§3. The metaphysical interpretation of art
In our attempt to heed what Hölderlin poetizes when he names the rivers, we will often have occasion to test a form of representation that for centuries has secured itself a validity in poetry, as well as in the interpretation of poetic works and in the way poetizing in general is determined.
According to this form of representation, the rivers and waters that are sung in a poetic work, for example, are grasped as perceivable events of "nature." Which indeed they are. In the poetic work, however, these things of nature assume the role of appearances that can be grasped as something sensuous [sinnlich], as something that offers a view and thus provides an "image." Yet in the poetic work such images present not only themselves, but also a nonsensuous meaning. They "mean" something. The sensuous image points toward a "spiritual" content, a "sense" ["Sinn"]. The river that is named and that appears in the image [Bild] is a "symbolic image" ["Sinnbild"]. Under the broadly conceived concept of a symbolic image, we also include what is called "allegory." This word, which stems from the Greek, aptly says what is at issue: ἀλλο-ἀγορεύειν. ἀγορεύειν (ἀγορά, the open. public place for a gathering of the people): to openly and publicly proclaim in a manner that everyone can understand. ἀλλο, something other, namely, to proclaim something other than what the image by itself allows to appear. ἀλληγορία is a proclamation of something else by way of something, namely, by way of something familiar that can be experienced sensuously. Legends and fairy tales, for example, count as "allegories." Another kind of symbolic image alongside "allegories" are "similes"; yet another kind are "symbols." σύμβολον derives from συμβάλλειν, which means, to bring together, to hold the halves of a ring against one another and to test whether they fit and belong to one another so that one can then recognize that the possessors of the pieces of the ring themselves belong to one another. The "symbol" is a sign of recognition that demonstrates and thereby legitimizes a belonging together. In the symbol too there lies the reference of something sensuous, the ring, to something nonsensuous—something pertaining to the soul—something spiritual, in the first instance, the belonging together of friends, friendship. The "symbol," too, is a symbolic image.
We can also count as symbolic images in the broadest sense what we call "examples," something that, as an instance that can be sensuously intuited. exemplifies and furnishes us with a rule that cannot be grasped sensuously. "Metaphors" likewise belong to symbolic images—μεταφορά, transference. Every "in-signia" is also a symbolic image in a certain way. The distinctions between allegory and symbol. simile and metaphor, example and insignia are fluid, and have not been firmly established with