Meaning as Uncertain and Unsayable: Negotiations of a Poetics of Faithful Incredulity

In her excellent volume Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life, Agnes Callard juxtaposes Socrates’s conclusion that the meaningfulness of life is a function of consistent critical inquiry into existence with Leo Tolstoy’s contrary insistence that existential meaning ensues from living life without constant interruptions of self-reflection. These two perspectives functionally identify the tension between whether individuals may linguistically express opinions on truth and meaning or must negotiate in some manner with an inescapable silence regarding how best to comprehend and communicate discrete interpretations of the significance and veracity of lived experience. This present article investigates that tension and how it depends on the poetic and apophatic characteristics of language to both Say and Unsay how meaning and truth may be conceived. Salient positions from Ludwig Wittgenstein and William Franke provide introductory material to set the context for a closer examination of the complementary hermeneutics of the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur and the American poet Wallace Stevens. Both thinkers concur that properly analyzing meaning and truth requires a reliance on the creative imagination with its privileging of poetic language and its dependence on the humility of an incredulous faith in approximating an operative asymptotic approach to existential meaning.