Meaning as Uncertain and Unsayable: Negotiations of a Poetics of Faithful Incredulity

Abstract

In her excellent volume Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life, Agnes Callard juxtaposes Socrates’s conclusion that the meaningfulness of life is a function of consistent critical inquiry into existence with Leo Tolstoy’s contrary insistence that existential meaning ensues from living life without constant interruptions of self-reflection. These two perspectives functionally identify the tension between whether individuals may linguistically express opinions on truth and meaning or must negotiate in some manner with an inescapable silence regarding how best to comprehend and communicate discrete interpretations of the significance and veracity of lived experience. This present article investigates that tension and how it depends on the poetic and apophatic characteristics of language to both Say and Unsay how meaning and truth may be conceived. Salient positions from Ludwig Wittgenstein and William Franke provide introductory material to set the context for a closer examination of the complementary hermeneutics of the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur and the American poet Wallace Stevens. Both thinkers concur that properly analyzing meaning and truth requires a reliance on the creative imagination with its privileging of poetic language and its dependence on the humility of an incredulous faith in approximating an operative asymptotic approach to existential meaning.

1. Introduction

In his small but substantial text, Philosophy and Theology, John D. Caputo offers a concise but clever commentary on the conjunction “and” by specifically addressing what he considers to be the tensive polysemy inherent in that integrating word (Caputo 2006, pp. 3–4). For him, that polysemy proscribes simply translating the conjunction homogeneously as a facile semantic adhesive joining two similar or related concepts. In other words, his injunction against that reductionistic interpretation arises from a belief that the conjunction “and” may also disguise a disjunctive potential, intimating that the concepts conjoined by the conjunction may not only be allies but adversaries as well. This semantic “coefficient of uncertainty” (Caputo 2000, p. 253) demands what Jacques Derrida would term a “negotiation” between the plausibly divergent readings of the word—a “shuttling” to and fro between undecidable meanings that may never be absolutely defined (Derrida 2002, p. 12). As a result, “and” may communicate conceptual collegiality between correlative ideas (e.g., faith and reason), and/or it may signal conflictual competition between antagonistic terms (e.g., Pro-Choice and Pro-Life). Furthermore, this reciprocation of negotiation inherent in the “and” concedes that one must constantly allow for the undecidable future, for the chronic messianic efficacy of always remaining sensitive to the “to come” (Derrida 2005, p. 91) and to the surplus of meaning (Ricoeur 1974, p. 410) that intimates the liminal nature of all discourse. In other words, the agitation of the “and” dilates every attempt to speak or write and, thereby, expands the frontiers of potential meaning by inflating the horizons separating what can and cannot be verbalized. Derrida labels this impossibility of a “final word” différance. This neologism adds to the idea of “differing” the concept of “deferring,” deferring as the conspicuous postponement of any final meaning until tomorrow. Total meaning always appears tomorrow, which means that meaning is always “to come” (Derrida 1981, p. 8).

As guest editor of this Special Issue of Religions that you are now reading, I have throughout the process been intrigued by its prescribed title. Indeed, I reference Caputo’s radical hermeneutics of “and” precisely because it directly pertains to what I find provocative about that title. One need merely glance at the title to quickly recognize the repetition of only one word—the conjunction “and”: “Seeking Truth and Meaning: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Religion and Philosophy.” “Truth,” “meaning,” and “religion,” “philosophy”—significant ideas paired through the power of the conjunction, a pairing that, given Caputo’s commentary, advances several questions. Does one coordinate truth and meaning as relatable ideas, or does one isolate them as incompatible notions? Is truth always meaningful, or is meaning always a function of truth? For example, may one define truth in a broader manner that allows for transcending a narrow correspondence or consistency theory, thereby also allowing for a filiation between truth and meaning in an existential sense? Or must one choose between truth as adequation and meaning as emotive, that is, as hostiles within a battle for the empirical? Likewise, does one assume a comparability between philosophy and religion (since both disciplines commit to a desire for truth and meaning), something akin to a Socratic aspiration for wisdom? Or does one disassociate philosophy and religion as incommensurable language games connected only by category mistakes in that the former maintains a critical perspective while the latter constantly struggles to elude perfunctory superstition? Of course, were we to advocate Caputo’s analysis of the tensive duality inherent in the concept “and,” we could presume both a connection and a disconnection operating between the major titular terms of truth/meaning and philosophy/religion. Doing so would allow us to factor into the semantics of the title a messianic deferral of final meaning and an operative openness to truth that preempts any alleged “Hegelian” closure in a supposed absolute synthesis. Doing so would also warrant fading the disciplinary boundaries that typically separate philosophy and religion, thereby amplifying the need to move across other disciplinary lines and adopt a plurality of interdisciplinary viewpoints.

Yet, if Caputo’s annotation of the “and” does commission a more fluid consideration of disciplinary separation, then another component of the issue’s title becomes active. In other words, one must, indeed, take “interdisciplinary perspectives” on the topics of truth/meaning and philosophy/religion. A myopic vision of the project whereby only a select curriculum may be employed would be counterintuitive to the title. One must, therefore, assume that the articles composing this Special Issue shift among various methodologies and approaches in order to give more expansive interpretations of the themes. Furthermore, however, if the productive conflict between conjunction and disjunction intrinsic to Caputo’s gloss on the “and” directs the investigation, then another component in the title also becomes quite significant. There is only one verb in the title, one explicit discursive direction as to what type of action the Special Issue assumes. That verb is “seeking”: “Seeking Truth and Meaning.” But that verb recapitulates the future-oriented messianic dynamic, communicated by the deferral and surplus of meaning, that precipitates out of Caputo’s exposition of the conjunction. The title does not identify “finding” truth and meaning or “determining” truth and meaning. Instead, it leaves the primary purpose of the Special Issue under the influence of Caputo’s “coefficient of uncertainty” by encouraging the exploratory character of “perhaps” and by focusing on the centrality of potentiality. The essays within the issue should, in their various ways, “seek” to comprehend truth and meaning, engage in an asymptotic process of exploration, and, at best, perhaps, proffer only tentative answers to the question of how the two subjects may be apprehended. The raison d’être of this issue must, therefore, remain provisional, offering perspectives that are suggestions and that never allow the “the” to prematurely close the process of “seeking” (cf. Stevens 1982, p. 215).

In my editorial contribution to this issue, I deliberately choose to fixate on the titular notion of “seeking” with all its concomitant motifs of the messianic, the risk of hermeneutics, the uncertainty of premature closure, the fluidity of meaning and truth, and the plurality of interdisciplinary investigation. In lieu, therefore, of a typical editor’s introductory article telegraphing the substance of all of the accompanying articles that comprise the Special Issue, I opt for a more focused inquiry into the discursive implications of a continual process of seeking truth and meaning, that is, by reflecting linguistically on how one might speak and not speak about what one might know and not know concerning the meaning of meaning and the truth of truth. I engage this inquiry as homo viator, one who remains in constant flux pursuing proper interpretations of meaning and truth, one who never forgets what Domenico Jervolino calls the “dimension of furtherance,” that dimension of perpetual exploration or negotiation of what I term a “poetics of faithful incredulity” (Jervolino 2006, p. 41). In concert with Derrida’s différance, I seek to emphasize a deferring furtherance of open-ended inquiry, something of an apophatic commitment to articulating the inarticulate within discourse. To accomplish this, I do not write a well-honed syllogistic document that ends in an irrefutable, unambiguous conclusion. Instead, I offer a hermeneutical pastiche of diverse theorists who cross disciplinary lines and insinuate potential insights into truth and meaning. Doing so results in an essay that remains true to the etymological intent of “essay,” that is, an essais that experiments, that supplies an attempt at comprehension and communication but never removes the ellipses. In its saying and unsaying, my introduction strives to respect the legislating conjunction, replacing the terminating period with the indeterminate openness of the “and.” Such is the apologia for my introductory essay title, “Meaning as Uncertain and Unsayable: Negotiations of a Poetics of Faithful Incredulity.”

Since one of my grad school mentors constantly reminded us that it is bad enough to be understood, much less misunderstood, I want to ensure that my “questions, hypotheses, and methods [are] clearly stated” for this editorial addition to the Special Issue. The guiding question that, with a nod to T. S. Eliot, I wish to drop on the reader’s plate concerns whether the gathered essays in this volume supply an exhaustive and definitive definition of meaning and truth or whether, of necessity, they adhere to the principle of fallibility, which states that every interpretation can potentially be correct but invariably incomplete or may simply be incorrect and in need of replacement. I conclude that all of the included articles are examples of the essais genre, meaning, as stated above, that they offer thought experiments as imaginative variations of ways to contemplate how one might seek for truth and meaning in both religion and philosophy. This article hypothesizes that each of these literary contributions instantiates the titular verb “seeking” by offering profiles and perspectives that do not close the thematic questions but safeguard the openness of the exploration. In other words, they do, indeed, comply with the strictures of the principle of fallibility. The essays represent multiple viewpoints, depend on a diversity of disciplines and genres, and advance defensible analyses without the hubris of premature closure or absolute certainty. I try in this essay to accomplish the same goal by raising the issue of the “messianic” and communicate that issue not only substantially through overt content but also stylistically by privileging breadth over depth. It is not my intent to give extensive readings of every theorist that I mention or use. On the contrary, I am, as testified above, attempting to inquire into the ubiquity of the “perhaps” by tracing its scope across authors, disciplines, and texts—focusing eventually on the philosopher Paul Ricoeur and the poet Wallace Stevens as examples of cross-disciplinary and multi-genre interpretations of Jervolino’s “dimension of furtherance.” Consequently, the reader should not look for penetrating evaluations of my sources but should, instead, infer from the quantity of references that my paraconsistent thesis of comprehending truth and meaning as “certainly” uncertain and “articulately” unsayable offers one valid manner of approaching the Special Issue’s legislating theme.

Meaning, Truth, and the Apophatic “If a man lives, he believes in something. If he did not believe that one must live for something, he would not live. If he does not see and recognize the illusory nature of the finite, he believes in the finite; if he understands the illusory nature of the finite, he must believe in the infinite. Without faith he cannot live.”

Leo Tolstoy, A Confession and Other Religious Writings

(Tolstoy 2014, p. 27)

“Prior to any articulation of content, there is an affirmative belief in something that is (as yet) no-thing but that nevertheless proleptically orients all possible knowing and eventual speaking. This as yet unbroken, unarticulated whole-nothing that gathers all attention to itself in silence is more potent than any supervening articulation that breaks the silence.”

William Franke, A Philosophy of the Unsayable

(Franke 2014, pp. 80–81)

In her provocative and creative book, Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life, Agnes Callard contends that one should not reduce Socrates’ maieutic method to a simple interrogatory pedagogy. Although approaching the teaching of any discipline through the dialectical toing and froing of question-induced discussions may offer efficient opportunities for intellectual engagement and for the dissemination of substantial knowledge, it does not genuinely instantiate the nuances of Socrates’s two primary intentions to midwife the birth of thought and dialogue and to be a gadfly and provocateur for critical reflection. Callard insists that Socrates’s quest for meaning and truth through the medium of inquiry concerns a much deeper issue, in that he aspires to accomplish one of two results from any dialogical discourse. Either he will convince his interlocutor that his, that is, Socrates’s, position is correct and should be accepted, or he will be persuaded by his interlocutor that his Socratic position is incorrect and should be replaced. Callard summarizes these two potential results as “persuade or obey,” noting that in Greek, both words ensue from the same root (Callard 2025, p. 10). She contends, therefore, that the genuine Socratic method leads to one of two expressions of respect: Socrates’s dialogue partner affirms Socrates by persuading him that his interpretation is incorrect, or Socrates affirms the worth of the other by answering his questions and/or questioning his answers (Callard 2025, p. 16).

Callard maintains that the “persuade or obey” approach manifests the true meaning of the Socratic maxim that the unexamined life is not worth living. To strengthen the rhetorical efficacy of this reading of the Socratic method, she then differentiates it from what she considers to be an anti-Socratic perspective adopted by the great Russian author Leo Tolstoy. She references Tolstoy’s 1882 work Confession and grapples with how that text prescribes a criterion for existential meaning that conflicts antithetically with Socrates (Callard 2025, p. 4). In that text, Tolstoy concludes a rather poignant and melancholic evaluation of his life by acknowledging that one should simply live life without investing useless time and energy in attempts to comprehend it. Callard believes that for Tolstoy, the better motto would be “the examined life is not worth living,” since the strategy of non-examination avoids asking what she calls “untimely questions.” She considers an untimely question to be “a question that comes at the wrong time—namely, after it has been answered” (Callard 2025, p. 27). In other words, such interrogations operate purely as rhetorical devices without any genuine hint of skepticism or uncertainty. One poses a “question” that one has antecedently already answered, if not intellectually then functionally. In other words, Callard claims that Tolstoy questions the purpose of his actions while consistently engaging in those actions and summarily concluding while doing so that he can discover no answer to his question (Callard 2025, p. 31).

Callard actually resorts to what Jacques Derrida labels as potentially a “puerile” critique, namely an example of performative contradiction (Derrida 1996, p. 4). She notes that when Tolstoy raises the specter of suicide as an appropriate response to the apparent meaninglessness of existence, then one may infer that he considers suicide to be a “meaningful” rejoinder to meaninglessness. If you make that inference, then, in claiming “that suicide is valuable enough to perform, you think that something is valuable and now it seems you are no longer a nihilist” (Callard 2025, p. 34). Of course, Tolstoy would not be surprised nor chagrined over Callard’s accusation of performative contradiction with reference to his ersatz nihilism, primarily because he overtly acknowledges his guilt over that very inconsistency in a rather clear self-indictment. Adopting what will later be something of a Camusian perspective, he poses the grounding question of suicide and then asserts, “Indeed, what are we who are convinced of the necessity of suicide yet do not decide to commit it, but the weakest, most inconsistent, and to put it plainly, the stupidest men, fussing about our own stupidity as a fool fusses about a painted hussy?” (Tolstoy 2014, p. 24). His stone of Sisyphus is, indeed, the struggle with whether there is any raison d’être to existence, any functional answer to the perennial question “why?” Channeling Dante’s literary conceit, Tolstoy confesses that he comes to the midpoint of his life, around the age of 50, and feels a tenacious hopelessness that all his actions will be posthumously meaningless (Tolstoy 2014, p. 15). Again, like Dante, he testifies to feeling as if he were lost in some dark forest where, unlike Dante, he does not encounter the lion, the leopard, or the she-wolf but instead an intense burden of uncanniness, of not knowing or understanding or, even better using its German expression unheimlich, a deep sense of homelessness, of not having any security or sense of familial familiarity (Tolstoy 2014, pp. 17–18).1 He finds no solace for this feeling of alienation in science, or art, or in the pursuit of wisdom, although he vouches for the wisdom expressed by Solomon (Qoheleth) when he declares existence to be superlative vanity, the “vanity of vanities” (Tolstoy 2014, p. 19).

Tolstoy admits that his angst and melancholia signal a loss of faith, a definite relinquishing of his earlier commitment to and belief in both God and a religious foundation for meaning. Yet, when in these thoughts himself almost despising, he receives an epiphany, perhaps an anamnesis, a remembrance of something that he once knew, precisely that in the “irrationality” of faith, one may find a functional and redemptive attestation of meaning. By talking with “normal” people, those who simply live, and work, and love, and believe in the irrationality of God, he concludes that it is the very thing that he rejects that offers the meaning he seeks (Tolstoy 2014, pp. 30–31). In other words, through experiencing those who pragmatically reveal their faith through their quotidian lifestyle, Tolstoy recognizes that his spiritual enervation ensues not from an epistemological error but from an existential deficiency, specifically from not recognizing that the meaning of life is autotelic. The meaning of life is to live it and live it gratefully and faithfully. As the above opening Tolstoyan epigram attests, one simply cannot exist without some element of faith, without believing in something. Consequently, he concludes that whatever “faith may be, and whatever answers it may give, and to whomever it gives them, every such answer gives to the finite existence of man an infinite meaning, a meaning not destroyed by sufferings, deprivations, or death” (Tolstoy 2014, p. 27). Indeed, he comes to reassert that the yearning for such meaning is in essence a desir de Dieu, an implicit desire for God (Tolstoy 2014, p. 32). He considers this desire to be so potent that he rhetorically collapses meaning and God into one metaphorical reality: “To know God and to live is one and the same thing. God is life” (Tolstoy 2014, p. 34).

Interestingly enough, Tolstoy’s accumulation of meaning, faith, and God as the redemption of his spiritual malaise may well evoke a loose association with Ludwig Wittgenstein in both his early period of logical atomism and his later move into ordinary language philosophy. As early as 1916, Wittgenstein writes that belief in God cannot be separated from the issue of existential meaning. As he succinctly states, “To believe in God means to see that life has meaning” (Wittgenstein 1961, p. 74e); consequently, theological language and language about faith may function as efficient semantics for investigating questions concerning the meaning of life. Furthermore, in his own personal investigations, he, again, sounds quite similar to Tolstoy. He asks, “What do I know about God and the purpose of life? I know that this world exists” (Wittgenstein 1961, p. 72e). Yet, this concern for a meaningful life appears to be a consistent issue throughout his work, at least if one attaches the concept of meaning to the concept of order with reference to teleology and purpose. He confesses that the “great problem round which everything that I write turns is: Is there an order in the world a priori, and if so what does it consist in?” (Wittgenstein 1961, p. 53e). Indeed, one might validly associate Tolstoy and Wittgenstein as theorists who, with or without any explicit faith commitment to theism or to an objective cosmological meaning, recognize the inescapability of human questions about belief and purpose and about truth and meaning. They both also recognize a certain practicality to the questions, along with a more functional approach to any proposed answers. That is to say, both affirm that a proper comprehension of a meaningful life may well come not from pure speculation alone but from the decidedly practical living of life routinely. Such a perspective appears to analogize quite well with Wittgenstein’s principle of linguistic meaning as a function of use. What does a sign mean? See how it is used (Wittgenstein 1965, p. 4; 2009, p. 25e). What does a life mean? See how it is lived.2

Perhaps one should, after all, consider that Callard’s differentiation between Socrates and Tolstoy does have merit and that her explanation of untimely questions does raise interesting points concerning whether dialogue is merely tactical in its communicative dynamics or transformative in its creative impact on self and community. Yet, one should also be careful to avoid falling into a fallacy of bifurcation with reference to the two thinkers. One should simply not reduce alternatives to a binary either/or: either Socrates is correct and the unexamined life is not worth living or Tolstoy is correct and the examined life leads to despair. Why not allow both interpretations to coexist? One can strive to live out a certain functional understanding of meaning while simultaneously devoting time occasionally to reflecting on what that meaning may be and whether it associates with truth. In other words, untimely questions may be inevitable for human beings who cannot escape the contextuality of existence and who never occupy a view from nowhere. All we do remains in situ, which requires that our questions cannot be segregated from our lived experience. Pace Husserl, in other words, there is no exhaustive epoché (Husserl 1931, Sections 31 and 32). We always experiment with theories of truth and meaning while simultaneously continuing the intellectual search for theoretical apperception of what the most productive theory may be within lived experience.

Callard concedes that no one genuinely eludes the systemic uncertainty of Socratic irony and its wisdom of learned ignorance nor of the Tolstoyan prescription of the necessity for faith as a valuable alternative to reductive rationalism. She acknowledges that “Socrates’ claim that ‘I know that I know nothing’ isn’t an empty gesture of skepticism, but rather a plan for life.” That plan, she continues, centers on the meaning one finds in accepting that although “we cannot lead lives based on knowledge—because we lack it—we should lead the second-best kind of life, namely, the one oriented toward knowledge” (Callard 2025, p. 15). Consequently, Socrates, as the “skeptical gadfly” (Callard 2025, p. 152), identifies wisdom and meaning not with the finality of possessed comprehension but with the inspiring stimulus to an asymptotic quest, a quest contingent upon perpetual questioning. Likewise, but also contrariwise, Tolstoy discovers in faith a mechanism for achieving meaning and truth apparently isolated from the discomfort of unremitting interrogations of life. As noted above, he separates faith as an “irrational knowledge” from the critical reason that considers faith to be the source of irrationality. Yet, he contends that faith reveals the relationship between humans and the Infinite and, as a result, “the assertions of true faith, although they cannot be proved, not only never contain anything contrary to the reason and the knowledge of man, but always explain that which in life without these conceptions of true faith appears irrational and contradictory” (Tolstoy 2014, p. 52). Although faith may not be synonymous with irrationality but actually revelatory of what appears to be irrational and contradictory in life, faith does separate itself from the rational discipline of asking critical questions that may never be answered. As Callard concludes, although Tolstoy “found an escape from these questions—and from suicide—in religious faith, [he] is clear that faith is a way of setting them aside, not an answer to them” (Callard 2025, p. 4).

One may, with validity, infer from Tolstoy’s apparent evasion of existential examination that he does not simultaneously evade a particular type of skepticism, primarily because his position on faith continues to rely on the acceptance of uncertainty and on the embrace of a teleological process of constant obedience to the divine will (Tolstoy 2014, pp. 52, 69). These two interpretations of faith actually endorse and energize the asymptotic process of human curiosity, an endorsement clearly found in the classical perspective of Sextus Empiricus. In the text, Pyrrhonic Sketches, Empiricus identifies three kinds of philosophers: those who claim to have found the object of their search, those who claim the impossibility of ever finding the object of their search, and those who keep their search active and open through a process of rejecting both its fulfillment and its futility. The first kind he calls the Dogmatics, the second the Academics, and the third the Skeptics. Furthermore, he claims that another name for the Skeptic approach in philosophy is the “Seeking School” (Empiricus 2015, p. 8), a label that interestingly connects with this Special Issue’s title and appears to affirm the impossibility of a premature closure of certainty by sustaining a Socratic openness to constant questioning and, one might also add, to a Tolstoyan itinerary of faith. At this point, reflections on the meaning of existence and the status of truth could be understood as entangled with Derrida’s “messianic,” that is, the affirmation of the “to come” that signals the uncertainty of an absolute future, an open consideration of the “what will have been” (Derrida 1996, p. 68). If meaning and truth are always “to come” (l’avenir), then one cannot nullify the tenacity of a persistent uncertainty or of the necessity for hope and faith as alternatives to absolute knowledge.

The persistent messianic uncertainty of meaning may well recapitulate, or at least recollect, yet another Wittgensteinian reference, specifically his famous 7th proposition in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent” (Wittgenstein 1999, p. 108). Perhaps this criterion of the limit to discourse simply proscribes any attempt to articulate beyond the restrictions of logical, empirical language, thereby implying an emotivist understanding of poetic or imaginative speech. Such an interpretation appears to supplement Tolstoy’s rejection of a Socratic reflection on the purpose of existence, prescribing that one should simply avoid any pretension to comprehend and communicate an explanation of life’s purpose beyond the facticity of living itself. On the other hand, however, one could read Wittgenstein’s homage to silence not as an obstacle to liminal transgression but as an invitation to affirm in creative and symbolic language both taciturnity and testimony, that is, as grounding the potential for an eloquent aphasia regarding truth and meaning.

I believe that the American philosopher William Franke adopts this second reading of Wittgenstein’s proposition and, in doing so, suggests another way of speaking about the integral connection between skepticism and silence when addressing theories of truth and meaning. Through broad inter-textual and inter-disciplinary investigations, he uncovers deep substantial insights into what he terms the “predicament of prolix speechlessness” (Franke 2014, p. 18). By this insight, he means that one cannot, in any close encounter of the linguistic kind, contravene that discourse consistently limps toward the liminal, persists in inhabiting the inhibitions that confine language within intractable semantic strictures. Indeed, whatever is said is always said in tension with the unsayable. He contends, therefore, that discourse has a way of “doubting and denying itself,” to the point that it never escapes the doppelgangers of “counter-discourses.” These counter-discourses “typically emphasize that what is not and even cannot be said is actually the basis for all that is said” (Franke 2014 pp. 5–6). As a result, if humans are, indeed, the zoon echon logon, the “living being that has speech,” then surrounding that possession of language always resides a penumbra of silence, the shadows of what cannot and will not ever be communicated.

Franke calls the penumbra of silence “apophasis” and understands that concept in its etymological sense. “Apo-phasis” literally means “away from speech” or “saying away,” which, he claims, “points in the direction of unsaying and ultimately of silence as virtualities of language that tend to underlie and subvert any discursively articulable meaning” (Franke 2007a, p. 2). Consequently, the apophatic “essence” of language transcends disciplines and genres, always accompanying any apophantic declaration signaling an undeniable transcendence or alterity that never finds its way into a proposition (Franke 2010, pp. 123–24). He contends that something always withholds itself in experience, refusing to show itself from itself as per Husserl’s “Principle of all Principles” (Husserl 1931, Section 24), but only revealing itself by refusing the confinement of concepts, coming to a disclosure that never opens but remains closed within the unsaid (Franke 2014, p. 77). A phenomenological encounter with the apophatic, therefore, can only be one of an intentionality of faith without any substantial intuition (Franke 2014, p. 81). This faith has no identifiable determinacy, since one never confronts the unsayable or the silence in themselves but only as intimated formal indications that seem to haunt every speech event of discourse (Franke 2010, p. 19). As Franke puts it, “[p]aradoxically, it is only through language that what is radically other to language can be evoked” (Franke 2014, pp. 97–98). Yet, one must tread carefully here and not confuse Franke’s insistence that the unsaid never separates from the said with a reductionistic conclusion that apophatic uncertainty, the skepticism that acknowledges the mystery that never devolves into mere problem (to use Marcellian language) (Marcel 1978, pp. 211–12), operates only within the confines of the linguistic (Franke 2014, p. 83). To do so would add a factor of decidability and objectification to the issue that Franke assiduously seeks to avoid (Franke 2007b, p. 3).

The paradox that only language can evoke the unsayable without condensing the apophatic solely to discourse may be interpreted as a paradox of thinking itself. Using something of a Kierkegaardian idiom, Franke refers to the discursive muteness inherent in human experience as “the paradox of thinking.” Kierkegaard identifies the ultimate paradox of thought to be the desire “to discover something that thought itself cannot think,” a definition that appears to involve a confusion of categories in that the paradox of thought, something cognitive, ensues from a desire, a want or a yearning, something conative (Kierkegaard 1985, p. 37). For Franke, the paradox includes not just the desire to think the unthinkable but the desire for thought “to be able to think against and negate itself” (Franke 2010, pp. 63–64). Yet, this paradox requires that one leave operative the apophatic as negation; specifically, one must never forget that one cannot always “take discourse at its word,” since discourse never escapes the negotiation between manifestation and concealment. In other words, Franke claims that we should always attend “to the ruptures and interruptions, to the silences and ellipses, that displace discourse and break the circuits of sense” (Franke 2007b, p. 1). This interruptive elliptical dynamic of apophaticism participates in the search for meaning and truth but does so by adhering to that Derridean notion of the messianic and avoiding any premature closure of a final answer to the perpetual questions of a functional existential raison d’être (Franke 2010, p. 413). Consequently, Franke envisages the apophatic “not as a barricade to speech and expression, but rather as a limit that, in effect, turns into a threshold … that invites exploration” (Franke 2010, p. 7).

The above discursive disruptions and their resulting gateway to exploration provide what Franke terms “a meta-critique of epistemology” (Franke 2015, p. xii) or “an immanent critique of our concepts, breaking them open to what language cannot say” (Franke 2010, pp. 69–70). He maintains that such disruptive dynamics may be found preeminently in poetic discourse, which indicates that one best approaches the ineffable “through myth and imagination” (Franke 2015, p. 390). Poetic, or creative, language may communicate the apophatic precisely because, in its creativity, it remains open to “an unbounded register of significance” (Franke 2017a, pp. 48–49). He refuses to diminish poetic discourse to the merely cosmetic or to functioning only as “an aesthetic extra.” Indeed, poetic language is a cosmizing medium for world construction, for creating contexts of human being-in-the-world (Franke 2010, p. 11). Not surprisingly, such a perspective correlates directly with Callard’s awareness that Tolstoy’s existential grappling with meaning and truth relies productively on his vocation as an author. She asserts that fiction provides him a potent laboratory in which to experiment with alternative ontologies and assorted interpretations of the purpose of life. She goes so far as to claim that his desire for some discrete purpose to existence and some functional foundation for truth “haunts so much of Tolstoy’s fiction” (Callard 2025, p. 45). Under the influence of the Italian novelist Elena Ferrante, Callard concedes that poetic discourse in the form of literary fiction “offers up the possibility of escape from everyday life,” while “great fiction allows us to explore what we otherwise look away from” (Callard 2025, p. 46). Ferrante does, indeed, testify to the unique approach that fiction takes to revealing truth (Ferrante 2016, p. 300). She contends that in nonfictional reality, we consistently lie to ourselves as therapy against the contagion of suffering (Ferrante 2016, p. 80). Yet, in fiction, individuals may speak truthfully about the meaning of existence in ways that cannot be spoken in nonfictional reality (Ferrante 2016, p. 213). In other words, both Callard and Ferrante affirm that creative language expressed as poetry or narrative or through various figures of speech constantly addresses the unsayable within the sayable as it relates to the human need for purpose and order. As such, it functions uniquely as a medium for seeking answers to the perennial question “why.”

Yet, Franke does not reduce the significance of apophatic discourse to the merely aesthetic or poetic use of language. On the contrary, he also directly connects it to the genre of “theological” discourse, understanding “theology” as referencing both a susceptibility to transcendence as the “something more” that consistently preempts any premature closure of meaning and also the “prophetic” affirmation of a skeptical acceptance of silence and of unfathomable mystery. Franke labels this bipolar theological power of poetic language “revelation” and concludes that such language expresses “sublime imaginations that enable humans to relate to the infinite and whole and to register intimations pushing up against the limits of the invisible and unrepresentable” (Franke 2017a, p. 94). Consequently, Franke does not intend “theological” to be synonymous with “dogmatic” but to be allied with the systemic indeterminacy of the limits of discourse. He professes that since a “certain sense of divinity can be found reflected already simply in the language that humans use to express the deepest roots of their existence and consciousness,” then one may consider that poetic investigations of the apophatic may, with validity, be labeled a form of theological disclosure (Franke 2017a, p. 79). He overtly connects the notion of revelation with the apophatic, therefore connecting it with the “disclosure of a comprehensive significance for the world and of an ultimate meaning for human life—through reference to figures of divinity” (Franke 2017a, p. 95). At this point, however, the apophatic discloses a decidedly “moral” nuance, since the tension between the desire for a holistic meaning and the recognition of the inescapable barriers of the unsayable motivate an openness to the other as idea, as interpretation, or as person, thereby constituting “a figure of apophasis as a broken-open self-reflection” (Franke 2010, p. 106). Subsequently then, for Franke, poetic, theological, and ethical discourse may be “deployed critically to illuminate the conditions of possibility of meaning—and therewith also of being—in the unsayable” (Franke 2014, p. 9). One might conclude, a fortiori, that without gainsaying the eminence of rational, critical reflection “the question of faith or belief remains inescapable. … What is being believed in apophatic thought is nothing determinate. Nevertheless, it remains decisive for every possible determinate of thought and action” (Franke 2010, p. 19). Such a position appears to place Franke firmly in the Augustinian tradition of credo ut intelligam, “I believe in order to understand,” which most assuredly puts him in proximity to Tolstoy in the pursuit for truth and meaning.

Our brief forays into Socrates, Tolstoy, Wittgenstein, and Franke have brought us to the tensive intersection of the prosaic and the poetic when determining how to comprehend and communicate existential meaning and a broader understanding of truth. We have determined that any endeavor to understand what meaning and truth are cannot avoid a systemic mystery that does not lend itself to a totally transparent clarity. It traffics both in the indicative and the indecisive, in both reason and faith, in the friction between both fact and fiction, and in both the immanent constraint of human cognition and the apophatic intimations of something transcendent or other. These various discursive polarities signal that attempts to identify, investigate, and express commentaries on truth and meaning remain liminal, apophatic, and inter-disciplinary, precisely because one must be wary of the definite article (that is, reducing any interpretation to the “the”) and because that wariness requires one to approach the Unsayable not only with silence but also with a plurality of complementary semantics. Negotiating these polarities requires creativity, insight, and humility, along with an appreciation of how best to synthesize the constituent elements that must be appraised in order to maintain a productive balance between both certitude and skepticism.

I contend that one can most assuredly find an excellent example of the above-mentioned negotiating prowess in the philosophical and poetic opinions of the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur and the American poet Wallace Stevens. From their varying approaches and in their distinct styles, both defend a creative correlation among indicative and innovative language, both admit that credible opinions may leave operative a revelatory incredulity, both justify the indispensability of belief, and both enjoin an asymptotic tolerance for not insisting on any premature closure of meaning. Their distinctive philosophical and poetic semiotics signify that truth and meaning are too consequential to be constricted to one genre of literature or to one monolinguistic medium of expression. As a result, they embrace poetic discourse and the creative heuristic function of imagination as sources of idioms that confirm the mystery of the human aspiration for meaning while simultaneously allowing for that mystery to be disclosed, as Franke contends, in the very apophatic “silence” that infiltrates every semiotics of existential purpose and order. For Ricoeur and Stevens, therefore, one must continually arbitrate among the complementary dynamics of faith and incredulity, of testimony and skepticism, and of the realism of fragmentary knowledge and the hope for a messianic and apophatic affirmation of human being-in-the-world. As will be delineated below, this arbitration is rooted in the predominance of poetic discourse and the transcendental creativity of the imagination.

2. Imagination, Belief, and the “Second Naivete”

“For the second immediacy that we seek and the second naïveté that we await are no longer accessible to us anywhere else than a hermeneutics; we can believe only by interpreting.”

Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil

(Ricoeur, 1967, p. 352)

“Profundum, physical thunder, dimension in which/We believe without belief, beyond belief.”

Wallace Stevens, “Flyers Fall”

(Stevens 1982, p. 354)

In the novel Foucault’s Pendulum, Umberto Eco’s creative and provocative narrative on conspiracy theories and the risks of hermeneutics, the primary protagonist and narrator of the story, a man named Casaubon, prides himself on adopting a consistent incredulity with reference to any knowledge claim. Of course, he insists on ensuring that the readers of his tale understand exactly what he means by that concept. He specifically wishes to avoid the common definition of the term as “being disinclined to believe,” a definition that easily leads to the conclusion that an incredulous person is synonymous with the infidel, the unbeliever, or the non-believer. Casaubon claims that such a definition allows for the possibility of affirming a hard distinction between the incredulous person who always critically refuses to believe and the credulous person who always naively chooses to believe. He argues that incredulity simply does not necessitate such a false dichotomy by confidently stating that it is “not that the incredulous person doesn’t believe in anything. It’s just that he doesn’t believe in everything” (Eco 1989, p. 49). Incredulity, therefore, does not disenfranchise the act of believing, of adopting some position of faith in something, for example, in the validity of existential meaning. On the contrary, it simply opposes any facile commitment to an unsophisticated gullibility.

Now Casaubon’s characterization of incredulity as other than a definitive rejection of belief suggests attractive corollaries when one considers the cultural implications of existing in a post-faith context, one similar to what Tolstoy so often confesses. In other words, in modernity or post-Enlightenment culture, one should never isolate any so-called discrete age of reason from an alternative discrete age of faith. The critical incredulity often associated with sapere aude (“dare to know”) does not necessarily entail total skepticism, either in the efficacy of critical reason or in the cogency of a humble faith, but may connote the possibility of synthesizing a discriminating faith with a well-honed critical edge. To repeat, incredulity does not signal either faith or reason, either faith or no faith, either believing or not believing. Instead, it acknowledges the impossibility of human beings ever attaining such absolute knowledge or certainty that some non-cognitive conviction as a proper response to situations or ideas, e.g., to truth or meaning, does not remain a live option.

In a post-secular hermeneutic of faith, especially one that accedes to Franke’s prescription of apophasis, incredulity naturally raises the issues of what one believes and how one believes, not whether one believes or not. The former two issues appear to me to predominate in part 1 of this essay in the approaches expressed by Tolstoy, Wittgenstein, and Franke and in the persuasiveness of poetics that permeates their separate reflections on the existential appetite for truth and for a raison d’être in life. The same two issues also pervade the above two epigrams from Paul Ricoeur and Wallace Stevens that establish the direction for part 2 of this investigation into truth, meaning, poetics, mystery, and the role of faith. Privileging Ricoeur’s vocabulary, I would claim that those issues directly bear on the notion of relating incredulity to a “second naivete” and, in doing so, relate incredulity to the necessity of hermeneutics.3 Ricoeur insists that an “immediacy of belief” has been lost, which demands that belief only occurs now through the mediating process of hermeneutics, specifically through the detour of listening to, that is, the interpretation of, poetic symbols, myths, and narratives (Ricoeur 1967, p. 351; 2004, p. 120). Ricoeur, therefore, affirms the biblical motto fides ex auditu, that is, “faith comes by hearing.”4 Yet, one can validly surmise that the motto only operates according to the very Augustinian principle of credo ut intelligam that, as recognized above, characterizes Franke’s philosophy of apophasis (Ricoeur 1974, pp. 298, 386; 1978b, p. 222).

I genuinely think, furthermore, that Ricoeur’s nomenclature also functions well as a proper paraphrasing of Stevens’s idea of believing “without belief, beyond belief.” Why would Stevens introduce the idea of belief with an affirming constative verb and then negate belief prepositionally with the emptiness of “without,” while simultaneously signaling a transcendence to belief through another preposition, “beyond,” denoting something superior to believing? Certainly his poetic and enigmatic expression of faith, his attempt to decipher just a “snatch of belief” (Stevens 1982, p. 552), indicates that a certain incredulity toward faith holds a tendentious consistency throughout his thought, something of a conceptual tenacity in both his poetry and prose. Perhaps this tenacity reveals that Stevens agrees with Casaubon and rejects the false dichotomy between faith and no faith. He, like Ricoeur, “believes” that there may be what one could, following Richard Kearney, call a “second faith, a faith after faith, that is equivalent to Ricoeur’s second naivete” (Kearney 2010a, p. 16). Indeed, he confesses in one of his letters that his poetry is a constant search for an object of belief, which, in turn, implies that faith never escapes hermeneutics, since a poetic faith demands the unremitting process of interpreting texts (Stevens 1966, p. 370).

Now I choose to correlate Ricoeur and Stevens with reference to their respective insights into a post-critical faith for two reasons. First, and more importantly, I find it fascinating that there exist so many complementarities between their theories of how faith relates to poetic language, to the productive imagination, to the creative dynamic of fiction, to the invention and discovery of order and meaning, and to the hopeful desire for an “absolute” of some sort. Moreover, in their philosophical and poetic theories of faith, neither can avoid theology, that is, avoid eventually talking about God. Second, I also consider it appropriate to relate the two thinkers because Ricoeur confesses that Stevens is one of his two favorite American poets, the other being Emily Dickenson. He compliments Stevens for his commitment to the entanglement of philosophy and poetry and for how he expresses “complex and very subtle feelings” through writing “poetry about poetry” (Ricoeur 1991b, p. 461). The general compatibility of their respective philosophies of poetic language, therefore, should not be too surprising. The more specific compatibility between their reflections on the imaginative character of faith and fiction as a second naivete may, however, certainly be pleasantly unexpected.

As noted above, Ricoeur clearly focuses his second naivete on the inescapable necessity of developing a hermeneutics of poetic expressions. The discourse of faith relies on linguistic creativity that can suspend first order reference to reality in order to establish a second-order redescription of existential possibilities (Ricoeur 2024, p. 249). In other words, the semantics of faith seek to transcend the correspondent referentiality of constative language and exploit the transformative epistemological and ontological dynamics inherent in poetic discourse (Ricoeur 2024, p. 276). For Ricoeur, such discourse discloses alternative ontologies by projecting exploratory “worlds of the text” that expose diverse ways of dwelling meaningfully in existence (Ricoeur 1995, p. 46). Doing so, in turn, allows poetic discourse to dispense evocative and metamorphic interpretations that may subjunctively clarify and communicate alternative imaginative structures of order and purpose. To achieve this hermeneutic, Ricoeur follows the same strategy as Franke and correlates an interdependency between poetic language and various concepts of revelation and manifestation, an interdependency that requires the response of belief specifically as a second naivete (Ricoeur 1991b, p. 89).5

As one, via a certain willful suspension of disbelief, “believes” in poetic discourse’s innovative proffers of reality and experience, one engages constantly with the imaginative efficacy inherent within narratives, metaphors, and symbols. Indeed, one could take “symbol” as a synecdoche for poetic language in toto and extrapolate from Ricoeur’s famous adage “the symbol gives rise to thought” the contention that the symbol also gives rise to faith (Ricoeur 1967, p. 348). Of course, consorting with symbolic and metaphoric language compels faith also to consort with the imagination, not the reproductive imagination of absent objects and the reconstitution of Humean impressions but the productive, rule-governed imagination more akin to Kant’s notion of schematization (Ricoeur 1978a, p. 147). Ricoeur clearly states that he uses the concept of “fiction” as his preferred term for naming this operation of imagination as both “rule-governed invention and a power of redescription” (Ricoeur 1995, p. 144); therefore, fiction broadly references the ontologically explorative nature of any expression of poetic discourse. When one reads a narrative, for example, the “shock of fiction” leads to a reconsideration of reality motivated by the alternative muthos (story) that contributes a variant mimesis (imitation) of human being in the world (Ricoeur 2024, pp. 256–57; 1991b, p. 133). It can achieve this inventive recital by virtue of what Ricoeur labels the “paradox of fiction,” a phrase that refers to the surprising implications of a narrative that, having no previous referent in empirical existence, may create its own novel referent (Ricoeur 2024, pp. 245, 275). This paradox of fiction may also be seen in Ricoeur’s theory of the living metaphor as a solution to the tension of semantic impertinence, a solution that ensues in a redescription of reality predicated upon improvised semantic similarities (Ricoeur 1991b, pp. 70, 125; 1981b, p. 230). In both cases, Ricoeur considers the function of fiction to be heuristic, that is, as supplying an algorithm of discovery directly related to the capacity of linguistic models to explain and transform the “world” of the text and of the reader (Ricoeur 2024, pp. 260–61; 1991b, pp. 84, 90).

For Ricoeur, heuristic fiction as “redescriptive” becomes a literary and imaginative medium of hope, promising the potentiality of revelation and renewal.6 Here, he can easily augment his credo ut intelligam with an accompanying spero ut intelligam (“I hope in order to understand”), indicating that hermeneutics relies on both belief and hope in order to decipher the meaning of imaginative texts (Ricoeur 1995, p. 207). Such hope, of course, cannot be exhaustively defined or totally realized. It operates in the tension between revealing and concealing, or between faith in affirmation and the uncertainty of disaster (Ricoeur 1991a, pp. 174–75).7 One could prosecute this consistent negotiation between the two possibilities as a desire for, a hope in, or a belief that the Absolute might be known. Yet, Ricoeur knows that such faith never becomes knowledge but remains always hermeneutical and, as such, always at risk. Consequently, he insists that one must consistently choose between absolute knowledge and hermeneutics (Ricoeur 1981a, p. 193), or between absolute knowledge and hope (Ricoeur 1995, p. 212), or between absolute knowledge and the uncertainty of testimony (Ricoeur 1980, p. 153). In other words, he acknowledges something akin to an apophasis of the Absolute, that the Absolute as completed meaning consistently remains “on trial” (Ricoeur 1980, p. 146).8 Whenever poetic language attempts to “say” something about meaning and truth, about God and belief, or about order and purpose, that imaginative language must invariably “unsay” what is said. In other words, as per Franke, revealing cannot be segregated from re-veiling, thereby ensuring the apodictic nature of the apophatic. Consequently, Ricoeur contrasts the second naivete with a “second opaqueness” that demands the wisdom of humility through which one must resign oneself to the inevitability of walking by an imaginative faith and not by a verifiable sight (Ricoeur 1991b, pp. 460–61).

Now, as indicated above, Wallace Stevens’s version of the second naivete compares quite well, mutatis mutandis, with Ricoeur’s.9 Stevens contends that even if one relinquishes any belief in a deity, one cannot relinquish the necessity of faith. In other words, agnosticism offers no alternative to Stevens regarding a legitimate response to modern apostacy. The abandonment of belief in God cannot possibly result in a mere cancellation of belief tout court but simply redirects belief in another direction toward another object. Yet, he insists that such redirected belief must depend on the imagination and the poetic. Indeed, he confesses that he, himself, should believe in the “essential imagination”; however, he also admits that it is far “easier to believe in a thing created by the imagination” than merely in the imagination itself. He further acknowledges that much of his poetry concerns identifying what that imaginative “thing” as object of belief could possibly be; yet, whatever its particularity, since it will ensue from and depend on the poetic, its character will be admittedly fictional (Stevens 1966, p. 370). Indeed, he confesses that the “final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly” (Stevens 1989, p. 89).

Superficially for Stevens, the imaginative, fictional creation of a substitute object of belief can only occur through the poetic, as he incontrovertibly contends in the first line of his poem, “High-Toned Old Christian Woman”: “Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame” (Stevens 1982, p. 62). Nevertheless, in another text, “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,” he emphatically affirms that the legislating fiction is not poetry but, on the contrary, the “fiction of an absolute.” In other words, Stevens apophatically says and unsays how supreme fiction might be deciphered. After that unsaid saying, however, he mysteriously addresses an “Angel” and asks the crucial skeptical question, “What am I to believe?” (Stevens 1982, pp. 428–29). In point of fact, in one of his letters, Stevens overtly concedes that he genuinely does not know what he means by a “supreme fiction” and that the process of reaching some precision on that topic “could occupy a school of rabbis for the next few generations” (Stevens 1966, p. 435).10 “Reb” Stevens, however, cannot avoid offering his own midrash on the supreme fiction of an absolute. He connects the definition of the “supreme fiction” with the idea of God, going so far as to proclaim that “God and the imagination are one” (Stevens 1982, p. 555). He imagines God as “the supreme poetic idea,” one that has salvific potential as a fiction enabling individuals to know a “truth” that may well supply a raison d’être and “set them free” (Stevens 1951, p. 51).11

Stevens never ignores the entanglement of order, meaning, truth, poetics, and God. He clearly indicates that the nucleus of the alliance between God and the imagination may well emerge from the human desire for order and purpose. He states that “We feel the obscurity of an order, a whole,/A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous,/Within its vital boundary, in the mind” (Stevens 1982, p. 555). Although he rejects any definitive expression of a structured process from the “Naked Alpha” to the “hierophant Omega” (Stevens 1982, p. 495), he, nonetheless, still affirms the possibility of a “Blessed rage for order …/The maker’s rage to order words of the sea,/Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred/And of ourselves and of our origins/In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds” (Stevens 1982, p. 138).12 Perhaps this “joy of meaning in design/Wrenched out of chaos” can function as one of the multifarious poetic names for “God” (Stevens 1989, p. 127). If so, then another conjunction fuses the imagination to God, since Stevens stipulates that “the imagination is the power that enables us to perceive the normal in the abnormal, the opposite of chaos in chaos” (Stevens 1951, p. 153).13 Indeed, he contends that the idea of God may well take different forms, not only different semiotic forms as in the substitutability of “names,” but different generic forms, such as “the form of high poetry” (Stevens 1989, p. 193). Consequently, one can add to Stevens’ unity of God and the imagination, the unity of God and poetry, even to the extent that poetry itself may be a medium of salvation. He writes that after “one has abandoned a belief in god, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life’s redemption” (Stevens 1989, p. 185). Conceivably, it does so because poetry persistently discovers, invents, and affirms order and meaning, and, in faith, one affirmatively hopes to experience that meaning to the extent that “He says no to no and yes to yes. He says yes/To no; and in saying yes he says farewell” (Stevens 1982, p. 438).14

3. Conclusions

Perhaps the above precis of the affinities between Ricoeur’s philosophical second naivete and Stevens’s poetic belief beyond belief has, despite its necessary inadequacies, competently accentuated the fascinating parallels between their respective imaginative interpretations of faith. Both theorists, using their assorted glossaries, have testified to a post-critical potential for belief that depends intimately on the poetic character of language, on the indexical efficiency of heuristic fiction, on an optimism for discovering and inventing order and meaning, and, correlatively, on the eschatological plausibility of an asymptotic Absolute, what Ricoeur calls his “personal Wager” (Ricoeur 1991b, p. 473) and Stevens references as “A foyer of the spirit in a landscape/Of the mind” (Stevens 1982, pp. 321–22). The congruence of Ricoeur’s and Stevens’ respective doctrines of faith issues from their shared commitments to the centrality of the imagination as both source and medium for interpreting any genuine faith after faith or faith beyond faith. Furthermore, both consider this centrality of the imagination to have salvific implications by offering a form of existential deliverance. Again, Stevens proclaims his poetic “gospel” message as follows: “poetry is that essence which takes its place as life’s redemption” (Stevens 1989, p. 185). For Ricoeur, the good news of a hermeneutical repetition of faith is that one may nourish a surviving hope in the re-creation of language and the re-description of existence because “[b]eyond the desert of criticism, we wish to be called again” (Ricoeur 1967, p. 349). Since this call derives from ontological variations suggested by the productive imagination, Ricoeur refers to this redemptive stimulus as “the grace of the imagination, the surging up of the possible” (Ricoeur 1978b, p. 237). That is what both thinkers share, a belief in and a commitment to the grace of the imagination, a faith in the sacramental potency of the imagination as the source and medium of meaning and as a constant call forward to seek some fictive Absolute that can, perhaps, never be known definitely. The seeking itself, however, may well be the manifestation of imaginative grace, which, in turn, establishes the efficacy of truth and meaning.15

Through an acceptance of the poetic, imaginative, and uncertain second naivete, Ricoeur and Stevens may echo the apophatic confession of Jacques Derrida who admits “Je ne sais pas, il faut croire”—“I do not know; I must believe” (Derrida 1993, p. 129). Is there meaning? Is there truth? If so, how might one know them, define them, and communicate them? I do not know; yet I cannot not believe in their potentially functional significance. I aspire toward an Absolute confirmation of order and of purpose but always with a systemic incredulity constantly reminding me that any apodictic confession that I have finally arrived at an exhaustive answer to the “what” and “why” of existence is but a premature closure, an untimely identification of Absolute knowledge or certainty. Consequently, I never escape relying upon the apophatic grace of imagination, on what Nicolas Cusanus would call “learned ignorance” (Cusanus 1954, pp. 8–9), or John Keats would label “negative capability” (Keats 1925, p. 89), or Jean-Luc Marion would ironically term “negative certainty” (Marion 2015, p. 1). These are all complementary idioms for attesting to a faithful incredulity as a proper commitment to the poetics of the grace of imagination.

In his 1969 acceptance speech upon receiving an honorary doctorate from his “almost” alma mater, Yale University, the American Abstract Expressionist, Mark Rothko, wrote the following: “I do know that many who are driven to [the life of art] are desperately [sic] searching for those pockets of silence where they can root and grow. We must all hope that they find them” (Rothko 2006, p. 157). “Pockets of silence”—what a beautifully poetic expression for the apophatic! Indeed, the vouloir dire for this miscellany of poets and novelists, phenomenologists and theologians, artists and existentialists, deconstructionists and ordinary language theorists endeavors to support the prime motif of this essay, specifically that one never possesses a final explanation of truth and meaning but perpetually seeks it, yearns for it, and awaits it. Yet, throughout the process, any verbal commentary on the expectations of some “completed” affirmation of a genuine clarification of truth and meaning exists within contexts of silence. Whether the silence stems from what cannot be said, from what does not lend itself efficiently to discourse, or from what one may simply choose not to declare out of a taciturn spirit, human beings cannot escape encountering those pockets. Whether the silence results from the Tolstoyan reticence to examine the truth and meaning of life, from the Wittgensteinian seventh proposition that simply acknowledges the liminal restriction of human speech, from the Frankean apophatic “universal vision of what is not” leading us persistently “to the threshold of the inexpressible” (Franke 2015, pp. 394, 390), or from Ricoeur’s and Stevens’s poetic second naivete, the reality remains that humans always exist within the interstices between knowing and unknowing, between saying and non-saying, and between believing and disbelieving. In other words, only within pockets of silence and through the grace of imagination can we semantically negotiate, with faithful incredulity, a poetics of truth and meaning.