Expressing The Unsayable

Philosophers and thinkers, throughout the history of both western and Chinese philosophy, seem to agree that some things can not be said by ordinary language, such as God, Logos, Idea, Substance, "thing-in-itself", Tao, etc., because they exist in a transcendental and metaphysical realm, and they function as the first all-embracing principle whereby al things in the real world are produced.Meanwhile, philosophers and thinkers, driven by curiosity, are quite interested in talking about the unsayable things, because the discussion on unsayability can offer help and inspiration to the study of semantics, prompting people to think what the nature of meaning is, so that people can employ tool of language to say the world in a more proper and effective way, and eventually promote linguistic studies to a deeper extent.On the other hand, most literature only discusses unsayability incidentally and so falls short of systematicity. This thesis is meant to present a systematic and comprehensive study of unsayability in the perspective philosophy of language. And it is organized in six parts.The first part is an overall introduction to the whole study. It introduces the reasons and its potential value for the study of unsayability, the rationale and methods of doing this study as well as its organization. Chapter One makes a comprehensive review on the background information, the study of the unsayable throughout the history. And it makes several distinctions so as to make the topic of this thesis more clarified, which is quite different from some so-called unsayable things, like the pragmatic situations when people deliberately keep something unsaid, or the psychological situations when people find themselves temporarily unable to say some newly sprung up things.Chapter Two deals with the generating mechanism of the unsayable things. It analyses the asymmetrical relationship of language, world and thought, which explains why something cannot be said by the means of ordinary language.Chapter Three makes categorization of the unsayable things. Firstly, it lists some features that can be used to identify the truly unsayable things. Then, in light of the common features, it categorizes the unsayable things into four major groups, namely, the logical form, metaphysics, ethics and aesthetics, and mystical things.Chapter Four generalizes four ways of expressing the unsayable things. Although the unsayable cannot be said directly by ordinary language, it can be partially and indirectly expressed, through the negative approach proposed by Fung Yu-Lan, the aid of metaphorical language, or the poetic language highly appreciated by Heidegger, or the self-showing approach maintained by Wittgenstein.The last part gives the conclusion. It makes the review of what is studied in the thesis; it explains the difficulties and limitations in making the research on this subject, as well as the expectation of the author on the value of this thesis.