The notion of symbolic experience does not constitute a prerequisite for the experience of emotion; rather, it is the experiences of laughter, love, joy or despair that are the necessary condition for the initial expression of emotion. Only subsequent to these experiences is the emotion gradually symbolised and incorporated into communication. This initial, emotional, non-rational mode of communication is not the sole origin of subsequent symbolisation, mythical representation and narrative; the other source is historical symbolic sedimentations, equally irrational and in need of symbolic interpretation. Whether man comes from language or is merely homo symbolicum is doubted by Alphonso Lingis: