Unspeakable topos

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The unspeakable topos is a well-known topos in the humanities, literature and music.

In rhetoric, the unspeakable topos describes the stereotypical difficulty, first described by Ernst Robert Curtius , of being able to do justice to an extensive material in the necessary brevity. But it also plays an important role in the philosophy of language.

The inexpressible becomes thematic at the moment when it seems questionable whether that which can be expressed with words can reflect the reality of experience. Plato already reports that non-existence is “inexpressible and inexpressible” ( ancient Greek ἄρρητον καὶ ἄφθεγκτον árreton kaì áphtegkton ).

The philosopher Plotinus (3rd century AD) judged in his preoccupation with the “one” that its connection with what can be said is based precisely on the strict inexpressibility of the “one”: there are no words for what is beyond what can be said. He therefore spoke of a "silent speech" ( ancient Greek λόγος σιωπῶν ). Until recently the opinion was often found that Plotinus wrote a bad Greek. The classical philologist Wilhelm Enßlin , on the other hand, held that this would only be true if the rules of school grammar were considered to be solely authoritative. The great difficulties in understanding are not due to the unclear expression, but to the abstract nature of the thoughts. Despite all its freedoms, Plotin's language follows Greek grammar and is not the stammering expression of the mystic who repeatedly struggles to find an expression for the unspeakable.

In the mystical theology of Pseudo-Dionysius Areopagita , oxymora were used to denote the unspeakable. Literary depictions of ecstasy in the Middle Ages, like Plato and Sappho, understood love as a paradoxical state and pointed to the unspeakable principle.

The motif of the unspeakable is a recurring motif even with poets like Dante . In the medieval novel Reinfried von Braunschweig it is said that not even Ovid could describe the love joys of the wedding couple. Albrecht writes that neither Ovid nor Aristotle could adequately describe the fame of the Titurison family .

In the poetry and rhetoric of the Baroque , the unspeakable topos and silence played a major role.

In Romanticism , the “idea of absolute music ” developed out of considerations about inexpressibility , and the contradiction that music says the linguistically unspeakable in its language was in turn reflected poetically in the medium of language and poetry. Richard Wagner wanted, as his writings on Beethoven show, to hold on to the romantic unspeakable topos and agreed with the view that where human language ends, music begins. Robert Schumann was also of the opinion that Beethoven's music should not only not be criticized, it should also not be praised because that too was presumptuous. One should love Beethoven's music and otherwise keep silent about it. Wagner and Schumann particularly emphasize the unspeakable topos and indescribability when dealing with Beethoven. Searching for “soul paintings” in music, an aesthetic conception of music, reaches its limits with Beethoven.

Immanuel Kant defines the “spirit in an aesthetic sense” by the unspeakable: the “aesthetic idea” is the imagination that “allows many unnamable things to be added to a concept, the feeling of which enlivens the cognitive faculty and with language, as a mere letter, Spirit connects ”.

Around 1900, the disempowerment of rational language and its claim to power is a powerful idea of ​​the time, which develops its own metaphor of lack. The unspeakable topos is an integral part of the literary staging of borderline experiences. Language crises are staged in a literary way in connection with literary reflections on images of this time, such as those found in Hugo von Hofmannsthal , Rainer Maria Rilke and Robert Musil .

In Hofmannsthal's A Letter , the failure of the modern conception of the ego is signaled and the ego is emphasized as the center of deception, the modern writer suffers from ego dissociation. The ego is no longer the place of self-knowledge, as in modern philosophy , but rather the focus of deception. The more it tries to insure itself, the more alien it becomes. The increasing breaks in the ego stem from his past lifetime. In this context, however, a time "good [r] moments" is conjured up and an "unnameable" time outside of time is conjured up. It is the "everyday" things, everyday objects of simple life, the sight of which suddenly ignites meaningfulness. The whole vocabulary of an aesthetics of the sublime is mobilized in order to show the reader that islands of meaning of another order are opened up in these leaps in time. This “Aesthetics of the Sudden”, which Karl Heinz Bohrer emphasized for the later literature of the 20th century, has always been associated with the sublime in intellectual history. Hofmannsthal varies the unspeakable topos to describe the “good moments” in this tradition of the sublime, which can be traced back to Pseudo-Longinos (approx. 1st century AD), who wrote that “silence [...] is sublime [is] as everything that is spoken ”. ( Walter Benjamin called these moments in Hofmannsthal times "profane revelation"). Hofmannsthal lets his protagonist use expressions like “the presence of the infinite” and “the most sublime present”, “flowing over”, “interwoven harmony”, and a “foreboding relationship to the whole of existence”. There is no division and no disintegration here as in the previous parts of the work that were critical of language. In these moments, the dualisms of modern times such as understanding and feeling, subject and object , the split between spirit and expansion, as the history of ideas has known since René Descartes , are canceled.

The phenomenologist Edmund Husserl tried to prove the origin of time in time-constituting consciousness, and ultimately had to use tropical speech in his project of a “philosophy as a strict science” , which mainly uses metaphors of “river” and “source”. In this context, Husserl wrote that the "names are missing", which indicates that the phenomenological origin of the time cannot be said. The untimely and non-objective flow of consciousness can only be thought of as temporal and objective and therefore only be discussed metaphorically. The philosopher Paul Ricœur spoke of the inexplicability of the origin of time as an aporia .

Reflecting on the unspeakable gains in importance in the 20th century. Ludwig Wittgenstein states that there are "inexpressible". The difference between saying and showing (“what can be shown cannot be said”) defines for him the subject of philosophy, which “[will] mean the unspeakable by clearly depicting what can be said”. For Wittgenstein, on the one hand the very highest is inexpressible, but on the other hand also the everyday and normal.

Herwarth Walden , one of the most important supporters of the German avant-garde of the early 20th century, found that one could not really talk about images. In order to be able to see a picture, one only needs one thing: “to see the picture”.

In his poem Ein Wort (1941) Gottfried Benn alludes to the unspeakable topos, to the word as a means of knowledge, which has become questionable, especially since the language crisis of the 20th century. At the same time, Benn is concerned with the meaning of the word since the Gospel of John . The homage to the word cannot create a permanently meaningful world here, only in the moment in art, and in this poem the subject remains alone “in the empty space around the world and me”. Goethe already took up the word in the Gospel , when Faust in the study stops translating lógos ( ancient Greek λόγος ) from Greek, then rejects “word”, “meaning”, “power” as a translation and opts for “deed” as a translation decides.

The physicist Albert Einstein was convinced that his crucial thoughts arose outside of language.

For Martin Heidegger , the essence of logic is sigetics , in which the essence of language is grasped first, which “cannot be linguistic” and should be left “without a name”.

The philosopher Hans Blumenberg tried to develop an “authentic way of capturing contexts” and “to represent the unspeakable itself in language”.

The question of aesthetics, music and language, which had already arisen in Romanticism, is still effective today and is also reflected upon with the means of analytical philosophy and linguistics , among others by the linguist Manfred Bierwisch and the philosopher Franz von Kutschera .

The unspeakable topos also plays a role in today's fan discourses. Often the comparison between analysis and fascination with the material is used here. Rainald Goetz, for example, shows resistance to the analysis of pop . Pop cannot be analyzed further.

See also

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Christiane Hessler: To the Paragone . Painting, sculpture and poetry in the culture of conflict of rank of the Quattrocento (=  Bénédicte Savoy , Michael Thimann , Gregor Wedekind [Hrsg.]: Ars et Scientia . Volume 6 ). De Gruyter, Berlin, Boston 2014, ISBN 978-3-05-009500-4 , pp. 310 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
  2. ↑ Ekkehard fields , Andreas Gardt (ed.): Handbuch Sprache und Wissen (=  handbooks language knowledge . Volume 1 ). Berlin, Boston, Massachusetts 2015, ISBN 978-3-11-029568-9 , pp. 485–486 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
  3. ↑ a b c d e Johann Kreuzer : Unsayable, that . In: Joachim Ritter , Karlfried founder , Gottfried Gabriel (Hrsg.): Historical dictionary of philosophy . tape 11 . Schwabe, Basel 2001, ISBN 978-3-7965-0115-9 .
  4. ^ Wilhelm Enßlin : Plotinos. In: Paulys Realencyclopadie der classischen Antiquity Science (RE). Volume XXI, 1, Stuttgart 1951, Col. 471-591 (here: Col. 530).
  5. ^ Christiane Augner: Poems of Ecstasy in the Literature of the 16th and 17th Century (=  Mannheimer Contributions to Linguistics and Literature Studies . Volume 49 ). Narr, Tübingen 2001, ISBN 3-8233-5649-6 ( limited preview in the Google book search).
  6. ↑ Winfried Wehle : Innamoramento. The impetus of the heart as the beginning of thinking and poetry . ( Dante , Vita nova I-III). In: Milan Herold, Michael Bernsen (Ed.): The lyrical moment. A figure of thought of Romania (=  Ottmar Ette [Hrsg.]: Mimesis. Romanic literatures of the world . Volume 55 ). De Gruyter, Berlin, Boston 2015, ISBN 978-3-11-035445-4 , pp. 39 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
  7. ↑ Manfred Kern, Alfred Ebenbauer , Silvia Krämer-Seifert (Hrsg.): Lexicon of ancient figures in the German texts of the Middle Ages . De Gruyter, Berlin / New York 2003, ISBN 3-11-016257-1 , p. 447–448 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
  8. ↑ Claudia Benthien : Baroque Silence. Rhetoric and Performativity of the Speechless in the 17th Century . Fink, Paderborn / Munich 2006, ISBN 3-7705-4236-3 .
  9. ↑ Ulrich Tadday : The beautiful infinite. Aesthetics, criticism, history of the romantic view of music . JB Metzler Musik, Stuttgart, Weimar 1999, ISBN 3-476-01664-1 , p. 123–127 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
  10. ↑ Berenike Schröder: Monumental memory - aesthetic renewal . Beethoven reception and the aesthetics of intermediality in the writings of the New German School (=  Jürgen Heidrich , Hans Joachim Marx , Martin Staehelin , Ulrich Konrad [Hrsg.]: Treatises on the history of music . Volume 24 ). V & R Unipress 2012, Göttingen 2012, ISBN 978-3-89971-889-8 ( limited preview in the Google book search).
  11. ^ Sabine Schneider : Promise of the pictures . The other medium in literature around 1900 (=  studies on German literature . Volume 180 ). Tübingen 2006, ISBN 3-484-18180-X ( limited preview in the Google book search).
  12. ↑ Carsten Cell: Constellations of Modernity. Silence - media change - literary phenomenology (=  Matthias Luserke-Jaqui , Rosmarie Zeller [Hrsg.]: Musil-Forum. Studies on the literature of classical modernism. On behalf of the International Robert-Musil Society . Volume 27 ). De Gruyter, Berlin / New York 2003, ISBN 3-11-017406-5 ( limited preview in the Google book search).
  13. ↑ Inga Romans : The time thinking in Husserl , Heidegger and Ricoeur (=  Phaenomenologica . Band 196 ). Springer, Dordrecht / Heidelberg / London / New York 2010, ISBN 978-90-481-8589-4 ( limited preview in the Google book search).
  14. ↑ Mariele Nientied: Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein. “Fooling into the truth” (= Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Hermann Deuser [Hrsg.]: Kierkegaard Studies. Monograph Series . Volume 7 ). De Gruyter, Berlin, Boston 2003, ISBN 3-11-020091-0 ( limited preview in Google book search).
  15. ↑ German Neundorfer: "Critique of Anschauung". Image description in the art-critical work of Carl Einstein . Königshausen and Neumann, Würzburg 2002, ISBN 3-8260-2508-3 , p. 24 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
  16. ^ Udo Friedrich, Martin Huber, Ulrich Schmitz: Uni-Wissen Orientierungskurs Germanistik. Safe in studying German . For your sure success in your studies. Klett Lerntraining, Stuttgart 2015, ISBN 978-3-12-939108-2 ( limited preview in the Google book search).
  17. ↑ Manfred Bierwisch : The organ of thought and the limits of what can be expressed . In: Union of the German Academies of Sciences , Saxon Academy of Sciences in Leipzig (ed.): "Tool Language". Language politics, language skills, language and power . 3rd Symposium of the German Academies of Sciences. Olms, Hildesheim / Zurich / New York 1999, ISBN 3-487-10773-2 , p. 96 ( gwz-berlin.de [PDF; 3.8 MB ]).
  18. ↑ Almut Todorow , Ulrike Landfester , Christian Sinn (ed.): Inconceptuality. A paradigm of modernity (=  literature and anthropology . Volume 21 ). Narr, Tübingen 2004, ISBN 3-8233-6035-3 ( limited preview in Google book search).
  19. ↑ Katrin Eggers: Ludwig Wittgenstein as a music philosopher (= Oliver Fürbeth, Lydia Goehr, Frank Hentschel, Stefan Lorenz Sorgner [ed.]: Musikphilosophie . Band 2 ). 2nd Edition. Karl Alber, Freiburg 2014, ISBN 978-3-495-48449-4 ( limited preview in the Google book search).
  20. ^ Franz von Kutschera: Aesthetics . De Gruyter, Berlin / New York 1998, ISBN 3-11-016276-8 ( limited preview in Google book search).
  21. ↑ Brigitte Weingart: fascination analysis . In: Gerald Echterhoff, Michael Eggers (ed.): The stuff we are attached to. Fascination and selection of material in cultural studies . Königshausen and Neumann, Würzburg 2002, ISBN 3-8260-2195-9 , p. 21–22 ( limited preview in Google Book search).