A critical discussion of Michael Sell's work, "The Mystical Languages of Unsaying" in relation to the works of mystic writers, Jalaluddin Rumi and Marguerite Porete.
Abstract This paper discusses the 'aporia of transcendence' which is a dialectical catechism or 'speaking away' that is used in philosophy. The paper speaks of the 'aporia of transcendence' as it relates to the works of Rumi and Porete. The paper reviews the work on this topic written by Michael Sells. It provides much research on Michael Sells and two other mystic writers, Jalaluddin Rumi and Marguerite Porete.
From the Paper "'Mystical experience' has long been portrayed as a remote awareness that can be explained and contrasted amongst other types of experience. But, this assessment has been met with substantial criticism in the past two decades. Such methodology evolved over time as a result of an assiduous decline of faith in humanity to impart paradigms by which people could attain secure identities. If society neglects to present convincing authority in regards to questions of Being, individuals often recoil to the internal sanctum of thoughts and feelings. In the alluring, vivacious, and sinister recesses of private musings, existence is validated and given merit. The clandestine struggle of a Mystic does not lend itself to understanding or provide insight into the intricate scaffolding of inspired philosophy. As Michael Sells comments, Mystic writers like Jalaluddin Rumi and Marguerite Porete did not aim to illustrate a specific type of experience. They hoped to generate an appreciation of the framework in which things take place at all and the human relationship to this fixed totality. "
Abstract This paper uses examples from James Joyce's "The Boarding House" and "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" to argue that the poet rejected the idea of meaning produced by structures and instead pointed the way towards an infinite number of interpretations rooted in subjectivity. The writer explains the focus on meaning through empiricism that was prevalent in Joyce's time, and how Joyce, on the other hand, through his writing establishes that while the self indeed only marks the intersection of various social tensions, it exists as the ultimate and mutable source of meaning. The paper concludes that if Joyce is correct and there is no truth but the subjective, then the self is the ultimate guarantor of meaning and art the tool by which it is uncovered.
From the Paper "Meaning and a sense of self are central to the human existence in order to place the self in context with the environment. According to Ferdinand de Saussure, we are trapped through language as integral parts of our environment or social system, within which we contextualize our selves. It follows that the structure of language produces reality, and timeless cultural structures create the individual, illusory sense of self; a self that remains stagnant because it cannot escape its place within its environment. Both the self and the possibility of change are therefore illusions, because meaning only stems from structures. This is the very idea at the heart of structuralism and similarly modernism which dominated Western thought during Joyce's time."
