it takes the concepts that philosophy wrings its hands over and reveals their mystery and seeming power as driven by our disappointment with misunderstandings and our desire to take ourselves out of the solution. — Antony Nickles

I know that Cavell uses this sort of explanation to account for the problematic features of philosophy before Wittgenstein. It makes it sound as though desire is at the heart of the split between olp and approaches antagonistic to it. Wittgenstein’s work is important, as important and innovative , and challenging , as any of the great philosophers in history. You had mentioned Kuhn in a previous post. Does Wittgenstein’s work not represent a paradigm shift? Would you say that a shift from Newtonian to Einsteinian physics , or from Lamarckism to Darwinian biology, or from Descartes to Hegel was a matter of shift of desire, or a gestalt shift requiring turning the world on its head ?

Is it possible to understand what you mean by ‘ taking ourselves out of the solution’ without already having undergone the paradigm shift necessary to relate to Wittgenstein’s world?

think it would be more apt to focus "change and stability" in our world and our concepts; people usually come into it afterwards to figure out a mess. — Antony Nickles

What do you mean by world? Can world have any useful
meaning outside of how the word is used by people relating via language?

Also, I had mentioned the following to Metaphysician Undercover :

“schizophrenics may experience thought insertion, the sense that another person’s voice is speaking to one inside one’s head. The schizophrenic knows the voice is coming from their own head, and yet they don’t recognize it as their ‘I’.” In the West , this voice is typically belligerent, accusatory, judgmental, whereas in other cultures it can be positive and supportive.

I was wondering if you think the kinds of conversations that that place with this sort of ‘other’ voice in one’s head
are amenable to an Austinian analysis. By that measure, what of the voices of characters a novelist creates? Often, writers say that the characters they create come to life and tell them what they want to do. They converse with the author.

Power does NOT require a foundation. It operates effectively without a ground or an essence. — Giorgi

The same can be said of a more originary basis of ‘power, in temporality. Or to put it in Derrida’s terms: not power but force, and not simply force
but differences of force. This deconstructs
Foucault’s power.

“ The words "force" and "power" which I have just joined you in using, also pose, as you can well imagine, enormous problems. I never resort to these words without a sense of uneasiness, even if I believe myself obligated to use them in order to designate something irreducible. What worries me is that in them which resembles an obscure substance that could, in a discourse, give rise to a zone of obscurantism and of dogmatism. Even if, as Foucault seems to suggest, one no longer speaks of Power with a capital P, but of a scattered multiplicity of micropowers, the question remains of knowing what the unity of signification is that still permits us to call these decentralized and heterogeneous microphenomena "powers. " For my part, without being able to go much further here, I do not believe that one should agree to speak of "force" or of "power" except under three conditions, at least. A. That one takes account of the fact that there is never any thing called power or force, but only differences of power and of force, and that these differences are as qualitative as they are quantitative. In short, it seems to me that one must start, as Nietzsche doubtless did, from difference in order to accede to force and not vice versa. B. That, starting from this qualitatively differential thought, one opens oneself, in attempting to account for it, to this apparently perverse or paradoxical possibility: the ostensibly greater force can also be the "lesser" (or the "strongest" force is not "strongest" but "weakest, " which supposes the essential possibility of an inversion of meaning, that is to say, a mutation of meaning not limited to the semantics of discourse or the dictionary but which also "produces" itself as history). C. That one takes into account, consequently, all the paradoxes and ruses of force, of power, of mastery, as traps in which these ruses cannot avoid being caught up. I” (From Limited, Inc.)

We can only address the body in a perspectival manner through an institutional lens. — Giorgi

What institutes the institution, what establishes the establishment? What incorporates the corporation? What embodies the body? What is the irreducible basis of a relation of forces? If the body is created by the institutional and corporate conditions of its being, make damm sure you don’t essentialize whatever you think you mean by corporate or institutional lens. It may cause you to miss what is most important and relevant to behavior, the subtle and intricate creative
changes that are likely utterly invisible to a thinking that
begins from a glorified Skinnerian notion of conditioning.

Read this paragraph 10 times and notic how your sense of the meaning of it changes each time in subtle ways. Welcome to the origin of the social. Good luck trying to explain that by institutionalized forces. Only a much more nuanced understanding of affectivity, sense, feeling and significance will allow you to see a whole universe of change underlying the monolithic, generic and superficial
entities that you take to be the irreducible basis of meaning.

So despite the ever changing difference of 'I', which you aptly describe, there is an underlying attitude of sameness, identity, within the 'I' which gives the 'I' of yesterday a special relationship with the 'I' of today, in comparison with the relationship between the 'I' of today, and any other person. This attitude, which is grounded in the difference between the temporal separation between the 'I' and itself, and the spatial separation between the 'I' and others, substantiates the difference between talking to oneself and talking to another — Metaphysician Undercover

There has to be more to perceived self-relationality of the’I’ than just temporal and spatial continuity. For instance, schizophrenics may experience thought insertion, the sense that another person’s voice is speaking to one inside one’s head. The schizophrenic knows the voice is coming from their own head, and yet they don’t recognize it as their ‘I’. So in this case absolute temporal and spatial
proximity is not enough to have a sense being one’s own ‘I’.

Foucault's claim would be that the experience of the body can be (is, in fact) as much a product of institutional training as any other. I think overall, phenomenology cannot escape essentialisms and that's Foucault's main bone of contention. Would you disagree? And why this privileging of Merleau-Ponty over Sartre? T — Giorgi

Sartre misread many forms of philosophy, as Derrida noted. He essentialized the ego , whereas Merleau-Ponty made the self out in the world. As far as the origin of the experience of the body, for MP body is a gestalt field , as is intersubjectivity. But that means institutions and other forms of conditioning only have their existence against a background of the body. If the body is nothing but these conditionings, the it is no longer a body and we can’t even talk about the socially determining conditionings. Each implies the other and this means that what conditions us is experienced from a point of view.
Each of us are conditioned by shared practices. that is the social gestalt. But those shared practices are not indentical practices. Each of us are conditioned differently
by those same practices. That is what it means to be embodied.

Focualt’s model of social interaction is too blunt and monolithic. It fails to discern differences within institutional forces, and as a result is inclined to act too violently.

phenomenology posits a theory of the subject and that offers an epistemic framework for grounding morality later on. I even demonstrate how a phenomenological attitude can lead directly to liberalism. That was Foucault's problem, in France, phenomenology was institutionalized and become another (though quite profound) technique of discipline and governance. — Giorgi

There are many versions of phenomenology. The forms of phenomenology that were institutionalized in France were bastardized interpretations , owing much more to Sartre than to Merleau-Ponty, whose phenomenology is not a ‘theory or the subject’.
Foucault is certainly an improvement over Sartre, but I think Merleau-Ponty goes beyond Foucault.

it is case by case for OLP (we are not looking for a general theory). — Antony Nickles

Ah, but there are general pre-suppositions informing the carrying though of the ‘case by case’ even if not explicitly articulated as such.

I believe you are using "sense" here as in "meaning", as if they were attached to the expression. Witt is trying to show that words (concepts more specifically) do not have an associated "meaning", in the sense of thought: — Antony Nickles

I am using sense in a Heideggerian or Derridean way.
For both of them words do not refer to
or represent meanings. A sense of a word is not an aspect of a concept that already exists, as in a variation on a theme. A sense is a variation, but it is a variation of a variation. There are only senses, with no originating ground. So really we can’t speak of a sense of a word, but word as only sense. You will not find me or Heidegger or Derrida advocating any notion of ‘associated meaning’.

an expression" has a lot of moving parts in each case, — Antony Nickles

I think it is safe to say that the collection of terms that are interlinked as part of Austin’s approach to doing things with words points to many moving parts. I consider this a particular kind of structuralism. There are of course many different sorts of structuralisms in philosophy. What they have in common is that they make use of a notion of an ensemble of parts unified by a central sense. We can also call this a gestalt. It is this unity in difference that drives the ordinariness of language for olp writers. One could say that the terms of ordinariness are whatever allows for an alignment of moving parts that creates agreement, shared practice , normativiity. You can qualify this unifying feature any way you like, provide cautions, limitations, reminders of all the different ways and circumstances in which it can be said to work or not work or maybe work, and what it means to work or not work or maybe work.

My point is that olp’s kind of structuralism ( and there are of course differences from Cavell to Austin to Witt to Ryle), like all structuralisms, is built on events that are invisible to it. How do I mean this? The picture view that Witt problematizes hides all differences from context to context in what it believes to be the same meaning, the same standard or origin that supposedly exists apart from
those changing contexts. The rabbit is there to be seen because it supposedly pre-exists my seeing it ‘as’ a rabbit. But it is not as if the person who relies on this picture view is not seeing what they believe is the ‘same’ meaning ( or just a different aspect of the ‘same’ meaning) via an endless series of language games. They just don’t notice this transformational process. It is invisible to them at an explicit level
even though they rely on it implicitly.

In a similar way, I see the particular discursive -based structuralism of olp as relying on a kind of box. Not a box in Witt’s sense of the beetle box. That is, not a box that supposedly remains what it is outside of contextual change, but a box that remains what it is only locally, contingently. So what makes it a box?

not that the concept is changed by the context--we could have the same sense of a concept expressed (same type of threat) and the contexts would only need to align in the ways necessary to allow for the criteria to work as they do in the same way--so that "every context" is different is not as meaningful as: they have differences, but they may or may not matter: to the expression (you deciding to say it, say, at an inappropriate time), or may only matter in the aftermath of you saying something we have to make sense of, or which changes the consequences of the expression (what happens after a threat to your brother may be different than after — Antony Nickles

For olp change and stability are functions of different kinds of relations between participants in language.
That means a relation between bodies is an irreducible structural condition for any notion of stability or change , accord or misunderstanding, usefulness or failure to work. By bodies I don’t mean bodies defined as humans or biological or any other substantive way other than as discursive participants.

What does this irreducibility structural condition hides?It hides its dependence on a more orginary relation, that between the self and itself.

Could there possibly be any way of thinking about a concept like a self’s relation to a self that does t depend on some form of cartesianism?

When would one use a word like self except in order to contrast it with a person who is not myself? What other use is there? I can have a use of ‘I’ and ‘self’ which only considers ipsiety as background to a figure that appears before ‘me’ . The ‘me’ is nothing but whatever this background part of the current context is. What occurs into the ‘me’ .’ I see, I do, I feel’ :these terms just are talking about how the background is changed. There is no ‘I’ without the background but there is also never an ‘I’ without what appears to it, changes it , interrogates it, expresses it. The ‘I’’s ‘ ‘voluntary’ actions also interrogate it, so that the ‘I’ finds itself deciding or acting. It doesn’t decide to decide or decide to desire. The matter confronting it interrogates it , decides for it.

A world of other persons appear to an’I’ , and their effect on the ‘I’ contributes to its sedimented background, but all other phenomena of sense also appear to and interrogate the ‘I’. That is , all events of perception speak to the ‘I’ in all forms and varieties of consonance and dissonance. The ‘I’ may recognize a phenomenon as familiar, disturbing , useful, illusory, promising , vague. But even the strangest and most alien phenomenon that speaks to the ‘I’ is still in some fashion recognized as akin to something previously experienced , so in the most general sense is normative. But every moment of experience of being spoken to , the ‘I’ is in some subtle but comprehensive way never the same ‘I’ as it was, it is an other. Is this a private or inner process? But what would that mean ? Private with respect to what ? It is a background continually changed by being continually exposed and interrogated by an outside. Is it inner because it is not a sharing with an other? But sharing is itself a being interrogated. The other, whether it is a voice or another sort of phenomenon , shares with the ‘I’ by changing the ‘I’.
If there is no ‘public’ , is there no ordinary? Yes, the ordinary is the various ways the background can be transformed such that it appears to itself as the same differently, as familiar to itself in various ways in an ongoing manner in various circumstances.


This being spoken to is language , although it may or may not involve words. The ‘I’ will have experiences not only of being interrogated by language from other persons , but is interrogated by language from the ‘I’. There is no definite distinction between my talking to myself and my talking to another person. Both experiences are forms
of talking to another who interrogates the ‘I’.
When the ‘I’ is with other persons and it is talking and listening, it is changing itself in myriad ways , as all phenomena that appear to it talk to it and change it. The process of the ‘I’’s being changed is so immediate and continual that it can make no sense to point to verbal language as in any way a difference in kind with respect to the always already ongoing contextual shifts in conceptualization that characterize the ‘I’’s comportment.

Olp’s ordinariness hides a richer, more immediate and more mobile ordinariness of the ‘I’s discourse with its world before , within and beyond verbal interchange.

I am currently "fighting off" phenomenological appropriations where they try to integrate Foucaultian findings with Husserlian phenomenology. — Giorgi

Why would you want to do that? Just don’t combine Foucault with insufferable moralism like so much of the discourse of the left does.

I can at this point, thus only address where you seem to go off track. Words do not have contexts, expressions do (actions do). — Antony Nickles

There are two ways that you’re going to perceive me as going off track. The first is the result of the fact that I have read only a little of Austin and Cavell( although I am making up for that now. I have read Wittgenstein closely in the past but it has been quite a number of years since I looked at his work).
So there will be misunderstandings on my part concerning how their terms are to be treated.

The other way you’re going to misunderstand me is the result of the fact that my interests lie in the areas I mentioned to you ( deconstruction, Heidegger, hermeneutics, constructivism, social
constructionism, phenomenology , autopoietic self-organizing systems theory, Rorty and pragmatism, enactive embodied cognition, Deleuziain bio-politics) and so my use of terms is influenced by that eclectic background rather than Cavell, Austin and Witt.

You don’t yet have any way of knowing this , but I may very well already be understanding the most important features of your reading of Witt, C and A, but am conveying my understanding using a vocabulary that I sense is unfamiliar to you. Would I be correct in assuming you have read little of Husserl, Scheler, Henry, Jonas, Merleau-Ponty, Zahavi, Gallagher , Ratcliffe, Varela, Fuchs, Gergen, Shotter or Gadamer?This may put you at a disadvantage both in conveying the ideas you want to
present and , more importantly , recognizing when other authors, using other vocabularies, are being ‘problematic’, or ‘skeptical’.

As you know it has been at least 70 years since Austin and Witt introduced their work, and in that time, a healthy, vibrant and complex scholarly dialogue has been unfolding in a diverse variety of disciplines , embracing and utilizing Austin, Witt and C , expanding their thinking in many directions.

But when I attempt to introduce this scholarship
to you, I sense that , in contrast with most of the generous and open-mindednacademic engagements between your preferred authors and other strains of philosophy that I see in the literature , you are inclined to wall off Witt, C and A from what you might be almost reflexively inclined to interpret as ‘problematic’.

That means that I may be better off abandoning my attempts to widen the discussion to include
other disciplines , and try instead to fine-tune my use of terms so that they are recognizable to you , as you train me in how you understand them.

Now let me ask about your comment that words do not have contexts, expressions and acts do. If we change any word in an expression , doesn’t it change the
sense of the expression? Is there such a thing as two identical expressions with non-identical
words composing them? What is an act and what exactly is the difference between an act and a word?

philosophy's concerns are not about facts (not that they fly in the face of them)--philosophy does not look to facts. I also believe that positivism's mistakes have led to a sense that science can address the concerns of philosophy (though it has reduced the purview of philosophy over time to such things as morality, meaning, aesthetics, what is the best way to live, etc. — Antony Nickles

My point was that 1) no clear distinction can be made between what philosophy supposedly does and what science does
2) All empirical treatments of ‘facts’ are embedded within and are oriented by an overarching philosophical worldview , whether the researches in that field are aware is it or not, and normally they are not. (Descartes and Newton, Darwin and Hegel, Einstein and Kant, Freud and Nietzsche ). The philosophers of science make explicit thee philosophical underpinnings, but they are what drive and give meaning to any empirical field.
The social sciences are moving. more and more in the direction of abandoning the very notion of account-independent facts.

Custom and upbringing are objects in a box, we only know them in contexts of use.
— Joshs

Our customs are literally the criteria we see when we look at the use of what we say when (in whatever context to draw out the criteria). They are not in a box (though they may be unexamined), and we do not "only know them" in looking at their use in context, that is exactly what OLP is doing — Antony Nickles

That was a typo on my part. I meant that custom and upbringing are NOT objects in a box. BTW, why do we not only know them in looking at their use in context? Are
you saying that we know them outside of local, contingent contexts, that they transcend contexts? No, you’re not saying that , are you? Are you trying to say that shared custom, upbringing , background assure that when move over from context to context a thread of normative continuity allows us to a avoid ‘starting from scratch’ with every new context?

I’ll close this with this from Brandom:

I’m guessing you disagree with it.

Rorty sees the distinction between public and private discourse as a special case of the distinction between thought and talk that takes place within a stable,
shared vocabulary, on the one hand, and thought and talk that transcends such a vocabulary by creating a new, individualized, idiosyncratic vocabulary, on the
other. Community-constitutive acts of forming ‘we’ intentions, and the giving and asking for reasons that such acts are embedded in, are made possible by the shared norms and commitments implicit in our use of a public vocabulary.
Poets and revolutionary scientists break out of their inherited vocabularies to create new ones, as yet undreamed of by their fellows. The creation of novel
vocabularies is an activity we can all partake in to one degree or another, but we should recognize the incommensurability of the vocabulary in which we
publicly enact our concern for the development of the ‘we’ and that in which we privately enact our concern for the ‘I’.

Rorty says:

There is no way to bring self-creation together with justice at the level of theory. The vocabulary of self-creation is necessarily private, unshared, unsuited to argument. The vocabulary of justice is necessarily public and shared, a medium for argumentative exchange.

"Even as [words] are uttered, there is a sense or feeling of their inadequacy." (One way to look at this is our lose of control, and our vulnerability, once we express something; that our words are out there, for us to be read by, held to.) However, the next sentence (as you quote) shows the radical, world-entire, world-ending doubt where philosophy takes it to: "With this, there is also a more pervasive experience of lack or absence. Something that once seemed integral to the world, like bedrock, is experienced as missing, perhaps altogether [enduringly] lost." This ends our trust in our ordinary criteria of our concepts, and philosophy's recourse is to have its own criteria and standards, and take away the context of criteria — Antony Nickles

Your analysis of Ratcliffe’s treatment of some heady psychological topics ( ptsd, severe depression) implies an alternative ‘psychotherapy’. I wonder if you are aware
of any writers who have elaborated such a Wittgensteinian alternative to psychoanalytic, cognitive and other approaches. I mentioned Ken Gergen but you seemed a bit hostile toward him.

I read the l article from 1969 you linked to , and re-read PI.

Here are my notes:

There are certain fundamental, irreducible concepts that are implied in all experiences of sense for Witt, Austin,Cavell:

me and other,interaction , better and worse, (felicitous and infelicitous, failure and success, which implies the binary hedonic of affect) , sense, criterion,context, convention, behavior, circumstance, familiar-unfamiliar(another affective
term) , pre-suppose, background-history memory past, present, use, language, game.

Let’s start with me and other. Before being able to say anything else about what ‘me’ or ‘other’ means in any specific context of use, this binary is pre-supposed. As Witt says, a word ‘looks at me’, so there is something that does the looking and something being looked at, even if the specific sense or content of that something is always instantiated in a different game.


There would be no me and no other apart from this relation.
Also irreducible are context, circumstance, game, language, criterion. these point to the two poles of the relation. On the one hand there is the background, the past , the history that alway comes into play to form a context. That is why a context is familiar to me , has a normative dimension. But this past, this history of mine, is not invoked as memory or recollection as if it were being retrieved from storage. My history , my past , works freshly as past as part of the new context of use. In this sense my past is always in front of me. The other pole is that aspect of the context that provides the new criterion, and assures that my context never repeats itself, never repeats the sense of a word. Context is novel and familiar (background history ) at the same time.

The other irreducible feature of a language game is affect. Word contexts can be more or less familiar, more or less felicitous , more or less successfully understood. This is the ethical dimension of language. As you put it “

rds] One way to look at this is our lose of control, and our vulnerability, once we express something; t — Antony Nickles

So what does this tell us about scientific approaches that are currently in use? It tells us that any approach that talks in terms of objects in a box ( let’s say that box is a universe, consciousness, mind or body ) is problematic. And it tell us that any treatment of a history as an already composed progression ( cosmological, biological, child developmental, cultural) is problematic.

Now, most of our sciences do think in terms of pictures. And yet they are undeniably useful to us. our planes stay up in the air, etc. Would they be even more useful to us , or useful in a richer way , if they understood
what Witt was getting at? Could there be such a thing as a post-Wittgensteinian physics or politics or psychology( I think there must be)!and what would that look like? As I’ve mentioned , there are today forms of political and psychological thinking, even biological, that claim to have assimilated Witt’s lessons. And there are the approaches to history that consider it not as an accomplished fact but as genealogy
(Nietzsche, Foucault, Lyotard).

(Here’s a feminist political theorist who integrates Austin,Cavell and Witt in her argument. )

https://web.law.columbia.edu/sites/default/files/microsites/academic-fellows/images/zerilli_nlh_published.pdf

You find Ratcliffe’s account problematic. You seem to find problematic accounts of resistance to communicative understanding due to personally sedimented histories.
But Witt seems to acknowledge the role of background in causing difficulties in understanding.

Witt says “ There are, for example, styles of painting which do not convey anything to me in this immediate way, but do to other people. I think custom and upbringing have a hand in this.”

Custom and upbringing are not objects in a box, we only know them in contexts of use. Nevertheless , there are consonances an dissonances, more and less felicitous relationalities, that can be spoken of usefully as ongoing patterns rather than as simply this momentary difficulty.

What would words like custom and upbringing do for Wittt if we needn’t say more than ‘this moment is this context of use, and now this new moment is a fresh context of use’?
Would this not prevent us from talking about different normative communities and flatten everything down to an utterly undifferentiated sense of contextual change?
Of course, it would also prevent us from talking about problematic uses of language since all contextual uses would simply be equally different.

So if the central ethical question concerns how to achieve optimal communication to avoid suffering, that implies another question: how effective and how intimate can communication be?

Does it indeed depend on two or more persons? Can I have a context of language use with my dog? If so, can I have one with my cat when we play with a string and he anticipates my movements , and I reciprocally anticipate his? Is that a language game? If so, what about my interaction with my gerbil? In other words, if I can be involved in language games with non-human mammals, where do we draw the line between an animal that I can have a language game with and one I can’t’? What would it even mean to draw a line like that? On the basis of what criteria? If you restrict language games to humans, what about pre-verbal infants? We now know that very young infants recognize our facial expressions.

If word use is a mater of a word looking at me, that is, confronting me with an outside that lets me know there is no inside to ‘me’ , why does this outside , this criterion of contextual sense , not extend to rocks and colors and all kinds of sensings that , like a person’s words and gestures, come at me, interrogate me , create new criteria? If con-text is with-person, why is not a non-person also a con-text?
Is there no language game, no felicity or non-felicity , in the changing pragmatic contexts of driving a car, walking to the store? Witt says no, because only in saying is there a context of sense. But then intimacy, felicity, understanding and happiness are at mercy of what happens when I talk with others, and can have no life outside of that talking. It wouldn’t make sense to suggest an understanding that was not a talking, an experiencing of joy that was not a talking

I speak only for myself, really, and the fact that there are or were Jews who admire Heidegger isn't relevant to my feelings about him. It wouldn't matter to me if he is considered a hero by all good men and women. I understand many think him a great philosopher. I don't, though. — Ciceronianus the White

Do you often make ethical judgments about people based on ‘feeling’ and a profound lack of knowledge of their work? You may be less immune to the sort of errors Heidegger made than you think.

I will check out those links. thanks.

I find even his clearer work, such as his essay on the question of technology, to be so infused with Romanticism as to be meritless. Oddly, he wrote very clearly when drafting the speeches he gave as Recktor at Freiburg, praising Hitler and providing philosophical support for Nazi ideology. — Ciceronianus the White

Infused with Romanticism? How so? BTW, I think that essay would be almost impossible to understand without first having read Being and Time.

Three of the most prominent philosophers of our time were great admirers of Heidegger’s work and found it indispensable ,all were Jews, and all suffered personally as a result of the Nazis. Hannah Arendt , his lover of many years , was also Jewish. I think she was pretty cool, and she didn’t seem to find him loathsome.

I’m also Jewish, and lost relatives to the camps. And I find Being and Time one of the most remarkable works of philosophy I have ever read. Good thing Dewey wasn’t a Nazi, eh? If it ever comes out that he supported Hitler perhaps you may need to undergo hypnosis to expunge your knowledge of his work.

Austin will fume over they idea that everything that is not a true/false statement is either irrational or emotion, etc. — Antony Nickles

Speaking of Austin and emotion , at the tail end of Ratcliffe’s paper on failures of language that I quoted
from, he incorporates Austin in his attempt to show how disruptions in situatedness in existential
feeling disconnects us from effective empathy and communication with others. Let me know if you find it problematic.

Here’s the full article :

https://www.academia.edu/39851117/Trauma_Language_and_Trust

Failures of Communication

Loss of trust adds to the experience of linguistic inadequacy in two ways. First of all, it contributes to an all-pervasive sense of impossibility and futility, of a future that no longer incorporates the potential for positive development. The world appears bereft of all those
possibilities associated with trusting relations with others, which include sustaining, repairing, and revising projects, and relating to people in ways that open up new possibilities.
With no prospect of such relations, the future lacks openness, spontaneity, the potential for meaningful and positive alternatives to one’s current predicament - for growth (Ratcliffe, Ruddell, and Smith, 2014). With this, the more specific potential of language is also
curtailed. It is not just that words currently fall short. Given that the future will not deviate in meaningful ways from the present, linguistic shortcomings are inescapable; there is no prospect of overcoming them or, more specifically, for relations with others that might open
up new communicative possibilities. Thus, in its most extreme form, loss of trust freeze- frames the linguistic predicament I have described. Words are not just hollow; they are irrevocably hollow.

However, even in less extreme cases, where some sense of an open, meaningful future remains, there is another way in which loss of trust contributes to an experience of linguistic failure: in addition, to exacerbating the experience of meaning-loss, it undermines the
conditions under which utterances are more usually made, registered, and recognized as successful. In How to do Things with Words, J. L. Austin (1962) addresses how utterances can ‘misfire’, fail to have their intended effects. The experience of meaning-loss already
described constitutes a sense of words somehow missing their targets, veering off course even
as they are uttered.

In its most extreme form, this ‘misfiring’ can amount to a seemingly inescapable form of silencing: you can say whatever you like, but you will still be unable to
say what you strive to say.1But also important for current purposes is Austin’s discussion of “illocutionary acts”, where we do something by saying something. Examples include the likes of announcing, pronouncing, questioning, answering, advising, suggesting, ordering,
promising, warning, and informing. Like all acts, these can be successfully or unsuccessfully performed: “unless a certain effect is achieved, the illocutionary act will not have been happily, successfully performed” (Austin, 1962, p.15). Various factors contribute to whether
or not an illocutionary act is successful, and it is not just a matter of what the speaker does.

Success also requires “uptake” on the part of others (Austin, 1962, p.116).11 We have already seen that, where words seek to convey one context but remain, for
the interpreter, anchored in another, there is lack of uptake. However, Austin’s discussion of illocutionary acts also points to a further impediment. The experience of one’s words being taken up by others depends not just on how one experiences one’s own speech, but also on
how one interprets their responses. Consider the effects of a pervasive loss of trust on whether or not one anticipates and experiences understanding on the part of others. Where there is distrust, one does not anticipate empathy, support, concern, or guidance but, rather,
the likes of threat, condemnation, misunderstanding, derision, and indifference. This has a pervasive impact on the experience of communication.
It is not uncommon for philosophers to assume that the practice of interpreting others depends principally on ascribing two classes of mental states to them, beliefs (which are informational) and desires (which are motivational).12 However, when interpreting the
behaviour and, more specifically the linguistic behaviour, of another person while interacting with her, Austin rightly observes that our utterances and hers do not take the form of bare statements of fact or expressions of desire. The task of understanding one another involves
recognizing a vast number of subtly different illocutionary acts, such as appealing, encouraging, dismissing, inquiring, or challenging. Austin (1962, Lecture XII) classifies them
into five broad types:
• verdictives: giving a verdict
• exercitives: exercising powers
• commissives: committing oneself to doing something
• behabitives: a more heterogeneous group that concern social behaviour (e.g.
congratulating, apologizing, cursing, expositings,specifying how utterances fit into arguments (e.g. I argue, I concede, I assume)

Once this complexity is acknowledged, it becomes apparent how loss of trust can impact on the sense of being understood, having one’s utterance taken up by another person, and equally upon the anticipation of being understood or misunderstood. To anticipate and
experience other people as taking up one’s utterances in certain ways requires trust. Where trust is absent, a respondent’s words and deeds will be taken to involve only certain kinds of illocutionary acts. The prospect of sincerely promising, encouraging, advising out of concern, or questioning out of well-meaning curiosity does not arise; the interpersonal world is bereft
of such possibilities. A sense of communicative failure or even futility may in turn be further exacerbated by an interlocutor’s genuine failure to recognize the person’s predicament, to recognize illocutionary acts such as pleading for understanding and respond accordingly. In
general terms, the feeling of being understood will be lacking and gestures that might otherwise be taken to signal understanding and concern will be experienced as indicating otherwise. As Shay (1994, p.181) remarks in his discussion of traumatized Vietnam veterans:
Democratic process entails debate, persuasion, and compromise. These all presuppose the
trustworthiness of words. The moral dimension of severe trauma, the betrayal of ‘what’s right’, obliterates the capacity for trust. The customary meanings of words are exchanged for new ones; fair offers from opponents are scrutinized for traps; every smile conceals a dagger. (Shay, 1994, p.181)

One thus inhabits a damaged world, which, in the absence of trust, no longer incorporates the
prospect of rebuilding. And integral to this is a way of anticipating and experiencing other people that renders many kinds of illocutionary acts seemingly futile, destined from the outset to fail.
An understanding of fist-person linguistic experience in trauma and emotional upheaval (where the latter is taken to be necessary but not sufficient for the former) therefore
has the potential to inform clinical empathy, where ‘empathy’ is construed in a permissive
way as understanding experiences had by a particular individual. In seeking to comprehend the relevant aspect of experience, we come to see that the first step in an empathic process will not be that of developing a positive understanding of what someone else experiences but, rather, recognizing the nature and extent of the potential gulf between one’s own world and (Ratcliffe, 2015; 2018). What is disrupted is something ordinarily taken for granted as shared by interpreter and interpreted, in the guise of a world that ‘we’ inhabit, in the context of which we have our differing experiences and thoughts. Hence, appreciating the phenomenology of language in trauma requires acknowledging how someone might be uprooted from a world that is more usually presupposed as ‘ours’. Failures of empathy will
occur when one interprets the other person’s experiences against the backdrop of this world, when the relevant experiences are actually symptomatic of its disturbance.

Finding the ability to articulate what has happened and to feel understood can be an important step in the process of recovery, one that may require the assistance of others (e.g. Herman, 1992/1997). A greater understanding of ways in which language may be experienced as inadequate to the reality of trauma therefore has potential therapeutic significance.”

OLP would say: imagine examples of when we say something about misunderstanding, and we can investigate the context and criteria and learn what it says about understanding better. Instead, we take our "guilt, hostility, and stress" (our desperate skepticism) out on our ordinary criteria, and abandon them. The step is made because the ordinary ways are subject to failure, and we want something--"a way to understand each other better than we do". Not to make ourselves better, but to start the way langauge works over from scratch and build from the criteria we want. But then we understand everything in one way, built to address or solve all our misunderstandings, at once (dispell or solve our skepticism). And this instead of seeing and learning about the many ways we have come up with over the life of our trying to understand, through what we say when we talk of our misunderstandings (even in idioms — Antony Nickles

Your method reminds me of the social constructionist Ken Gergen.

For Gergen, we only exist as the kind of ordinary, everyday persons we are, within certain, socially constructed, linguistically sustained "living traditions" - within which, what people seemingly talk 'about' (referentially) is in fact, constituted or constructed 'in' their responses to each other in the talk between them. In Gergen's version, such a tradition seemingly exists as "a repository of linguistic artifacts," sustained as such "in virtue of negotiated agreements widely shared within the culture".For him, these socially negotiated agreements influence, not only what we take our realities to be, but also the character of our subjectivities, our psychological make-up.

As Gergen sees it, instead of failures of understanding being crucial (and provoking adaptive reconstructions), "what we count as knowledge are temporary locations in dialogic space - samples of discourse that are accorded status as 'knowledgeable tellings on given occasions’.”

I think what this approach leaves out is the contribution of the subjective dimension, and for that reason it is being supplanted by approaches that integrate olp insights with embodied , enactive perspectives drawing from phenomenologists. A you know, Wittgenstein did not deny that there are such things as biological bodies , his concern was with how we ‘justify’ meaning claims that our empirical models generate.

So it seems to me you could take one of two tacks.
1) You could point to the continuing usefulness of our empirical descriptions of physical, biological and psychological phenomena, only reminding us of the problems that arise by treating these empirical models
and their associated concepts as if they existed outside of the discursive contexts that formed and constantly reform them.

In addition, you could recognize that Wittgenstein’s method of approach is not simply agnostic with respect to empirical science, that is , not just allows that empirical models in general are pragmatically, contextually useful, but that his approach to discourse has specific implications for ways of thinking about the biological and the psychological. A whole range of assumptions concerning the way we talk about concepts like the nature of biological evolution, the processes of affectivity, perception, cognition and language require rethinking after Wittgenstein. .

And this rethinking has taken place, providing alternatives to Cartesian representational models of emotion, perception, empathy, cognition and language. You will find Wittgensteinian and Austinian scholars who embrace these new approaches, including the autopoietic self-organizing systems work of Varela and Thompson, the embodied, embedded, enactive, affective perspectives of Gallagher, Fuchs, and Ratcliffe,
the hermeneutic constructivist ideas of Chiari, the phenomenological contributions of Zahavi.

The advances of these writers allow for an integration of the biological, the psychological and the discursively intersubjective. But they do this not only by re-situating , pragmatising and ‘contextualizing’ the treatment of these issues, but also by adapting Wittgenstein’s contribution such that it takes into account a certain asymmetry between the subjective and the objective poles of contextual sense-formation.In self-organizing systems terms, this is called structural
coupling, At the level of psychological phenomena, it lends to awareness its point of view, the ‘for-meness’ of experience.

The second approach you could take is to dissolve
these approaches within your discursive method, calling them all problematic as long as they refuse to relinquish the subjective in favor of a discursive idealization which denies a role to point of view.

For instance, Matthew Ratcliffe has been working on an approach to experiencing he calls ‘existential feeling.

Ratcliffe fleshed out his approach with elements drawn from the phenomenologies of Merleau-Ponty, Husserl and Heidegger:

“Both Husserl and Merleau-Ponty add that localized experiences of possibility presuppose a more-enveloping orientation, a sense of belonging to the world. When I see or think about something, when I am afraid of something, and when I am in a bad mood about a wider situation, I already find myself in the world, in a way than differs in kind from intentional experiences in one or another modality (e.g. imagining, perceiving, or remembering something). This ‘world' is presupposed by intentional states of whatever kind with whatever content. We can think of it in terms of a possibility space, a receptivity to types of possibility.”“Things are experienced as significant to us, as mattering to us, in various different ways, something that involves a sense of the possibilities they offer.” (Ratcliffe, 2020


In the following, Ratcliffe shows how communication is affected by subjective alterations in existential feeling.

“The themes of silence and the unsayable have been associated specifically with the testimonies of Holocaust survivors. In addressing the relevant literature, Martin Kusch (2017) introduces the term “linguistic despair” to capture the way in which language’s failure is taken to be unavoidable and insurmountable. The phenomenon he refers to is mentioned explicitly in several well-known autobiographical accounts. For instance, here is how Elie Wiesel (2006, viii-ix) describes the linguistic challenge that one faces:
Convinced that this period in history would be judged one day, I knew that I must bear witness. I also knew that, while I had many things to say, I did not have the words to say them. Painfully aware of my limitations, I watched helplessly as language became an obstacle. It became clear that it would be necessary to invent a new language. But how was one to rehabilitate and
transform words betrayed and perverted by the enemy? Hunger – thirst – fear – transport selection – fire – chimney: these words all have intrinsic meaning, but in those times, they
meant something else. (viii-ix)

Charlotte Delbo (1985 / 1990, p.3) describes the limitations of language in a complementary way, emphasizing a kind of ‘splitting’ that encompasses language, self, and reality. There is the consensus world that one now inhabits no and there is also the world of
the concentration camp.

2 As Wiesel points out, words such as ‘hunger’ and ‘chimney’ had quite different connotations in that world, in a place where all that one previously took for
granted and that one’s interpreters now take for granted was extinguished. To describe Context A to those residing in Context B, one relies upon words such as x, y, and z, which are familiar to interpreters situated in B. However, those words have importantly different
connotations in A, which are muffled by interpreting them against the backdrop of B. Hence, in order to describe something, one must use words that someone else understands, but that same understanding eclipses the phenomenon in question. As Kusch (2017, p.142) writes,
“the struggle for words is essentially the struggle to communicate the destruction of much of
what in ‘ordinary life’ we take for granted”. There is a loss of ordinarily implicit, pre- reflective certainties that the workings of language more usually presuppose.
If this is what the phenomenon consists in, then it is also something that can arise at the level of the individual, something that can happen to ‘me’ rather than ‘us’, where ‘us’ might be a family, a larger group, or even a whole culture. Of course, there remain important differences. Nevertheless, a particular person can similarly experience the destruction of a habitual world that others presuppose, such that words cannot be successfully exported from one context to the other. For example, Annie Rogers (2007, p.4) describes what she calls the “unsayable” in a way that seems to incorporate this (although it is not the explicit focus of her account): “It was there, as a sixteen-year-old girl, that I stopped speaking for five months, from October to February. I realized that whatever I might say could be misconstrued and used to create a version of ‘reality’ that would be unrecognizable, a kind of voice-over of my truths I could not bear.” Later on, she writes, “Here is the unsayable, where words are spoken, yet fall into disconnection with what they point toward” (p.88). It should be added that the distinction between group-level and individual-level trauma is by no means straightforward. That something happened to ‘us’ does not imply a sense of shared understanding among those who endured it. Where we are concerned with the phenomenology of trauma, what happened to ‘us’ may still be experienced principally as ‘mine’ rather than ‘ours’. For instance, Shay (1994, pp.205-6) reports that some Vietnam veterans did not feel solidarity with fellow traumatized soldiers but instead construed their
disclosures in terms of an adversarial “pissing contest”. The trauma is experienced as something that happened to ‘me’ - something to be endured alone, which is not to be understood by or shared with others.
We might distinguish two phenomena here: (a) a struggle to find the right words oneself; (b) a failure on the part of others to understand those words. One might have the experience of conveying something in an entirely adequate way, associated with the experience of others failing to comprehend one’s words due to their own contingent limitations. Conversely, one might feel that, although one’s words fall flat, certain empathic
individuals still manage to understand. However, (a) and (b) have a common origin and are, in practice, thoroughly entwined. One struggles to find words because something is lost when those words move between contexts, and others fail to understand because a familiar context eclipses an unfamiliar one. The communicative task of the trauma survivor is therefore doubly difficult: the profound gulf between what she endured (and perhaps continued to
endure) and what an interlocutor takes as given
impedes both linguistic expression and
linguistic comprehension. Importantly, the problem does not consist merely in recognizing that words fall short;
one also experiences those words as falling short. Even as they are uttered, there is a sense or feeling of their inadequacy. With this, there is also a more pervasive experience of lack or absence. Something that once seemed integral to the world, like bedrock, is experienced as missing, perhaps altogether lost. My task here is to clarify the relevant phenomenology. Two
broad types of scenario can be distinguished: (i) one shares context B with another person and seeks to relate context A to that person, while experiencing the gulf between where one once was (A) and where both parties are now (B); (ii) one inhabits A in an enduring way, thus experiencing a gulf between where one is now (A) and where the other person is now (B). I will focus principally on (ii), on those cases that involve an enduring experience of loss, in contrast to something that also seems alien to oneself much of the time. However, I also concede that the distinction between A- and B-type scenarios is not clear-cut.”

Are you familiar with the work in the area of the problem of other minds, or the issue of empathy?
— Joshs

Yes, started with, Descartes I wanna say. I think my post of my reading of Witt's lion quote is to show what he discovered about the problem of the other. I — Antony Nickles

I’m going to take that as a ‘no’. I sense a gap between the Wittgensteinian approach you are using and the fertile research currently taking place on self-consciousness and empathy. You’ll have to trust me when I say that scholars like Dan Zahavi and Shaun Gallagher have a thoroughgoing familiarity with Wittgenstein, and would claim to embrace his approach. I believe they would say there is more to say about the basis of intersubjectivty and its relation to subjectivity than what you are offering , but which not at all incompatible with Wittgenstein. My initial impression is that your approach doesn’t allow you to allow sufficiently for the role of subjectivity in intersubjective functions like language, that it runs the risk of idealizing discursive structures. It comes off as a radical social constructionism of the sort that Deleuze critiques as leaving out the ‘bio’ favor of the political.


It may be that if your interests gravitate toward political theory or literature , the approach you are using may be suffice for for those purposes. But I believe it is inadequate to address such phenomena as pacholfical pathologies and developmental aspects of empathy and langauge acquisition . As Zahavi notes:”Relevant test-cases would include thought-insertion and other self-disorders in schizophrenia, disturbed forms of self-understanding in autism and diminished self-experience in dementia and Alzheimer's disease.”

I should add that the authors and approaches I’m referring to now do not follow the more radical
line of reasoning of Heidegger or Derrida regarding temporality. They are fully in line with Merleau-Ponty when he says

“ In the experience of dialogue, there is constituted between the other person and myself a common ground; my thought and his are inter-woven into a single fabric, my words and those of my interlocutor are called forth by the state of the discussion, and they are inserted into a shared operation of which neither of us is the creator.”

Do me a favor and take a quick look at the following paper by Dan Zahavi, one of the leading phenomenological writers.

Here’s the abstract:

Is the self a social construct?

DAN ZAHAVI
University of Copenhagen, Denmark

Abstract: There is a long tradition in philosophy for claiming that selfhood is socially constructed and self-experience intersubjectively mediated. On many accounts, we consequently have to distinguish between being conscious or sentient and being a self. The requirements that must be met in order to qualify for the latter are higher. My aim in the following is to challenge this form of social constructivism by arguing that an account of self which disregards the fundamental
structures and features of our experiential life is a non-starter, and that a correct description and account of the experiential dimension must do justice to the first-person perspective and to the primitive form of self-referentiality, mineness or for-me-ness that it entails. I then consider and discuss various objections to this account, in particularly the view that an endorsement of such a minimal notion of self commits one to an outdated form of Cartesianism. In the final part of the paper, I argue that the self is so multifaceted a phenomenon that various complementary accounts must be integrated if we are to do justice to its complexity.

http://www2.psych.utoronto.ca/users/tafarodi/psy425/articles/Zahavi%20(2009).pdf

I’d also recommend this comparison of Ryle and Austin with phenomenology, penned by Shaun Gallagher

http://www.ummoss.org/gall17doublePhen.pdf

ABSTRACT – A discussion between phenomenologists and analytic philosophers of mind that took place in 1958 reveals some hidden connections between these two approaches to studying the mind. I argue that we can find two complementary phenomenological methods within this discussion – one that follows along the line of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, the other that follows the kind of analysis of speech-acts, avowals and “unstudied speech,” proposed by Ryle and Austin.”

the "question" of Being isn't one I've considered nor have I thought it worthwhile to do so. And I'm leery of what seems to be the tendency of many philosophers to come up with definitions of such grand concepts as "Being" and "Thought" as part of an effort to understand, finally, what they are, or what reality is, or what knowledge is, what "Good" is. I suspect that efforts to do so are tainted by what Dewey referred to as "the philosophical fallacy" which he summarized as being "lack of context." — Ciceronianus the White

Whatever ‘Being’ means to you in a philosophical context, I’m betting that it has absolutely nothing to do with Heidegger’s project , but the only way you’ll find that is to get over your prejudice and read Heidegger. I felt exactly the same way as you when I was a grad
student in experimental psychology. I was
convinced the style of writing of contemporary continental philosophers was unnecessary and that more ‘empirical’ or ‘ ordinary’ language was more effective.
I now realize that the best of the continental philosophers use a language to express exactly what they mean to say, and what they are saying is vitally relevant and substantive. My initial difficulties in penetrating their language, i found out , had nothing to do with arbitrary word choices on their part and everything to do with the challenging content of their ideas.

The fact that Dewey used a more ‘ordinary’ vocabulary(did he really? You think his notion of pragmatic is the everyday notion, or a profound change in its sense?) didn’t seem to help him gain acceptance. He was ignored by mainstream psychology for 90 years. In some ways his vocabulary was less accessible or ‘ordinary’ than Heidegger’s.

such concepts may be used uncommonly and and have uncommon meanings. I don't think those efforts are rewarding, however, and think that we're better served if "ordinary language" which is quite versatile is used in explanations and discussions, and ordinary events considered, even in philosophy. Words may invoke great insights, but I think that's the business of poets. — Ciceronianus the White

Heidegger’s vocabulary isn’t extraordinary with respect to Wittgenstein or Dewey , it’s simply richer, and or uses more routes of access to it from more cultural modalities ( the theological, political, psychological, literary) than he so-called ordinary vocabularies of analytic philosophy. If you want to be understood deeply , you must draw from as rich and multi-varied a stir of cultural resources as possible.

As far as why you should read Heidegger, he is now being used more and more as an important source of ideas for a current generation of writers in enactive , embodied approaches to cognition. His work has been important i the understanding of the relationship between affect and cognition, in the interpretation of schizophrenic, depression, autism, ptsd and more.

One "uncommon" use is when philosophy stripes concepts of the criteria that account for their ordinary uses (possible senses) and significance (why those senses matter to us)--"knowledge" 'appearance" "difference", intention" etc. And, yes, this "creates problems", like when "thought" is imagined to be an internal thing that, to be special, new, innovative, needs to be "outside" of the ordinary criteria of our concepts, that those must be circumvented. — Antony Nickles

Another ‘uncommon’ use is to convince
onself that one is using ordinary language to talk about olp, only to find the readers are all over the place in interpreting the sense of those ‘ordinary’ words. Why do you think that is? Perhaps our ordinary criteria are themselves , from one to the next to the next person( and ‘within’ each person), already ‘outside’ the ordinary, so no circumvention is needed. Perhaps this is because there is no purely internal any more than there a a purely public.

Are you familiar with the work in the area of the problem of other minds, or the issue of empathy?
It’s become a burgeoning field of study and I think it is germane to the understanding of language, given that in order to communicate with others, we must first recognize them as like ourselves, as fellow language-using beings.

The three prime candidates for explaining empathy are theory theory, simulation theory and interaction theory. The first two pre-suppose an ‘inner’ mentation that actively infers the existence of others and attempt a to ‘mind read’. The interactioniat group rejects internal representations in favor of a primary intersubjectivity , which has much in common with Wittgenstein.
This growing group of writers make use of Husserl’s and Merleau-Monty’s analyses of empathy.
The other feature of intersubjectivity that is becoming widely accepted is that there is something it is like for me to experience a world( Nagel) They stipulate that all consciousness is self-consciousness ; there is a minimal pre-reflective self-awareness that accompanies al experiences. I’m wondering what you take is on this, since it speaks to the subjective side of language.

Well, I suppose an innovation in thought doesn't have to be a good one — Ciceronianus the White

Here’s the first page of Heidegger’s magnum opus, Being and Time.

“”For manifestly you have long been aware of what
you mean when you use the expression 'being.' We,
however, who used to think we understood it, have now
become perplexed.”( Plato)

Do we in our time have an answer to the ques­tion of what we really mean by the word 'being'? Not at all. So it is fitting that we should raise anew the question
of the meaning of being. But are we nowadays even per­plexed at our inability to understand the expression
'being'? Not at all. So first of all we must reawaken an
understanding for the meaning of this question. Our
aim in the following treatise is to work out the question
of the meaning of being and to do so concretely. Our
provisional aim is the interpretation of time as the pos­
sible horizon for any understanding whatsoever of
being.”

Hi, I would like to submit the following papers. They are all drafts. None has been submitted to publishers.

https://www.academia.edu/42097007/A_Phenomenological_Critique_of_Existential_Feeling_Affect_as_Temporality

https://www.academia.edu/41670442/A_Phenomenological_Critique_of_Mindfulness

https://www.academia.edu/41358275/Husserls_Challenge_to_Merleau_Pontys_Embodied_Intersubjectivity

https://www.academia.edu/44497152/Personal_Construct_Theory_as_Radically_Temporal_Phenomenology_George_Kelly_s_Challenge_to_Embodied_Intersubjectivity

I'd be interested in some examples of instances where an innovation in thought was communicated by using common stock words uncommonly. — Ciceronianus the White

Heidegger: Being, ‘is’, self, curiosity, idle talk, care, hearing, understanding , discourse, time, past, future.

Derrida: spacing , intention, writing , trace, mark, presence, expression, sign,

Husserl: ego, intention, empathy, sense, real, objective, nature, material, physical.

I could list many more philosophers. And it’s not just individual words whose sense is changed , it is also conventional grammatical structure.

I am the author. Did you enjoy the paper?

there is no situation of communicating with another, such as what you and I are doing now , where you wouldn’t be in a better position to understand me by assuming that every word I use is not just the mark of a history of sedimented cultural contexts , but my own integral interpretation of that history of contexts as I interpreted them, just as you own contextual background is unique to your history."
— Joshs

That sounds exhausting; most of the time we don't need to be that special, nor intentional (if at all), but, yes, some times it is appropriate to be deliberate (a speech), or to "speak your (individual) truth" as it were. — Antony Nickles

How often in your life , say over the course of a
month, a week or even a day, do you feel feelings of guilt, anger, anxiety? These are the social affects that tell us of the myriad ways we misunderstand each other , talk past one another, fail to ‘ put ourselves in the other’s shoe’ I would say that , given how prevalent these forms of suffering are in our lives, and how often they can lead to cruelty and suffering, most of the time we are in desperate need of a way to understand each other better than we do. If what I described is exhausting , it is much less exhausting than settling for emotional pain. That is, if we are successful at it. And we don’t have a chance at succeeding if we miss a large chunk of what produces misunderstandings. and their associated feelings of guilt, hostility , stress.

We are not that powerful--we don't set meaning, nor mitigate understanding; again, we abandon ourselves to our words. — Antony Nickles

We are even less powerful than Witt or Austin assume. That is to say, ‘we’ are even less powerful that the socially formed we that they talk about, which is still quite powerful in violent and arbitrary ways. We don’t abandon ourselves to our words, we abandon ourselves to temporality, to change in context, which is more fundamental than words seen as shared conventions.
Creative shifts in sense operate before, beneath , within and beyond shared conventions.


Derrida says all speech is writing in Derrida’s sense of writing as differance, so when I speak or write to myself, I am speaking to the other. This is the origin and only site of the social.

“When he writes himself to himself, he writes himself to the other who is infinitely far away and who is supposed to send his signature back to him. He has no relation to himself that is not forced to defer itself by passing through the other in the form, precisely, of the eternal return. I love what I am living and I desire what is coming. I recognize it gratefully and I desire it to return eternally. I desire whatever comes my way to come to me, and to come back to me eternally. When he writes himself to himself, he has no immediate presence of himself
to himself. There is the necessity of this detour through the other...”

“From this point of view, there is no difference, or no possible distinction if you will, between the letter I write to someone else and the letter I send to myself. The structure is the same.”

This would also apply to speaking to oneself and to another.

I should mention that , concerning concepts like ‘I’ , ipsiety, the subject, Being, the self, Derrida and Heidegger don’t begin from a notion of self as Anthropos, as a human being , or living thing, or empirical body.
For Derrida the mark, difference, the trace, writing can’t even be said to be a ‘who’ as opposed to a ‘what’.

Intention , meaning to say, Being, experiencing, is a bare temporal structure , the past which is changed by a presenting which comes from a future. This tri-partite structure is what a single moment ‘is’, and it is irreducible, and comes back to itself as utterly other than itself, as utterly new context.

If we cannot say that this temporality of intention is a human or living thing or any sort of ‘entity’ , then the notion of two ‘people’ and what takes place between them is already a secondary or derived modification of the primary sociality of the ‘self’ that continues to be what it is by being a new and other self every moment. The self ‘is’ this other to itself , what Heidegger calls the in-between.

Getting back to the arbitrary and violent power of the socially constructed ‘we’, tell me a little about what you and Austin think happens when you sit by yourself in your armchair for hours or days with no communicative contact with others, and you are thinking and writing nonstop. Let’s not worry yet about what ‘ thinking’ means here. How would you characterize this experience? What if I were to talk about what took place in the following way: you began your writing by moving from a foundation of sedimented social norms, conventions and practices that are embedded in the words that you think to yourself. By over time , you found yourself rethinking the conventional sense of those words and moving beyond the conventions. Your solitary thinking and writing brought you to a changed relationship to those conventions , and this is reflected in the odd new terms
that begin to crop up in your work.

When you re-engage with your intellectual
community after this period of solitary creativity, you find you understand them less well and they understand you less well. You may eventually need to move on from
that community and find or form a new one .

Tell me how you would translate what I just said in Austinian terms. Does your solitary creativity amount to no more than a reshuffling of socially formed concepts?

I prefer Eugene Gendlin’s explanation:

“After Wittgenstein philosophers have assumed that only language gives meaning to sensing the body “from inside.” The common experiencing we have all day is philosophically ignored because they think of it as merely internal and indeterminate, made interactional only by language. There is a big difference between my view and that of the current philosophers. They say that the body as sensed from inside is meaningful and interactional only through language (which includes concepts, culture, and history). If we find a bodily sense meaningful, they think this can only be what language and culture have trained into our bodies.”

If our interactions are attributed to ‘culture’, we may seem culturally programmed since we are born into a world of language, art, and human relationships. Culture may seem imposed on human bodies. But we can ask: How can a body have cultural patterns such as speech and art, and how can it act in situations? If we can explain this, we can explain how culture was generated and how it is now being regenerated further and further.

“We can speak freshly because our bodily situation is always different and much more intricate than the cultural generalities. A situation is a bodily happening, not just generalities. Language doesn't consist just of standard sayings. Language is part of the human body's implying of behavior possibilities. Our own situation always consists of more intricate implyings. Our situation implies much more than the cultural kinds. The usual view is mistaken, that the individual can do no more than choose among the cultural scenarios, or add mere nuances. The ‘nuances’ are not mere details. Since what is culturally appropriate has only a general meaning, it is the so-called ‘nuances’ that tell us what we really want to know. They indicate what the standard saying really means here, this time, from this person.

Speech coming directly from implicit understanding is trans-cultural. Every individual incorporates but far transcends culture, as becomes evident from direct reference. Thinking is both individual and social. The current theory of a one-way determination by society is too simple. The relation is much more complex. Individuals do require channels of information, public discourses, instruments and machines, economic support, and associations for action. The individual must also find ways to relate to the public attitudes so as to be neither captured nor isolated. In all these ways the individual is highly controlled. Nevertheless, individual thinking constantly exceeds society.”

As Witt's builders show: a lot of the context is already there ("written" Derrida might say)--our understanding of money, a transaction, private ownership, a question, on and on--for both of us to know, when I say to a grocer "Can I get that Apple?", that I want to buy it. — Antony Nickles

Of course , properly speaking , the context isnt anywhere, doesn’t exist, until it is experienced in the act of drawing from a background and in the same instant changing that background by using it in the now. But nowhere do we have evidence that the background that I draw from and the background that you draw from are the ‘same’ background. That is why Derrida talks of internally stratified contexts , social contexts that are ‘relatively stable’ rather than centered or unified as ‘shared’ from me to you. The ‘from me to you’ doesn’t share the context, it changes the context, but does so such that it can be seen ‘the same differently.’

There is no context that is shared. That is , there is no situation of communicating with another, such as what you and I are doing now , where you wouldn’t be in a better position to understand me by assuming that every word I use is not just the mark of a history of sedimented cultural contexts , but my own integral interpretation of that history of contexts as I interpreted them, just as you own contextual background is unique to your history.

That is to say, you should be looking to see how I mean every word that I use in relation to that larger personal system of understanding that is unique to me even as it bears a close enough relation to your own system that we are seemingly able to understand one another. But I don’t assume that we will understand one another beyond a certain secondary level of ‘sharing’. and I can even get a sense of where we will depart from each other in our interpretation of each other’s terms.

Now do we know how well we have understood one another ? The way I would put it to the test is by researching as much of your previous comments in this thread as possible, so as to construct an ongoing model of your synthesis of Wittgenstein, austin, Emerson and Cavell, and how it differs from other contributors to this forum who also enjoy those authors. I would then attempt to summarize my reading of your position back to you, and use your own assent or rejection as the validation of whether my efforts were successful. I consider my method as a kind of subsuming of your system as a variant of my own system. Not melding or sharing of the of the two, but a going back and forth between two contextual worlds of sense-making. I would be interpreting each of your words in the way that I hypothesize you mean them and contrast that with the way that I mean them, with no expectation that that gap can ever be narrowed by more than a small amount because of the stable self-consistency of each person’s evolving system of understanding.

You, for your part , may not even be assuming that there is such an integral superordinate background unique to me and producing a common resistance of my use words to ‘shared understanding with you. So your criteria for understanding might be much looser than mine, and also would probably not have as its goal an ability to anticipate my further behavior beyond what could be determined in terms of ‘shared’ contexts.

So I'm just, as always, not sure what to do with Derrida. The idea of a concept repeating through different contexts, or iterability, is in the same vain for me as a word tied to a meaning (stripped of any need for context), or a representation being true or false about the world (the bogeymen Austin takes on). I know they are meant to be different, but it's as if Derrida doesn't want his cake but still wants to eat it. — Antony Nickles

Never mind Derrida then. I want you to deal with my claim that you miss a vital amount of what goes on with people when you apply a glorified conditioning model, which is essentially what Austin’s approach is. For conditioning models, the ongoing personhood of the peso. is nothing but the constantly changing sequences of arbitrary impingements that shape their behavior.

Let me try and set the terms of this debate:

Austin’s belongs to a multi-varied movement in philosophy that wanted to move behind both idealism and empiricism. That movement includes Wittgenstein,
Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, Deleuze, social constructivism , radical constructivism, hermeneutics, enactivism, etc.

A Rationalist apparatus in the head , and a representationalist language of inner correspondence with an outer, independently existing world , was abandoned in favor of social interaction as the set of meaning-making. The limitation of these approaches is that as they did away with ‘inner’ contents insulated
fro social context , they retained a reliance
on a substantial notion of content. Now instead of our rational internal templates dictating our meanings, our behavior is dictated by interpersonally formed contents. This was certainly an improvement, i. that it revealed the endless creativity in social structures and language , and also revealed a dynamically changing distributed order absent from rationalist and empiricist models.
But it didn’t go far enough to deconstruct the idea of content. Austin’s socially formed notion of concept begins too late, presumes too much. When you cite examples of the criteria for a concept to be felicitously used , your. examples of possible sense of a word are too over-determined. They treat ‘sense’ in a way that hides a whole universe of shading, variations and
textures within it that I suspect are invisible to you. And because they are invisible, Derrida’s use of intention is also invisible to you, leading you to profoundly misread him as having in mind a version of the old rationalism.

“The sky is blue.” take a shared’ sense of that phrase, such as ‘it’s not going to rain’, and then dig beneath that generic shared shell to reveal of senses of senses, different for every participant in that supposed same context of sense. For each participant, there is totality of relevance , as Heidegger puts it , that determines why they care enough in the first place to participate in the conversation, why rain is important to them in terms of their clothing or the fishing they hope to do or the fact that hey are less prepared for bad weather than their companion who they feel competitive with. All of these background concerns are an intrinsic part of the sense FOR THEM of that phrase.

“ The idea of a concept repeating through different contexts, or iterability, is in the same vain for me as a word tied to a meaning (stripped of any need for context), or a representation being true or false about the world.”

For Derrida the concept doesn’t repeat through different contexts. The first repetition of the concept destroys its meaning, just as change in context does for Austin’s notion of concept. The difference between derrida and Austin here is that time is context for Derrida. This follows upon Heidegger’s notion of temporality. Every new moment of time, every new ‘present’ is a new context, and destroys the old concept
and replaces it with the new. There is no onoing ‘perspective’ that survives this endless destruction and birth of concepts.

At this point you must be very confused. On the one hand, I’m presenting a view of contextual change that is so immediate, continual and thoroughgoing as to make it seem that the only kind of social world that could ensure from such flux would be without any stable order and without any room for shared conceptualization.

On the other, I have talked about systems of sense- making and stable superordinate worldview s, which I’m sure immediately raised red flags(aha, he’s invoking a pre-constituted rationalist inner system resistant
to contextual change!)

This paradoxical situation is difficult to explain in the language of the old way of thinking about such things as time and context. All I want to say at this point
is that to succeed at deconstructing Austin’s ‘concept’
is to replace content with process. Put differently , it takes away the arbitrary force and power invested in the notion of shared concept. A minimalist , intricate grounding of sense doesn’t have the substantiality of arbitrary force.

This minimalist notion of sense does not achieve its integrative continuity through any rationalist internal power. On the contrary, it simply lacks the formidability of value content implied by socially embedded and physically embodied sedimentation necessary to impose the arbitrariness of polarizing conditioning on the movement of experiential process.

Again, Derrida is jumping to conclusions maybe for his own reasons (if context is closed than the only option is difference?). A context only needs to be fleshed out to clarify any distinctions which are necessary for you and I to have no more concerns. If a concept is used generally, than the need for criteria and any context are simple to resolve. To quote myself from Emotions Matter: "The sky is blue." "Do you mean: we should go surfing? It's not going to rain? or are you just remarking on the brilliant color?" All these concerns of course may not need a much larger, more-detailed drawing out of a context to resolve (either to the Other or myself), but the context is endless if the need for distinctions remain. Context is not a means of (all) communication, it is a means of investigating our criteria of our concepts. One question would be: what context gives us an idea of the criteria a philosopher is relying on when saying "Surely I must know what I feel!" (Witt) — Antony Nickles

Is a context a kind of frame within which events happen? Do things take place WITHIN a context? Do two people interact within a single context? Can i hold onto an intention over time within a single context?

I ask these questions because the way that I interpret Derrida, context is synonymous with text , and text is synonymous with differance, the mark, the gramme, etc.
I don’t think a single context is large enough to include two people for Derrida. His notion of interability determines a context as being only a single moment of time, and it is only a single moment as experienced from a single perspective , that of the one forming an intention.

The moment I intend an utterance is the context for me. The next moment I find myself meaning to say something other than what I meant to say in the previous moment. What i originally meant to say has subtly changed its sense The context has changed and with it the criterion of my intention. It will appear for all ‘intents and purposes’ that I hold onto the ‘same’ context from moment to moment, because the shift in sense is so imperceptible. But what of my relationship with my interlocutor? If there is no ‘same’ context from moment to moment in my intending to say, then certainly my own intending and my receiving of the other’s response to me cannot be part of the ‘same’ context. I don’t think a context is something that can be said to be shared between two people for Derrida.

“The sky is blue”. However I intend this phrase , I cannot say that the moment of my intending it is the same moment , and thus the identical context, as my awareness of the other’s response to it. Relative to this very narrow notion of context, Austin’ s notion appears to Derrida to totalize into a single frame what is in fact a whole series of transformations of contexts, between myself and myself, and between myself and another. A whole series of very subtle transformations of sense end up being ignored , and stuffed into a single criterion of sense, a single situation. This does not mean that there isn’t a similarity between my criteria of sense and another’s, only that they are not the identical criteria or the identical context.

For the purpose of determining pragmatic social criteria of meaning Derrida makes use of a notion of dynamical context which is not-self-identical but consists of chains of differential marks.

“...the value of truth (and all those values associated with it) is never contested or destroyed in my writings, but only reinscribed in more powerful, larger, more stratified contexts. And that within interpretive contexts (that is, within relations of force that are always differential-for example, socio-political-institutional-but even beyond these determinations) that are relatively stable, sometimes apparently almost unshakeable, it should be possible to invoke rules of competence, criteria of discussion and of consensus, good faith, lucidity, rigor, criticism, and pedagogy.”(Limited Inc)


“Iterability makes possible idealization-and thus, a certain identity in repetition that is independent of the multiplicity of factual events- while at the same time limiting the idealization it makes possible:broaching and breaching it at once...the possibility of its being repeated another time-breaches, divides, expropriates the "ideal" plenitude or self-presence of intention,...of all adequation between meaning and saying. Iterability alters...leaves us no room but to mean (to say) something that is (already, always, also) other than what we mean (to say) (Limited,Inc,p.61)... It is not necessary to imagine the death of the sender or of the receiver, to put the shopping list in one's pocket, or even to raise the pen above the paper in order to interrupt oneself for a moment. The break intervenes from the moment that there is a mark, at once. It is iterability itself, ..passing between the re- of the repeated and the re- of the repeating, traversing and transforming repetition(p.53).

You are trying to reduce it to analysis; cannot be done. IF you had these experiences yourself you would know that. — Janus

Maybe I have had these experiences myself but have a way of dipping into them and extracting sayable sense from them, not to analyze or reduce them , but to expand and enrich them. Eugene Gendlin‘s focusing provides one such method.

Profundity in this context is a matter of feeling, not intellectual complexity and conceptual density or depth. — Janus

Feeling is a kind of knowing or understanding.
I do know that any feeling, no matter how profound, is an ineffective guide to life if one cannot find a way to articulate it further, to carry it forward into expanded senses of knowing. Putting it into words doesn’t destroy it , it is richer than the words , but the words are based on it and can point back into it.

Quite a bit I would think, compared with those thought up in armchairs. Care to name some of the latter? — Ciceronianus the White

As you know , like all languages, English is constantly evolving. One way to see this is by monitoring what new words make their way into dictionaries every year, which marks their entity into the realm of the ordinary, or at least conventional usage. You can google the list for this year.
How many of those words were ‘armchair’ words originally, used by a very small group of people for ‘uncommon’ purposes? Did they ‘ err’ by not using the common store?

philosophers, and everyone else, makes use of the common stock of words all the time. Some err by construing and using them uncommonly, however. — Ciceronianus the White

Good lord, how does one convey an innovation in thought WITHOUT either using the common stock uncommonly or inventing neologisms?

How do you know that? — synthesis

Look up ‘Alva Noe’ or Shaun Gallagher’. Your characterization of such terms
as language , perception and information seem to point to a rather outdated view of cognition.

some of the most "profound and intense" experiences were some of the last. I — Janus

What made them profound? What did you learn from them, and what made them different from the psychedelic experiences that weren’t as profound( assuming the same
drug and dosage)?

the experiences with meditation, when I was able to 'breakthrough', were also more intense later rather than earlier. — Janus

What made for the change from the earlier to the later? What accounts for the undependability of the experience?

the altered state") is paradoxical; always new and yet always the same; it is not subject to the ordinary logic you seem to be wanting to apply to it. — Janus

It seems to be subject to some kind of logic in your mind:you said it can come or not come , depending on certain variables, and there is something the same about all the experiences.

If you achieve ‘breakthrough’, to use your words,
is the experience from that point on like a plateau ? Is it monolithic? If it gives feelings of love or peace or bliss, is does this feeling persist as exactly the same homogenous tone of feeling thoughout the experience, or does it have modulations and textures?

Do you want fame, or truth? — Banno

If you discover a writer whose worldview seems extraordinary to you , and who has not entered the public consciousness yet, your adoption of his terminology would put you in a small minority. But is his language ‘ordinary’? If he uses common terms but radically changers their sense , is it still
ordinary?

...our common stock of words embodies all the distinctions men have found worth drawing, and the connexions they have found worth marking, in the lifetimes of many generations: these surely are likely to be more numerous, more sound, since they have stood up to the long test of the survival of the fittest, and more subtle, it least in all ordinary and reasonably practical matters, than any that you or I are likely to think up in our arm-chairs of an afternoon-the most favoured alternative method. — Banno

Sounds like a recipe for mediocrity. I wonder how much of that ‘common stock of words’ would remain if we removed the contributions of writers in innumerable fields of culture who thought them up in their armchairs(Plato, Freud, Shakespeare,etc).

Also, my understanding is that Derrida misconstrues Austin's peripheral reference to "force" in one particular category (perlocutionary) to apply it as Austin's entire goal, and overlooks that Austin more generally is still claiming truth value (adequation to the world), but calls it "felicity" (aptness) to the criteria of a concept--if an apology is done correctly, it is not true, but felicitous (apt), rather than infelicitous (botched, I think is Austin's way of putting it once). This is not a "force" more than a rationality. — Antony Nickles

Yes, I think that comes up in this section. This is what Derrida was working up.

“Austin's procedure is rather remarkable and typical of that philosophical tradition with which he would like
to have so few ties. It consists in recognizing that the possibility of the negative (in this case, of infelicities) is in fact a structural possibility, that failure is an essential risk of the operations under consideration; then, in a move which is almost immediately simultaneous, in the name of a kind of ideal regulation, it excludes that risk as accidental, exterior, one which teaches us nothing about the linguistic phenomenon being considered. This is all the more curious-and, strictly speaking, untenable-in view of Austin's ironic denunciation of the "fet­ishized" opposition: valuelfact.

In addition to the questions posed by a notion as historically sedimented as "convention," it should be noted at this point:

1) that Austin, at this juncture, appears to consider solely the conventionality constituting the circumstance of the utterance [monce], its contextual surround­ings, and not a certain conventionality intrinsic to what constitutes the speech act [locution] itself, all that might be summarized rapidly under the problematical rubric of "the arbitrary nature of the sign," which extends, aggravates, and radi­
calizes the difficulty. "Ritual" is not a possible occurrence [eventualite], but rath­er, as iterability, a structural characteristic of every mark.

2) that the value of risk or exposure to infeliCity, even though, as Austin recog­nizes, it can affect a priori the totality of conventional acts, is not interrogated as
an essential predicate or as a law. Austin does not ponder the consequences issuing from the fact that a possibility-a possible risk-is always possible, and is in some sense a necessary possibility. Nor whether--once such a necessary pos­sibility of infeliCity is recognized-infeliCity still constitutes an accident. What is a success when the possibility of infelicity continues to constitute its struc­ture?”

Got this from spark notes.

“One of the greatest deceptions of language, according to Nietzsche, is the subject-predicate form of grammar. Because all sentences are divided into a subject and a predicate, we are led to believe that there are actors (subjects) and deed (predicates) and that the two can be separated. As a result, we come to think of killing as something distinct from a bird of prey, something that it does. Nietzsche points out that grammar would similarly suggest to us that flashing is something distinct from lightning, something that it does. And just as there is no lightning distinct from the flash, Nietzsche suggests that there is no bird of prey distinct from the killing.

This argument does not simply suggest that killing is in a bird of prey's "nature" and that "it wouldn't be a bird of prey if it didn't kill things." In Nietzschean metaphysics, there is no such thing as the bird of prey as common wisdom would understand it. Gilles Deleuze interprets Nietzsche as suggesting that nothing exists but forces. We might simplify Deleuze's analysis by suggesting that only verbs truly exist: nouns and subjects are just the conveniences of grammar. While we might talk about a bird of prey killing a lamb, really there is just one force acting upon another. Of course, using "force" as a noun is a mistake, as it simply substitutes one noun for another.”

my knowledge of Derrida is not even being able to get through his attempt to read Austin (in Signature Event Context); — Antony Nickles

I re-read Signiature-Event-Context today, and my take on it is this. Derrida zeros in on the concept(s) of context, which is central to the argument of olp. He claims that Austin believes one can exhaustively determine a context of word uses such that no remainder is left over.

“Austin’s analyses at all times require a value of context, and even of a context exhaustively determined, in theory or teleologically; the long list of "infelicities" which in their variety may affect the performative event always comes back to an element in what Austin calls the total context.6 One of those essential elements-and not one among others-remains, classically , consciousness, the conscious presence of the intention of the speaking subject in the totality of his speech act. As a result, performative communication becomes once more the communication of an in­ meaning, even if that meaning has no referent in the form of a thing or of a prior or exterior state of things. The conscious presence of speakers or re­ceivers participating in the accomplishment of a performative, their conscious and intentional presence in the totality of the operation, implies teleologically that no residue [reste] escapes the present totalization. No residue, either in the definition of the requisite conventions, or in the internal and linguistic context, or in the grammatical form, or in the semantic determination of the words em­ployed; no irreducible polysemy, that is, no "dissemination" escaping the horizon of the unity of meaning. “

What does he mean by this? I can tell you that the treatment of context , not just by Austin but also Wittgenstein, leaves me with questions similar to Derrida’s. What is the minimal requirement for a context of use?At least two people, no? There is a speech act involving an utterance and a response. Is the the context a unity between these two aspects, between my intent and the other’s response, between what I send out and what comes back? Do these together constitute a single intent and single context? Or are there two contexts here, the context which forms the circumstances of my utterance , and the changed context which marks the other’s response, which can surprise my expectations?

I must join Banno and express my surprise that you claim Frantic Freddie Nietzsche exemplifies OLP. — Ciceronianus the White

In case you missed my response to Banno,

Derrida wrote:
“ Austin was obliged to free the analysis of the performative from the author­ity of the truth value, from the true/false opposition, at least in its classical form, and to substitute for it at times the value of force, of difference of force (illocutio­nary or perlocutionary force). In this line of thought, which is nothing less than Nietzschean, this in particular strikes me as moving in the direction of Nietzsche himself, who often acknowledged a certain affinity for a vein of English thought.”
Limited, Inc.

But I'm puzzled by your inclusion of the Great Moustache, since I find him relatively obscure. — Banno

Derrida wrote:
“ Austin was obliged to free the analysis of the performative from the author­ity of the truth value, from the true/false opposition, at least in its classical form, and to substitute for it at times the value of force, of difference of force (illocutio­nary or perlocutionary force). In this line of thought, which is nothing less than Nietzschean, this in particular strikes me as moving in the direction of Nietzsche himself, who often acknowledged a certain affinity for a vein of English thought.”
Limited, Inc.

Words/ideas are extremely important tools, but they have serious limitations. — synthesis

I don’t distinguish between words and experience. Words are not ‘tools’ that represent thought. Language IS thought, and thought IS experiencing. So the ‘serious limitations’ of language are a reflection of the serious limitations of experiencing. Yes, certainly one can make a distinction between verbal and non-verbal language. Not all implicit meanings we experience are clear enough to articulate verbally. But they are still a form of language.

When truly with your lover, do you look deeply into their eyes so they can realize the magnitude of your caring or would you present them with a dissertation on the theory of language and meaning as it applies to love? — synthesis

I would attempt to ‘communicate’ my feelings through non-verbal and perhaps verbal language. But my non-verbal expressions are not more ‘direct’ or ‘ pure’ or ‘immediate’ than language. This is an old Western philosophical prejudice privileging the ‘immediacy’ of speech over writing , gesture over speech. All communicating is mediate and interpretive. I think assuming that eye contact and expressions of bodily intimacy directly and unambiguously conveys one’s feelings to another is a recipe for disaster.

What concept of "enlightenment" are you talking about? — baker

I was referring strictly to @Janus’ formulation of the feeling expansion of self.

skepticism/moral relativism (Descartes, Derrida); — Antony Nickles

The only thing I would quibble with here is your characterization of Derrida as a relativist and/or a skeptic. He denied being associated with either of these( you may have meant only Deacartes as the skeptic).