Madness and the Ineffable: Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Lacan

What is the relationship between language, the self or subject, and the realm of the ineffable? Is the true self or subject something that precedes or underlies language, or does it only come into being through our acceptance and mastery of linguistic forms? What is madness's relationship to that which is (or which is experienced as being) inaccessible or inexpressible through the medium of language? In his exemplary essay, "Talking Cures: A Lacanian Reading of Hegel and Kierkegaard on Language and Madness," the philosopher Daniel Berthold investigates these issues by exploring the views of the three key authors mentioned in his title. Each of these authors is known for the complexity of his thought and the difficulty, verging at times on impenetrability, of his prose style. In Berthold's fine essay, these challenging issues and authors are treated with a clarity and grace that is very rare. One cannot help but feel grateful to a writer who lives up so successfully to the motto of the Spanish philosopher, Ortega y Gasset: "In philosophy, clarity is courtesy."

My purpose in this commentary is not to dispute anything Berthold says: as indicated, I find his arguments essentially convincing and his formulations clear. I shall try, rather, to clarify further these inherently difficult issues by attempting to sum up, from a somewhat different angle, a number of the key themes that are treated in Berthold's article, and also by expanding on the distinctness of the Lacanian perspective.¹

The Ineffable

As Berthold's essay shows, Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Lacan are all profoundly interested in the relationship between language, the nature of the self or the subject,² and the possible existence of a realm or a mode of being beyond words; in this sense they participate in a common problematic. Each of the three authors acknowledges that human beings feel the presence of an ineffable realm, and are inclined, at times, to equate their deepest self or sense of being with this realm. All three authors also accept that the advent of language entails the death of some contact or aspiration (contact with a more fundamental reality, aspiration toward more authentic selfhood or sense of existence) that is often felt by the individual person to be most basic and true. Their disagreements emerge when one considers how each of the three understands and evaluates this orientation toward a non- or anti-linguistic realm. Here it is useful to distinguish two key issues.

The first issue concerns what I will call the validity of the human orientation toward the ineffable. (This could also be referred to as "truth value.") One may ask whether the human being's sense of the existence of such an external realm or personal mode of being actually corresponds with any reality to which one can have access or which one might, in fact, be able to instantiate. In short one may ask, regarding the ineffable, whether there is actually any there there. The second question pertains rather to what I will call the value of this orientation or aspiration: does such a focus or aspiration (setting aside the issue of its validity) contribute to the health or fulfillment of human existence? Whereas Hegel and Kierkegaard seem to be, for the most part, on opposite sides of the issues of both validity and value—which they treat as tightly linked—the Lacanian position, as we shall see, is both more complex and more ironic. Lacan is perhaps the least courteous of writers; unfortunately, he may nevertheless have the most sophisticated vision of things.

Based on what Berthold tells us in his article, Hegel seems to view the supposed realm of the ineffable as basically an illusion: indeed, Hegel (1807/1977, 66) describes "the unutterable [as] nothing else than the untrue."³ On his view, the realm of the ineffable is not an actual reality of which we have inklings, as through a glass darkly, so much as a projected image that is generated by the "earthly elements" of the soul's primitive and instinctual desires...