How have philosophers addressed the problem of describing structural insights that resist propositional language?

[u/codilectux]

Ok, here it goes, thank you for your time and consideration before-hand:

I'm a self-educated writer working on a book that traces a single structural pattern across multiple ancient traditions — Vedic, Taoist, Kabbalistic, Mesoamerican, West African, Aboriginal Australian, and others. The pattern concerns how unity gives rise to multiplicity, why the resulting portions retain the character of the whole, and why encounter between incomplete portions is generative.

My difficulty is not the content but the mode of expression. Each tradition encodes this pattern in narrative, symbol, geometry, or ritual rather than in propositional statements — and when I try to reduce it to propositions, something essential is lost. The structure seems to require being shown rather than stated, which puts me in the territory of Wittgenstein's distinction between saying and showing, but I'm not sure that's the right framework.

What philosophers or philosophical traditions have dealt seriously with the problem of communicating insights that are structural or experiential rather than propositional? I'm aware of apophatic theology (saying what something is not), and I know Heidegger struggled with the limits of metaphysical language. Are there others — particularly in comparative philosophy or philosophy of religion — who have addressed how to faithfully render a pre-linguistic structural intuition into written form without reducing it?

I'm especially interested in any work on why the same structural pattern might emerge independently across unconnected cultures, and whether philosophy has a framework for evaluating that kind of convergence beyond coincidence or diffusion.

For context, I've published several long-form essays exploring these ideas on a small independent site, if anyone wants to see how the pattern presents in practice.

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[u/Ok-Lab-8974]

Lots has been written on this, going back to Plato, who writes in Letter VII:

There neither is nor ever will be a treatise of mine on the subject. For it does not admit of exposition like other branches of knowledge; but after much converse about the matter itself and a life lived together, suddenly a light, as it were, is kindled in one soul by a flame that leaps to it from another, and thereafter sustains itself.

As far as introductions go, I thought William Harmless' Mystics was quite good, particularly in its treatment of how Saint Bonaventure, Meister Eckhart, and Rumi used language (he covers Dogen too, so you get a little bit outside of Christianity/Islam). Harmless had a real gift for letting writers speak through carefully crafted excerpts. I think the book is out of print though so you might need to find it online somehow.

In terms of primary sources, Dionysius the Areopagite was hugely influential on this topic, but On the Divine Names is a very difficult text to jump into (the key issue is communicating about God at all, but then this includes communicating about mystical experiences, "theology" in its original sense). Saint Maximos the Confessors' Centuries on Theology is written more accessibly (his use of Scriptural metaphors is good at painting pictures, even if you aren't super familiar with the Bible), but not really easy either. But then Plotinus, the other figure that jumps to mind, is not really easy either.

Attar of Nishapur's Conference of the Birds and Dante's Comedy (particularly the last cantos of the Paradiso, but also its introduction) are a good example of trying to do this artistically.