 
                         20051227.00

                     Limits on Language

     When I was in college, there was a confrontation,
largely implicit, but occasionally articulated, between the
notion that some "things" - read experiences, were
unspeakable, were beyond, or outside of the realm of
language; and those who said that whatever was inexpressible,
(unsaeglich, unaussprechlich) was in fact unreal, not worth
any consideration at all.

     It was, apparently, the positivist dispute in an
advanced state of self-perpetuation.  Some of the rejoinders,
it seems to me now, are obvious. Since language is our
primary means of communication, what is not expressible in
language is indeed at a communicative disadvantage. But no
sooner is language designated as the primary medium of
communication, than it becomes apparent that language is
impotent to define its own limits; even to say that something
is unspeakable is to speak about it. And just as language
arises spontaneously from the need to understand, so it is
the nature of language, that it persists in veering beyond
its apparent limits. Most egregiously, the converse, that any
experience should be exhaustible in language, is self-evident
nonsense: none is.  And it is pathetic to contemplate the
limitations that the positivists purport to impose on
experience in attempting to prove their point.

     Truth is to be sought not so much in the glare of logic
as in the penumbra of language, where, as on a seashore, what
is tangible is sometimes relentlessly eroded and at other
times surreptitiously accreted by the surf of unpredictable
experience.


                      * * * * *
Copyright 2005, Ernst Jochen Meyer
