[The positively indeterminate: Symbol as an entity of open meaning]

Abstract

Martin Heidegger postulates the recovery of the creative power of the word as the fundamental task of phenomenology, identifying in poetry the conservation of this privileged form of relationship with language. The present work deals with language as a way of accessing the primordial spheres of being through an interpretation of mystical experiences as occasions for breaking the linguistic automatism that prevents seeing in the word something beyond a mere instrument for the transmission of information. Based on reflections on symbols developed by thinkers such as Gaston Bachelard, Paul Ricoeur, Mircea Eliade and Gershom Scholem, we propose a phenomenological conceptualization of the symbol as an entity of open meaning, whose origin refers to the positively indeterminate that constitutes the “object” of mystical experiences. Positively indeterminate is our expression for the divine, interpreting it as the source of all meaning that is, for that very reason, absent from any determined meaning, not because of a lack, but because of an excess of signification. The excess of signification is presented, then, as the key to a form of relationship with the word conceived as a force of creation.