The Role of Symbols in Human Development: Beyond Animal Symbolicum

What separates humans from every other living species on Earth? It is not simply the ability to think, use tools, or live in groups – many animals do versions of all these things. What sets humans apart is something subtler and far more profound: the capacity to inhabit a world made entirely of symbols. A cross on a hilltop, a national anthem, a wedding ring, a poem – none of these things carry meaning on their own. They carry it because we, as a species, put it there. This idea sits at the heart of the philosophical concept known as Animal Symbolicum, and it opens up deep questions about what human development truly means, how we integrate our material and spiritual lives, and how symbols make genuine relationships possible.

From rational animal to symbol-making animal
The symbolic system: a third link in the chain
Symbolic forms and the architecture of human culture
Maréchal’s openness: the spiritual dimension of symbol-use
Integrating the material and the spiritual
Symbols as necessities, not luxuries
Symbols and the depth of interpersonal relationships
When symbols fail, relationships fracture
The animal symbolicum in the modern world

From rational animal to symbol-making animal

For centuries, the standard philosophical description of the human being was animal rationale – the rational animal, a definition rooted in Aristotle. But in his landmark 1944 work An Essay on Man, the German neo-Kantian philosopher Ernst Cassirer challenged this formulation directly. Cassirer argued that reason alone is too narrow a category to capture what is distinctively human. Art, myth, language, religion, and science are all equally fundamental expressions of human life – and what they share is not rationality but symbolism.

Cassirer proposed that humans should be defined as animal symbolicum – the symbol-making or symbolizing animal. In his view, humanity cannot be understood by examining biology or bare cognition alone. It must be understood through the symbolic universe that humans have collectively constructed throughout history. This universe includes language, art, myth, science, and moral codes – all of which are symbolic forms through which humans organize, interpret, and give meaning to their experience.

This was not a minor terminological update. It was a fundamental reorientation in how we understand human nature. As critics of Cassirer’s work have noted, he was arguing that rationality is just one expression of a much deeper human instinct – the instinct to think in symbols. Art and myth are not lesser forms of knowledge; they are, in Cassirer’s terms, equally valid symbolic configurations of reality.

The symbolic system: a third link in the chain

One of Cassirer’s most illuminating observations concerns what distinguishes human response from animal reaction. In other animals, the relationship between stimulus and response is relatively direct. The environment sends a signal; the organism reacts. But in humans, something intervenes. Cassirer described this as a “third link” inserted between the receptor system and the effector system – the symbolic system. Rather than reacting immediately to stimuli, human beings pause, interpret, and respond to a symbolically mediated version of their world.

This is why a human being hearing a piece of music does not simply register sound waves – they may feel grief, nostalgia, or transcendence, depending on the symbolic associations attached to that music. It is why a flag is not just cloth, a handshake is not just a physical gesture, and a name is not just a sound. Symbols, in Cassirer’s framework, are not passive representations of reality but active tools that mediate human experience and construct the world we live in. Humans, in a meaningful sense, do not live in the same world as other animals – they live in a new dimension of reality, one structured entirely by symbols.

Symbolic forms and the architecture of human culture

Cassirer developed these ideas systematically across his three-volume Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (1923-1929). His central claim was that all the major domains of human culture – language, myth, art, religion, and science – are distinct symbolic forms, each constructing its own coherent aspect of reality. Rather than treating knowledge as a mirror of ready-made reality, Cassirer argued that humans live within networks of symbols that organize perception, thought, and social life. These forms are historically evolving and culturally diverse, yet they share a structural regularity that philosophy can analyze.

This has important implications for human development. It means that growing up as a human being is not just a biological process – it is a process of initiation into symbolic worlds. Language acquisition, moral education, aesthetic experience, religious formation – all of these are the means by which a person becomes fully human. Cassirer’s theory of symbolic forms as the objectivation of the spirit also raises the question of individual identity: our sense of self is shaped by which symbolic forms we engage with, how deeply we engage with them, and the interplay between them.

Maréchal’s openness: the spiritual dimension of symbol-use

Cassirer’s account is powerful, but it largely remains at the level of culture and cognition. To understand why symbol-use is so deeply connected to human development in a spiritual sense, we need to turn to a different thinker – the Belgian Jesuit philosopher Joseph Maréchal. Where Cassirer asked what symbols reveal about human culture, Maréchal asked what the human intellect’s restless reaching reveals about human nature itself.

Maréchal’s central insight was that the human intellect is not a passive receiver of information but an inherently dynamic force – always striving, always reaching beyond what it currently grasps. He identified in this dynamism a double openness: the mind’s drive to grasp everything it encounters, and an intrinsic directedness toward an ultimate goal. For Maréchal, this dynamic thrust of the intellect cannot terminate in any finite object; it is oriented toward what he called the Absolute, or Unlimited Being. The intellect, in other words, is constitutively open to the transcendent.

What does this have to do with symbols? Everything. If humans are beings whose intellect is oriented toward what surpasses the material world, then they will inevitably need symbols – because symbols are the only means by which the intangible can be brought into the realm of the tangible. A symbol takes something that cannot be seen, touched, or weighed – a value, a commitment, a spiritual reality – and gives it a material form through which it can be encountered, shared, and reflected upon. Maréchal studied this tendency toward action as innate in the human intellect, finding in it the basis for understanding how humans are always reaching beyond mere material existence into realms of meaning, value, and transcendence.

Integrating the material and the spiritual

This is where Maréchal’s philosophy becomes especially significant for understanding human development. Humans are simultaneously biological creatures rooted in the physical world and spiritual beings capable of engaging with realities that transcend the senses. We are not purely one or the other. Human being as spirit, in Maréchal’s framework, is the openness of the finite to the infinite – the dynamic self-movement of transcendence toward absolute being.

Symbols are the mechanism that makes this integration possible. A ritual, for instance, is a physical action – movements of the body in space, particular words spoken at particular times. But it simultaneously embodies and communicates realities that are anything but physical: covenant, belonging, transformation, the sacred. Symbols allow humans to live in both dimensions at once, without collapsing either one into the other. This is why symbol-use is not incidental to human development but central to it. Through symbols, humans organize their perceptions, structure their thoughts, and create shared meaning – and through that shared meaning, they also access dimensions of existence that pure biological existence could never reach.

Symbols as necessities, not luxuries

It is tempting to think of symbols as decorative – things we add to experience once the basics of survival are covered. But this gets it backwards. Symbols are not additions to human life; they are conditions of it. Language is the most specific expression of human symbolic activity, and it is through language that humans even experience their world as a world with objects, relationships, and meanings rather than as a bare flux of sensations. Remove symbolic capacity from a human being, and you do not get a simpler human – you get something that is no longer recognizably human at all.

Research in developmental psychology reinforces this point. Children as young as twelve months use pointing to share their attentional focus with adults, an early form of symbolic communication that facilitates shared meaning and underlies both social cognition and language development. The emergence of symbol skills in early childhood is directly linked to the development of social-emotional understanding. In other words, becoming a person and becoming a symbol-user are not two separate developmental processes – they are the same process.

Symbols and the depth of interpersonal relationships

Perhaps the most immediately tangible way to see symbols at work is in human relationships. Relationships are not merely arrangements of proximity or mutual utility. They are built from shared symbolic worlds. When two people share a language – not just vocabulary, but the deeper symbolic resonances that words carry – they gain access to each other’s inner lives in a way that would otherwise be impossible.

Symbolic interactionism, developed by thinkers like George Herbert Mead and later Herbert Blumer, describes how human behavior is shaped not by objective conditions but by the symbols and interpretations individuals construct through social communication. According to this framework, meaning is not inherent in objects or actions – it is constructed and modified through interaction. This means that relationships are ongoing, creative processes of shared meaning-making, not static structures.

This is why art, music, ritual, and gesture are so important in relationships. Symbolic interactionism emphasizes the role of symbols and shared meanings in shaping human interaction, underscoring how communication helps individuals decipher complex relational patterns. When someone offers a gesture of reconciliation, lights a candle in memory of someone lost, or uses a term of endearment, they are not just performing an action – they are invoking a shared symbolic universe that gives that action its meaning and power. Relationships deepen not just through shared time or shared experience, but through the symbolic frameworks that allow each person to make their inner world legible to another.

When symbols fail, relationships fracture

The reverse is equally true. When symbolic communication breaks down – when words are misread, when gestures are misinterpreted, when the symbolic frameworks of two people diverge – relationships suffer. Communication scholars often note that meanings are not in words themselves but in people, because of the inherently connotative nature of symbolic language. What a word or gesture means to one person may carry entirely different emotional and relational weight for another. This is not a problem to be solved but a feature of symbolic life that requires constant, attentive engagement with the symbolic world of the other.

This attentiveness – what Gabriel Marcel called disponibilité or spiritual availability – is itself a deeply symbolic posture. Marcel described relationships of availability as ones in which persons transcend their separation without merging into unity, remaining distinct while genuinely open to one another. Symbols make this possible. They are the medium through which one person reaches toward the interiority of another – not to possess it, but to encounter it.

The animal symbolicum in the modern world

In the contemporary world, the symbolic dimension of human life has expanded enormously. Digital communication has created entirely new symbolic registers – emojis, memes, hashtags, profile images – each carrying social meanings negotiated in real time across global communities. Social media platforms are arenas where people create and negotiate meanings daily through posts, comments, and modern symbols that carry complex social significance.

But the expansion of symbolic media has also brought new dangers. When symbolic systems become divorced from the realities they are meant to represent – when political slogans replace genuine civic discourse, when curated self-presentations replace authentic self-disclosure, when ritual becomes empty performance – the integrative function of symbols breaks down. Cassirer himself, who lived through the rise of Nazi propaganda, was acutely aware of how symbolic forms could be corrupted and weaponized. His final book, The Myth of the State, was a warning about precisely this risk.

What all of this points to is a sobering and important truth: being an animal symbolicum is not an achievement that humans automatically reach. It is a capacity that must be cultivated, exercised, and protected. The quality of our symbols – their truthfulness, their depth, their connection to the genuine realities of human experience – shapes the quality of our inner lives, our relationships, and our communities.

What do you think? If symbols are the medium through which humans access both the material and spiritual dimensions of life, what responsibility do we bear for the quality and truthfulness of the symbolic worlds we create and inhabit? And in an age where digital symbols proliferate faster than we can reflect on them, are we in danger of losing the kind of deep, embodied symbolic life that Cassirer and Maréchal described as essential to being fully human?

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Table of Contents

From rational animal to symbol-making animal 🔗

The symbolic system: a third link in the chain 🔗

Symbolic forms and the architecture of human culture 🔗

Maréchal’s openness: the spiritual dimension of symbol-use 🔗

Integrating the material and the spiritual 🔗

Symbols as necessities, not luxuries 🔗

Symbols and the depth of interpersonal relationships 🔗

When symbols fail, relationships fracture 🔗

The animal symbolicum in the modern world 🔗