Reaching for the Ineffable: Communication Despite the Limitations of Language

“I know I am talking nonsense, but I’d rather go rambling on, and partly expressing something I find it difficult to express, than to keep on transmitting faultless platitudes.”

                                                                        -Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain

            The human experience is a complicated and often messy ordeal. How’s that for an understatement? Emotions, thoughts, senses, finding ourselves in a world full of histories, objects, theories, problems, desires, wants, needs, drives, and on top of all of that, a world full of other humans. When confronted with these others, it is not quite like being confronted with something like a tree. We see the tree and think of use value. Questions emerge such as what does this do? I can observe it and begin to ponder ways in which I can use this tree as solutions to problems I have. I can chop it down and burn the wood for warmth. I can use the wood to build structures for shelter. I can eat its fruit for subsistence if it bears fruit—and a myriad of other possibilities. The complexity of our relationship increases with animals as we find companionship and emotional and psychological value in addition to bare utility. Call it anthropocentrism if you like, but something deeper emerges in our encounter with other humans. While communication happens at all levels of our being in the world, when faced with another like us, a longing to share, compare, and exchange our experiences emerges. It’s a desire to known that you’re not alone in the kind of experiences you have. A longing for validation, for concern, for care, and for love. As such, the need to communicate becomes front and center. In an unanalyzed and obvious way, communication does not appear to be an issue. We are constantly communicating with one another. Emersed in thousands of languages both verbal and non-verbal, with a myriad of complex signs and signifiers, communication is everywhere. However, are there limitations to this? How do we know that what we are trying to communicate is being received? What about those deepest experiences that we want to communicate but words seem to fail us—the experiences that we cannot even seem grasp ourselves? Then there is the issue of interpretation and trying to ascertain what meaning was meant to be conveyed. This becomes increasingly problematic with the written word and what to do with it. Some say we must account for historical context, the life of the author, the grammar of the language and the culture to know what’s being communicated. Others on the opposite side see the meaning being made by the reader devoid of the author. Accordingly, this inquiry examines how society conceptualizes knowledge transmission through communication, and demonstrates that despite the inherent limitations of language, people can effectively speak, listen, and understand one another.

Ways of Knowing

            In philosophy, epistemology deals with questions concerning knowledge ranging from what knowledge is to what the limits of knowledge are. An exploration of the history of epistemology would not just warrant an essay of its own, but multiple courses, and even still, one could not cover it all as it is a living inquiry. Some argue that it is essential to the human experience. Indeed, Aristotle said as much when he stated, “All men by nature desire to know. An indication of this is the delight we take in our senses; for even apart from their usefulness they are loved for themselves” (Aristotle, 1924, p. 114). While there can be a discussion here about essentialism or anti-essentialism regarding what humans are or do fundamentally, it seems obvious that humans desire to know, to discover, to understand. Arguments arise when considering the best methodology to know something. Is it by reason? Is it by empirical sense data? Intuition? Emotion? Faith? Memory? Imagination? Essentially, each of these has historically developed a theory and discourse around what it means to know something. The popularity of each wax and wanes across history. One school of thought has had a lasting effect since the Enlightenment in the Western world—empiricism—the idea that the best way of knowing is found by sense data. With the rise of science and then analytic philosophy, knowledge became something that is quantifiable, logical, and definite. For example, the analytic philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein in his seminal work Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus states the following: “For an answer which cannot be expressed the question too cannot be expressed. The riddle does not exist. If a question can be put at all, then it can also be answered” (Wittgenstein, 1921, p. 187). In other words, the only kind of questions that can be asked are ones that can be answered logically and analytically. For Wittgenstein, such questions are nonsensical. Surely this is missing out on whole swaths of human experience and dismissing them as illusions and the misappropriation of language. Inherent here is a kind of defeatism when trying to grasp for the difficult to describe and convey. Before giving into defeatism and even before exploring an alternative, let us deepen this problem of the limits of language.

Limitations of Language

            One problem with language is its ambiguity—its slipperiness. With every language, words are semantically bound within their sentence, their paragraph, page, book, author, culture, history, and time. Now, this does not mean that we are so hopeless to think that if we see a bottle that says “Poison” on it that we are safe to consume it given that maybe it doesn’t really mean a toxic substance that shouldn’t be ingested. Rather, it does mean that semantic analysis is extremely important. Jacques Derrida describes the difficulty of slipperiness of language in the following way: “Every sign, linguistic or nonlinguistic, spoken or written (in the usual sense of this opposition), as a small or large unity, can be cited, put between quotation marks; thereby it can break with every given context, and engender infinitely new contexts in an absolutely nonsaturable fashion” (Derrida, 1982, p. 320). What Derrida is getting at here is that all language is dynamic and not fixed. He states that it is difficult to get at any core meaning—if not impossible because a word can be lifted from one context to another and change radically in meaning. Again, does this destroy the possibility of meaning? Not necessarily. However, what it does tell us is that signs and symbols are not as simple in meaning as we often take them to be. He continues by stating that, “This does not suppose that the mark is valid outside its context, but on the contrary that there are only contexts without any center of absolute anchoring” (Derrida, 1982, p. 320). Therefore, language and meaning-making interpretation requires careful consideration and work. Let us consider some more philosophical complications and also some psychological complications when considering language.

Philosophical Complications

            While analytic thinkers from the Vienna Circle outright cut all language that cannot be stated as verifiable logical and empirical propositions, language faced other critiques from the so-called continental tradition of philosophy. Poststructuralist schools of thought such as the Deconstruction of Jacques Derrida were not alone in their approximations of problems inherent in language. In his text The Archaeology of Knowledge, Michel Foucault writes, “The frontiers of a book are never clear-cut: beyond the title, the first lines, and the last full-stop, beyond its internal configuration and its autonomous form, it is caught up in a system of references to other books, other texts, other sentences: it is a node within a network” (Foucault, 1969, p. 23). This quote dovetails with Derrida’s own work mentioned earlier. What we again see here is that language cannot be understood in isolation, but rather as a network of meaning-making. Often, I have used the metaphorical illustrations of a constellation of stars, or better yet due to its constant remaking, a spiderweb for which we are collective weavers. However, notice here again, this critique is one of caution and deliberate consideration, not one rivaling the complete dismissal of some of the Vienna Circle verificationists that have had such an impact on the Western world to the point that if something is not scientifically accounted for it is nonsensical.

Psychological Complications

As a final means for complicating matters of language and thus the knowledge that we are communicating with one another, there is the role of the psyche as defined and described by psychoanalysis. Central to psychoanalysis is the concept of the unconscious as famously articulated by Sigmund Freud. Though Freud himself is seen as the father of psychoanalysis, like all thought, much of his own thoughts were influenced by those who went before him and have influence many after him. As such, the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan describes the unconscious in the following way, “The unconscious is the discourse of the Other” (Lacan, 1966, p. 16). The unconscious is not merely the place of repressed desires and thoughts, rather, it is akin to a language that is constructed by the influence of societal norms and culture, and it is always influencing our subjective conscious experiences. Therefore, our relationship to our own experiences is not our own—in contrast to the notion of a purely independent and individual Cartesian subject. That is to say, we never fully and completely grasp anything with the kind of certainty that many claim in the analytic West’s cult of scientism. Language and thus meaning are psychically negotiated even to our own conscious subjectivity. Writing years before Lacan, the psychoanalyst Carl Jung states the following in concurrence:

“Man as we realize if we reflect for a moment, never perceives anything fully or comprehends anything completely. He can see, hear, touch, and taste; but how far he sees, how well he hears, what his touch tells him, and what he tastes depend upon the number and quality of his senses. These limit his perception of the world around him . . . No matter what instruments he uses, at some point he reaches the edge of certainty beyond which conscious knowledge cannot pass.” (Jung, 1964, p. 17)

There are inherent limitations of human perception. There is only so much that we can perceive and not only this, but our perceptions are not clear and without influence. We all have subjective interpretations rather than objective observations. Ultimately, our senses are bound to us as filters for our experiencing the world, but how does this impact communication?

Hope for Communication

Implicit in the analysis thus far is a particular notion of knowledge. Experience as something to be known purely analytically and empirically for it to be communicated effectively. We have seen the problems that arise from this endeavor and the dismissive treatment by some due to their supposed shortcomings. In our grasping for the words, the means of meaning-making to articulate and convey those experiences that are most powerful, intense, and often allusive it is not satisfactory to dismiss them or give up on the project of communicating them. Perhaps then, our methodology and criteria are amiss? In her text The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt attacks this notion of knowing when she states, “Thought and cognition are not the same. Thought, the source of art works, is manifest without transformation or transfiguration in all great philosophy, whereas the chief manifestation of the cognitive processes, by which we acquire and store up knowledge, is the sciences” (Arendt, 1958, p. 190). Arendt makes the distinction of thought and cognition and spends much of her time providing a critique of this collapsing of thought and cognition going as far back as the work of Immanuel Kant. She argues that thought and cognition do not transmit in the same way and likens thought as that which manifests in art. Our fears of being able to communicate become the problem of using the wrong analytic criteria for the job. However, the need for certainty placed aside, what of the slipperiness of language and unconscious influence upon our own conscious subjectivity? What about the same problems of knowing we are heard and seen? Don’t fall back into the same trap again. We can know differently.

Speaking and Listening

What is communication if not speaking and listening? The question is not actually whether we can speak and listen, but rather, how to speak and listen. When we try to do this in a computational way of transmitting information as propositions we are using the wrong tools for the job—we are playing the wrong game. Thoughts become confused with cognitions. Words and feelings with logic and reasoning. It is a practice to speak and listen. Communication is an art that does not simply transmit but transforms and transfigures. The Zen Buddhist teacher Shunryū Suzuki states the following about communication in his book Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, “When you listen to someone, you should give up all your preconceived ideas and your subjective opinions; you should just listen to him, just observe what his way is. We put very little emphasis on right and wrong or good and bad. We just see things as they are with him, and accept them. This is how we communicate with each other” (Suzuki, 2020, p. 89). Remember, this is a practice. This idea of bracketing out all preconceived ideas and opinions is rationally impossible—for that is what we are. However, this is a practice of turning the whole intellectual process off. Whether we can do this fully or not is not what is important. Rather, what is important here in this quote is being present to the other in order to give rise to the conditions required to hear and be heard and to see and be seen. Furthermore, this is not only a practice. Work has been done in this area to provide frameworks for how this kind of being with others is possible. Perhaps one of the best thinkers in this area, the philosopher Martin Buber provides a foundation for this dialogical and transpersonal knowing and communicating. In I and Thou, Buber writes:

“Spirit in its human manifestation is man’s response to his Thou. Man speaks in many tongues - tongues of language, of art, of action - but the spirit is one; it is response to the You that appears from the mystery and addresses us from the mystery. Spirit is word. And even as verbal speech may first become word in the brain of man and then become sound in his throat, although both are merely refractions of the true event because in truth language does not reside in man but man stands in language and speaks out of it - so it is with all words, all spirit.” (Buber, 2010, p. 51).

Buber regards the interconnectedness of humanity as something absolutely fundamental. Rather than seeing the intersubjective construction of the unconscious as a stumbling block, Buber leans into this idea of interconnectedness. In fact, for Buber, this spiritual interconnectedness is what allows for speaking and listening despite our ability to bracket the self. In a sense, the project is one of opening rather than bracketing. Here, we do not send out language to one another in hopes of communicating. Instead, we allow ourselves to stand in the language that is us—what Buber calls spirit. Here, we do not reach for the ineffable, we stand in it together.

Understanding

The result of this practice of speaking and listening, of this practice Suzuki calls us to, of this standing in spirit together, is one that produces understanding. An understanding that does not seek to reduce and prep for inquiry atop the surgical table, but one that transcends the need to do so. It is a kind of grace. Concerning understanding, St. Augustine remarks, “For understanding is the reward of faith. Therefore, do not seek to understand in order to believe, but believe so that you may understand” (Augustine, XXIX, 6). As St. Augustine points out, what we have done is the inverse. Rather than engaging with the other in belief that I can be seen and heard, and they be seen and heard, we have tried to understand in order to believe. It is not that we simply believe that what we have said is heard. No. It is that we have faith in the possibility, in the invitation and unclothing our defenses in this space which allows us to know and be known. The philosopher Emannuel Levinas explains the experience this way:

“To approach the Other in conversation is to welcome his expression, in which at each instant he overflows the idea a thought would carry away from it. It is therefore to receive from the Other beyond the capacity of the I, which means exactly: to have the idea of infinity. But this also means: to be taught. The relation with the Other, or Conversation, is a non-allergic relation, an ethical relation; but inasmuch as it is welcomed this conversation is a teaching. Teaching is not reducible to maieutics; it comes from the exterior and brings me more than I contain. In its non-violent transitivity the very epiphany of the face is produced.” (Levinas, 1969, p. 51)

In the encounter with the Other, we open ourselves up not so much that we place our preconceptions aside, but instead so that they are overflowed by the Other. Levinas describes this as an opening up of ourselves to infinity—this is akin to Buber’s spirit and perhaps what others mean by God. And here too we come full circle to knowledge. In this experience, in this opened space of communication, we are taught, and we learn. Not through questions and answers, but through an enrichment that spills over us and fills the space between self and Other.

Conclusion

            In our desire to know and be known we are not alone. It is part of the human experience to desire this. We desire to communicate. We desire validation, companionship, and shared feelings of joy, sadness, hope, and love. Oftentimes in our very search for these things, we create intellectual barriers and walls to defend us from the possibility of being seen and hurt or from seeing others and invalidating our defenses. We have spent much time creating criteria to establish what counts for knowledge and what doesn’t. To be sure, there are different ways of knowing and these different ways do call for different methodologies in order to produce the kinds of results required for the particular questions and problems. This analysis is not an attack on empiricism, rationalism, or scientific thinking. However, it is a reminder that sometimes, perhaps even often, we can misapply a methodology where it shouldn’t be. We can become so excited with the results that a theoretical framework or method can give us such that we think that applying it to all things seems like the right thing to do. This often results in problems. In the context of communicating personal experiences, feelings, and existential ponderings, we should be sure to follow the advice of the oft quoted psychologist Abraham Maslow (1966, pp. 15-16) about having more than one tool for fear of seeing all the problems of the world in light of that one tool.

References

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Aristotle. (1924). Metaphysics. Oxford University Press.

Augustine. Tractates on the Gospel of John. (XXIX, 6).

Buber, M. (2010). I and thou. Scribner.

Derrida, J. (1982). Margins of philosophy. University of Chicago Press.

Foucault, M. (1969). The archaeology of knowledge. Pantheon Books.

Jung, C. G. (1964). Man and his symbols. Doubleday.

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Levinas, E. (1969). Totality and infinity: An essay on exteriority. Duquesne University Press.

Mann, T. (1924). The magic mountain. S. Fischer Verla

Maslow, A. (1966). The Psychology of Science: A Reconnaissance. Harper & Row.

Suzuki, S. (2020). Zen mind, beginner's mind: 50th anniversary edition. Shambhala Publications.

Wittgenstein, L. (1921). Tractatus logico-philosophicus. Routledge & Kegan Paul.