How to say what can't be said: Techniques and rules of ineffability in the Dionysian corpus (Pseudo-Dionysius).

摘要

An abiding challenge in philosophy of religion is making sense of the paradox whereby mystics speak about Ultimate objects and experiences while insisting that these objects and experiences are ineffable. In the interest of developing new methods of analyzing such paradoxical practices, this dissertation investigates a two-fold hypothesis. (1) Ineffability can be "performed" through the violation of everyday linguistic rules by showing (rather than stating) that language is incapable of expressing Ultimate objects and experiences. (2) Such violations satisfy higher-order rules that are created and sustained within specialized mystical discourse communities.; The first section of the dissertation surveys existing studies of ineffability in twentieth-century theories of mysticism, maintaining that such studies have concerned themselves almost exclusively with the question: Is mystical experience ineffable? Due to the fact that experience fails to provide an object that is accessible in a linguistically untainted state, however, this question inevitably resists solution. A more fruitful way of approaching the issue of ineffability rejects this question for the more tractable question: How do mystics express the ineffability of Ultimate objects and experiences?; In order to answer this question, the second section of the dissertation assembles an extensive set of linguistic rules and tools pertinent to the identification and analysis of grammatical techniques of ineffability in mystical-apophatic texts: John Searle's rules of illocutionary force, reference, and predication; George Lakoff and Mark Johnson's metaphor theory; and Umberto Eco's semiotic theory.; The third section of the dissertation uses these rules and tools to identify and analyze grammatical techniques in the corpus of the sixth-century Christian Neoplatonist Pseudo-Dionysias. This effort uncovers antinomian grammatical techniques, confirming the first part of the hypothesis in this instance. But it also discloses intra-textual, higher-level grammatical rules, whereby Dionysian expressions of inexpressibility are themselves rule-governed, albeit by rules less prominent in ordinary language use. This confirms the second part of the hypothesis. Moreover, this section presents a philosophical argument that all expressions of inexpressibility must be rule-governed (to some degree) insofar as techniques of ineffability are stabilized within a discourse community and serve to communicate something within that discourse community.