The current hype around AI (machines that can speak and write without thought) shall be taken as an occasion to reflect upon the forgetting of the primordial symbol in late modernity. The primordial symbol, otherwise known as the vague concept (Pierce), is expressive rather than pragmatic, communal rather than private, and productive of sense rather than restricted to a position in a pre-established “chain of signifiers”. Because the development of science and technology depended upon the institution of systems of conventional symbols—clearly defined, ideally univocal, and unvarying or context-free, we have come to forget that primordial symbols are not deteriorated concepts or mere figures of speech; rather they are the very origin of human thinking. In this paper, I shall track the history of this distinction between primordial and conventional symbols as it develops into a minor literature in modern philosophy. I shall have occasion to reference Herder, Schelling, Cassirer, Ricoeur, and Taylor in the course of making the case for remembering the primordial symbol and with it the primacy of the aesthetic, the mythic, and metaphoric over the discursive, the logical, and the scientific.