Religions

The mechanisms of aim-setting and decision-making in criminal activity as a four-level hierarchical structure were presented for the Russian criminals known as ‘vory v zakonie’. The first level represents a basic concept of saving one’s own life, borrowed from the Torah. The second level, the ‘Thieves’ Law’, is a set of mental models that has much in common with the adaptation and misinterpretation of old religious and legal systems. The third level is a set of general concepts and ideas about what Good or Evil is in the form of words called ‘Notions’. These levels have no material form; they reflect themselves in models of behaviour and argot as a collective output. The fourth level in the material form of page-long ‘secrete messages’, containing some models of behaviour, are the ‘Frames’ (how to behave in imprisonment), wherein the ‘Vory’s Commandments’ (how to behave at large for young criminals) do not belong to the criminal ideology. This criminal ideology, a discrete antisystem, is enriched by the three ideas found in old religious and legal systems proposed as the ‘fifth feeling of Time’: the memory of the soul in the endless time being awoken after reincarnation, making the past as if it never happened, and knowing the future.

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.

The editors first met each other via email in early 2020 [...]