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Zwicky 2012: What Is Ineffable? International Studies in the Philosophy of Science ISSN: 0269-8595 (Print) 1469-9281 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cisp20 What Is Ineffable? Jan Zwicky To cite this article: Jan Zwicky (2012) What Is Ineffable?, International Studies in the Philosophy of Science, 26:2, 197-217, DOI: 10.1080/02698595.2012.703480 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/02698595.2012.703480 Published online: 05 Oct 2012. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 332 View related articles Citing articles: 2 View citing articles Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=cisp20 International Studies in the Philosophy of Science Vol. 26, No. 2, June 2012, pp. 197–217 What Is Ineffable? Jan Zwicky In this essay, I argue, via a revision of Freud’s notions of primary and secondary process, that experiences of resonant form lie at the root of many serious ineffability claims. I suggest further that Western European culture’s resistance to the perception of resonant form underlies some of its present crises. Is there anything that is genuinely ineffable? If so, how is it possible to think about it or to understand it? It is fashionable in some philosophical circles to express impatience with these ques- tions. The word ‘ineffable’, some will urge, is itself a predicate—one that obviously cannot be predicated of anything on pain of self-contradiction.1 Others, content to dismiss the paradox as a minor metalinguistic knot, nonetheless assert that ineffability claims are uninteresting: language, they maintain, or some language-like structure, is involved in all human cognition and thus, by definition, nothing genuinely ineffable could ever claw its way over the horizon of human consciousness.2 Part of getting with the program of analytic philosophy has been adopting the agenda of positivist science—and although science, in many quarters, has moved on, many analytic phi- losophers still feel there is something more than a little disreputable about the very idea of ineffability. I propose at the outset to dismiss these dismissals. The paradox is indeed superficial: ineffability claims—at least the ones I’m interested in—mean something like ‘no words seem right or adequate here’. And the hypothesis of a ‘language of thought’ is just that: a contestable, and contested, theoretical reconstruction of the evidence. In what follows, I will be developing a few contestable hypotheses of my own, coming at the issue of ineffability from the other end, so to speak. I propose to take serious ineffability claims seriously, and to see what they suggest about the nature of the world.3 In doing so, I hope that my approach will be recognizable as a kind of Jan Zwicky is an independent scholar. Correspondence to: P.O. Box 51, Heriot Bay, British Columbia V0P 1H0, Canada. E-mail: [email protected] ISSN 0269-8595 (print)/ISSN 1469-9281 (online) © 2012 Open Society Foundation http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02698595.2012.703480 198 J. Zwicky inductive science—that is, an activity that the ghost of Xenophanes might recognize as continuous with his own. By ‘serious ineffability claims’ I mean ones in which people really appear to be driving at something—they’re not just being flip, or witty, or feeling frustrated by the complexity of some situation. What would have to be the case for such ineffability claims to be true? The question is difficult because we are immediately confronted by an empirical puzzle that cannot be easily dismissed: often, we make a serious ineffabi- lity claim but then don’t fall silent.4 We keep trying to communicate, or articulately wishing that we could. The desire to communicate is still manifestly present. The inef- fability claim itself can be an expression of this desire. The intensity of the pressure to communicate is, I believe, key to the phenomenon as a whole. To focus on it is to focus in the right direction. It tells us meaning is at stake. 1. A First Hypothesis What sorts of things do we say are ineffable? Frequently, what we feel we cannot talk about adequately is an experience—a complex of perceptions, feelings, thoughts, and memories, something we undergo. So-called mystical experiences obviously comprise a large subclass here; but often experiences of the natural world are described as inef- fable, as are experiences of love, both sexual and nonsexual. We also often have diffi- culty conveying dreams in words, and our experiences of art, especially of music, are frequently said to be ‘wordless’ or indescribable. And on occasion, we want to claim that the art objects or the rocks and trees themselves are ineffable.5 I have chosen the examples that follow with an eye to themes and characteristics that occur repeat- edly across cultures, while avoiding accounts that offer overtly Christian, Islamic, or other dogmatic interpretations. That is: there are commonalities among accounts of ineffable experience in addition to ineffability claims. These commonalities can be dis- cerned across cultures and also in accounts that make no overt reference to religious conviction. Religion is obviously an, if not the, elephant in the room: the tendency to regard ineffable experience as spiritual is arresting, and ultimately that tendency must be addressed. But my guide, to begin with, is the surprisingly consistent phenomeno- logy, rather than what appear to be doctrinal impositions. Forthwith, the examples. Suzanne Langer [I]t seems peculiarly hard for our literal minds to grasp the idea that anything can be known which cannot be named ...The real power of music lies in the fact that it can be ‘true’ to the life of feeling in a way that language cannot...Hans Mersmann ... wrote: ‘The possibility of expressing opposites simultaneously gives the most intri- cate reaches of expressiveness to music as such, and carries it, in this respect, far beyond the limits of the other arts.’ Music is revealing, where words are obscuring ... [Its meanings exist] outside the pale of discursive thinking. The imagination that responds to music is personal and associative and logical, tinged with affect, tinged with bodily rhythm, tinged with dream, but concerned with a wealth of for- mulations for its wealth of wordless knowledge, its whole knowledge of emotional International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 199 and organic experience, of vital impulse, balance, conflict, the ways of living and dying and feeling ... [Its meanings occur to us in] a flash of understanding. The lasting effect is ... to make things conceivable rather than to store up propositions. 6 Not [propositional] communication but insight is the gift of music. Bernard Berenson It was a morning in early summer. A silver haze shimmered and trembled over the lime trees. The air was laden with fragrance. The temperature was like a caress. I remember—I need not recall—that I climbed up a tree stump and felt suddenly immersed in Itness. I did not call it by that name. I had no need for words. It 7 and I were one. R. M. Bucke I was in a state of quiet, almost passive enjoyment, not actually thinking, but letting ideas, images and emotions flow of themselves, as it were, through my mind. All at once, without warning of any kind, I found myself wrapped in a flame-colored cloud. For an instant I thought of fire, an immense conflagration somewhere close by in that great city; the next, I knew that the fire was within myself. Directly afterward there came upon me a sense of exultation, of immense joyousness accompanied or immediately followed by an intellectual illumination impossible to describe. Among other things, ...I saw that the uni- verse is not composed of dead matter, but is, on the contrary, a living Presence; I became conscious in myself of eternal life ...I saw that all men are immortal; that the cosmic order is such that without any peradventure all things work together for the good of each and all; that the foundation principle of the world, of all the worlds, is what we call love, and that the happiness of each and all is in the long run absolutely certain. The vision lasted a few seconds and was gone but the memory of it and the sense of the reality of what it taught 8 has remained during the quarter of a century which has since elapsed. What is striking about these examples is, of course, their articulateness. They make it clear that the experience can be described, can be described in some detail, at least insofar as we are required to say what happened. We can recount events that occurred, in the correct sequence; we describe the impressions they made on us; and in the case of music, we can describe, or even write out, the sequence of notes. The problem, then, seems to be that listing a series of notes, giving a run-down of events, indeed, simply speaking—in any way—can feel wrong. It is as though such speaking involves a distortion or misrepresentation of some kind; we feel it fails to capture what matters in the experience, or that it does not adequately convey what we grasped or understood. This leads me to my first hypothesis: Hypothesis I: It is the meanings of certain experiences that are ineffable. This would explain why we seem to be able to say so much about the experiences themselves, while continuing to insist that they are indescribable. But what is meaning? Meaning, I would like to say with Robert Bringhurst, is what keeps going.9 It is what keeps going right through us, transforming us as it does so.
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