This chapter explores Wittgenstein’s two references to the arts in 4.014. The first is his musical example of the unity of language and the world; the second his allusion to the fairytale The Gold-Children by Brothers Grimm. The chapter argues, first, that Wittgenstein’s early notion of logic incorporates forms that for Kant belong to transcendental aesthetic, namely, space and time. Second, it spells out how this commitment motivates Wittgenstein’s musical example and why it is crucial to draw a distinction between transcendental form and empirical structures made possible by that form. Finally, the chapter argues, pace Peter Sullivan, that the unity of language and the world is guaranteed by the metaphysical subject as their common origin. If the fairytale is read as a condensed illustration of Wittgenstein’s position, then this common origin is signified by a golden fish.

We conclude our book with brief summaries of our responses to the challenges we outlined in Chapter 2. We argue that the account we offer here shows promise and that the evidence is clear that, of all theories of utterance interpretation, relevance theory is uniquely positioned to accommodate emotion and affect.

This chapter introduces the two essential challenges in accommodating emotional communication within a theory of utterance interpretation: the challenge of description versus expression and the challenge of propositions and ineffability. We sketch the prehistory of philosophical thought and show how the sidelining of emotional communication in modern linguistic pragmatics is very much a consequence of the propositional foundations on which modern theories of semantics and pragmatics are built. Consequently, such theories have problems accounting for expression and ineffability. Two further challenges are also articulated. The first of these concerns the nature of the term pragmatics, and this chapter concludes with some background on what we mean by pragmatics in this book. The second concerns the nature of emotion itself: what is emotion? We turn to that challenge in the next chapter.

The constituent elements of the book: Hermetic spirituality, the historical imagination, alterations of consciousness, the relation between language and experiential knowledge, and radical agnosticism in the study of religion. Narrative historiography and historical-comparative methods.

Since the Ogdoad, the Ennead, and the Source are described as beyond verbal description, how can written language convey anything at all about this ultimate experience of gnōsis? Discussion of oral transmission by means of logos, dissemination of written treatises, and the paradoxes of hermeneutics as understood in terms of Deconstruction (Derrida) and Hermeneutics (Gadamer).