The Rule of Evocation :: Language Papers

The Rule of Evocation It is the goal of this essay to challenge the belief that one never transcends language — that all one knows, indeed all one can meaningfully experience, is defined within language. My challenge lies not in words, but in the use of words to evoke what is beyond language and to invite a lived experience of it. If one accepts this use of language as not only possible, but primary, we ultimately see meaning not within language, but through it. Under the 'rule of evocation' language need not in any way within itself express, reproduce, re-present, or capture what it evokes. It need simply evoke it, and such an evocation is not a re-presentation in language of what is evoked. It is a presentation of the thing itself. It is the goal of this essay to challenge the belief that one never transcends language — that all one knows, indeed all one can meaningfully experience, is defined within language. My challenge lies not in words, but in the use of words to evoke what is beyond language and to invite a lived experience of it. It is rooted in the belief that this use of language is not only possible, but primary. My challenge must reside in this use of language rather than in language itself because language itself can be viewed as a closed system. One can look at language totally in isolation from its use to evoke what is beyond language. From this viewpoint nothing is seen but a series of internally related and defined signs. If one also accepts the idea that all uses of language are defined by the internal rules of language, it then seems quite natural to also believe there is nothing, or nothing one can use language to point to, beyond language. I am not the only person to challenge the language-trapped position. Erazim Kohak eloquently points to what I mean by the evocative use of language in The Embers and the Stars: A Philosophical Inquiry into the Moral Sense of Nature when he says that: In the communication between two humans who share the fundamental experience of being moral subjects, the intentional thrust of the act of communication is the evocation of understanding and the basic technique one of evoking an analogous experience. The hearer can be said to have understood when he can, albeit vicariously, "relive" the experience.