the case that language is the tool for learning, processing, and transmitting the truth. The same principle applies to imagination. As I have written before, the Wright brothers needed vibrant imaginations to conceive of the airplane. Imagination is imperative for deducing causal connections between separate events, and imperative for all long-term decision-making. As I said in my earlier essay, though people often use their imaginations to indulge in falsehoods, imagination is really the tool for adhering to reality.
And I can make an addition to all of the above. Hipsters have given us the impression that symbolism in art is about being nebulous and cryptic in message. But I hope I have established in this essay that, overall, symbolism in art is ultimately about providing information and ideas with the utmost clarity.
When I was in the fifth grade, my teacher waxed enthusiastically about how fiction is rich with symbolism. However, I still did not comprehend what that meant. When someone talked about symbolism in art, I thought it meant the artist being pretentious and purposely hard-to-understand.
Even Factual Events Can Be Symbols
Even an account of true events can be a symbol. The story of the persecution of Galileo is a series of events that happened literally. But when people cite the example of Galileo, it is to present it as a case study of something that might still happen today. They are warning that, once again, there might be similar instances of someone being mistreated for telling the truth. As this happens, the account of Galileo and his punishment are symbols of similar injustices that might be repeated but should not be. What happened to Galileo, happened literally. But in the context of today’s society, you are not Galileo literally. Still, if there is a danger that you might be punished for speaking the truth, Galileo can be a fitting symbol for you and your situation. 
