Would a phenomenology of the ineffable be possible?

Abstract

This essay expounds the first steps of an investigation in progress about the existencial senses that can be characterized as extra-linguistic or ineffable. A description of the emotional or “impressional” sense is presented as a first approach to the topic. This sense corresponds to what Husserl calls “the entire state of the soul”, that is, the integral existencial state at any given moment of the individual experience. The proper ineffability of the senses of this kind and the merely practical or “quantitative” ineffability of other elements of the same living experience are also distinguished. Phenomenology would then have the task of analyzing the constitution of these properly ineffable senses, and, in this respect, it could become an integral and concrete phenomenology (along the static, the genetic, and the generative phenomenologies), that would also be fundamental for a phenomenology of language.