Vagueness

Abstract

In the Sufi Ibn `Arabi’s mystical discourse, a performative “language of unsaying” is generated from the tensions and paradoxes that arise from the attempt to articulate the ineffable nature of a transcendent divine. However, such forms of language also occur in his attempts to articulate the elusive nature of the barzakh, an intermediate property of all existent things and beings. His use of language invokes not only issues of ineffability arising from a transcendent object, but also the dynamic relation between the ineffable and the intermediate. The analytical concept of “vagueness” helps to clarify such concepts as the barzakh by showing how these symbols are, relatively speaking, “precise” representations. Such a linguistic, philosophical knot is built into the mystical, pedagogical tradition of Ibn `Arabi’s Sufism, necessitating a distinction between how contemporary analytical philosophers and Sufi thinkers like him think about vagueness, while also emphasizing the sophisticated understanding of language at the heart of his Sufism.