Re: Effing the Ineffable

Fumbling with words for what might still elude them

Is there more to life than what can be described? This seems to me self-evident. As a journalist, I found that frustrating, but it’s impossible to explain things fully a lot of the time. There are all sorts of drawbacks, of course, yet we muddle along.

In any case, it’s not a new problem. The early Upaniṣads said similar things more than 2,000 years ago. Describing a state of transcendence, the Taittirīya warns: “Before they reach it, words turn back,” so the ultimate nature of things is “indescribable,” to quote the Māṇḍūkya. And the oldest of these mystical texts, the Bṛhad Āraṇyaka, puts it even more starkly: “One can only say not—, not—.”¹

In other words, the only words available are limited descriptions, which fall short of describing the whole. This underlying oneness, known as brahman, is said to be the same as the innermost self (ātman), and synonymous with consciousness.

A huge ever-growing pulsating brain… (Getty Images)

We’ve learned a lot more in the intervening centuries about many things, but there are still a few mysteries about being conscious that can’t be explained. Noting such limits, the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein said the inexpressible ought to remain that way (“Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen”). Yet as another philosopher, Roger Scruton, commented:

“Wittgenstein’s famous conclusion, that that whereof we cannot speak we must consign to silence, has rarely been obeyed by those who have concluded that the most important things in life are indescribable. Schopenhauer devotes half a million words to the Will, which lies beyond concepts and can be known only by some non-conceptual acquaintance that defies translation into words. Kierkegaard tells us that truth is subjectivity, and therefore cannot be given objective form. But he devotes a million or so words to evoking it nevertheless. If we are to get anywhere in discussing the transcendental, it seems to me, we must adhere to the crucial point, namely, that it lies beyond the world of our theoretical knowledge.”

Scruton’s essay, titled “Effing the Ineffable”, argues that music is better equipped to convey the experience of something “beyond”. A few decades before him, the mystical author Alan Watts made a similar case for the language of verse. “The task and delight of poetry,” Watts writes in his memoir, In My Own Way, “is to say what cannot be said, to eff the ineffable, and to unscrew the inscrutable.”

All of which has been echoed by Iain McGilchrist, a polymath whose website declares him “committed to the idea that the mind and brain can be understood only by seeing them in the broadest possible context, that of the whole of our physical and spiritual existence, and of the wider human culture in which they arise.”