Language and the Thresholds of Sense: Some Aspects of the Failure of Words

In his challenging, indeed upsetting, book, Ineffability: The Failure of Words in Philosophy and Religion, Ben-Ami Scharfstein writes: "Everything conceivable can at least be hinted at in words; but the inevitable residue of what we want to and cannot accomplish with them is the degree of ineffability that we can never escape, and perhaps do not want to escape. The experience itself of ineffability, not to speak of the argument over it, is one of the many gifts of speech. A little ineffability is not at all a bad thing to have. But when it gets to be a lot, the ineffability is of another, deeper, probably darker color" (1993, 186). If it is true, one might ask, that "everything conceivable can at least be hinted at in words," what is the nature of this "hinting," and why and when do we have to "hint" rather than say directly? Further, what is this notion, within language itself, of an "inevitable residue"? Why is there a "degree of ineffability that we can never escape"? And what would it mean to speak of an ineffability that we "perhaps do not want to escape"? What is the difference between "a little" and "a lot" of ineffability? It appears that, according to Scharfstein, speech itself, by its very nature, manifests the ineffable: in some form or other, in some aspect or other. But the paradox is heightened by thinking of the experience of ineffability, that is, the failure of words, as "one among the many gifts of speech." It not only opens the path to other nonlinguistic or at least nondiscursive ways of accessing the conceivable—or the "meant"—but cuts at the roots of all semiotic totalitarianism, absolutism, fundamentalism, and their multiform consequences in human life.

Language, I will argue, lies between two irreducible thresholds of sense: (a) a prelinguistic "lower" threshold, which, in Eugene Gendlin's formulation in his Experiencing and the Creation of Meaning (1962), is rooted in the body's felt sense of significance and that, as George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (1980, 1999) have shown, is embedded in a vast field of images and image schemata, comprising every sensory modality; and (b) a postlinguistic "higher" threshold, which measures all articulation in terms of adequacy not just to the "thing-meant" but to the (simultaneously enabling and constraining) conditions of the possibility of formulation or articulation itself. This thing-meant may or may not be a "thing" or belong to the "objective world." And ultimately it may or may not be even indirectly accessible in language, as Susanne Langer and many others have argued. Langer, for her part, has contended that the "morphology of feeling" or the "logic of feeling" must be accessed and expressed, that is, symbolized, nondiscursively—even if the medium is ostensibly linguistic. Langer (1942, 1953, 1988) developed the notion of nonlinguistic symbol systems under the rubric of "presentational forms" and "expressive symbols" to widen the whole conception of human rationality and human meaning making (see also Innis 2009).

Or, even if such domains of meaning are indirectly accessible in language, they may nevertheless only be accessible in a language, nondiscursively used, that attempts to go beyond itself and in so doing shatters or self-consciously denies its "fit" to its object. Susanne Langer's nondiscursive approach to literature, on the one hand, and Michael Sells's startling notion of "mystical languages of unsaying," or forms of apophatic discourse that rely on paradox, contradiction, and pregnant images to evoke a "meaning-event" that is itself experienced but does not "state" a fact, on the other hand, are prime examples of this enriching failure of words in the discursive mode. (See on this Innis 2007a, 2007b; Sells 1994.) This way of posing the issues, of course, is not without both remote and recent parallels or antecedents in the philosophical, theological, and semiotic traditions that deal with negative theology, metaphor, rhetorical modes, and paradox, where there is a denial of "direct reference" to language.

Language emerges out of the unsaid, moves toward the to-be-said, and passes beyond...