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

Abstract

In his challenging, indeed upsetting, book, Inejfability: The Failure of Words in Philosophy and Religion, Ben-Ami Scharfstein writes: Everything conceivable can at least be hinted at in words; but the residue of what we want to and cannot accomplish with them is the of ineffability that we can never escape, and do not want to escape. The experience itself of ineffability, not to speak of the argument over it, is of the many gifts of A ineffability is not at all bad to have. But when it gets to be lot, the inef fability is of another, deeper, probably darker color (1993, 186). If it is true, might ask, that everything conceivable can at least be hinted at in 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 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) 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 vast field of images and image schemata, comprising every sensory modality; and (b) 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