  If the sign’s proper function is to refer to its referent, it is self-cancelling. The road sign that is so attractive that it distracts from the danger it refers to and causes a new one by prompting drivers to pull up and admire it, does not function properly. The symbol, however, does not refer to something outside itself. It presents its own meaning. The material symbol is, indeed, the place where that meaning becomes present. Yet the symbolically delivered meaning is never given completely. Its meaning is indeterminate. References to the symbol as fragmentary nevertheless anticipate the possibility of wholeness. The speculative dimension of such reasoning resides in the premise that every stated meaning involves bringing forth more than is actually spoken. Resonance and depth depends upon animating the statement’s hermeneutic Hintergrund, lighting up unstated meanings or revealing anticipated ones. The “speculative” capacity of an image or word concerns its ability to sound out or insinuate the unstated nexus of meanings which sustain a given expression but which are not directly given in it. The speculative power of an image or phrase has something in common with the sublime: it illuminates in the spoken or visual image a penumbra of unstated meanings whose presence can be sensed but never fully grasped or conceptualised. Hence, an artwork can always mean more, that is, insinuate a transcendent dimension of meaning which though never exhausted by the symbols which carry it do not exist apart from the symbols that sustain it. The symbol is resonant with the suggestion of meaning because it constantly invokes what is not immediately given. This not-given does not exist apart from the given but is inherent within it. Hence, the hermeneutical sublime, the excess of meaning, the promise of meaning more and meaning something different which is made apparent by the symbol, is held within, is immanent in the given.