But symbol as I mean it here, in the abstract, is not this, but is rather always an
afterthought, a speculative appropriation of the aesthetic moment in the service of a supposedly more vital and essential meaning; the symbol is that which arrests the force of the aesthetic, the continuity of the surface, in order to disclose "depths"; it suspends the aesthetic in favor of the gnoseological, in order to discover something more fundamental than whatever merely "accidental" form might manifest it.
