Gene Halton: "In the Peircean perspective, language, if you mean by that linguistic language, is but a subspecies of the inferential and communicative process of semiosis, even within human communication. Two examples: “Talking about music is like dancing about architecture,” as Thelonius Monk once said to quiet a critic’s question. Or as the great modern dancer Isadore Duncan said, “If I could tell you what it meant, there would be no point in dancing it.” Or consider felt, wordless empathic communication. Or this: Someone I know who studied with a Native American wise man told me that the man gathered all of his students, former and current, to spend a month with him for his last teaching. His last teaching he gave to them was his death, as it unfolded over that month."
ADDENDUM
Peirce: “Nor must any synechist say, 'I am altogether myself, and not at all you.' If you embrace synechism, you must abjure this metaphysics of wickedness. In the first place, your neighbors are, in a measure, yourself, and in far greater measure than, without deep studies in psychology, you would believe. Really, the selfhood you like to attribute to yourself is, for the most part, the vulgarist delusion of vanity.”
From the Peirce list
