What Is Ineffable?

Abstract

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.

Acknowledgements

My sincere thanks to Robert Bringhurst, Warren Heiti, and Tim Lilburn for comments on earlier drafts of this essay, to Tim Green who assisted with certain points of research, and to participants in the Fall 2011 Gauss Seminars at Princeton University, who offered valuable criticisms of a version that was presented there.

Notes

See Alston (1956) for a classic statement of this view.

The most recent version of this view—the so-called Language of Thought Hypothesis—was formulated by Jerry A. Fodor (1975). See also Fodor (2008) and (1981). It is frequently urged that Fodor's notion of epistemic boundedness entails that there are ineffable states of affairs. The reason that this claim is not interesting in the present context is twofold: according to Fodor, these states of affairs are, in virtue of being ineffable, unknowable; and, although they are unknowable, we can know things about them, in particular, that they have linguistic structure.

Donald Davidson's semantic holism also has the consequence that there cannot be ineffable meaning—meanings just are relations among sentences: no sentential relations, no meaning. See Davidson (1974). A clear discussion of the relevant portions of both Davidson and Fodor is contained in Kukla (2005).

Apart from philosophers who have made serious ineffability claims, such as Herakleitos, Jankélévitch, Nagarjuna, Plotinus, and Wittgenstein, there are a number of recent commentators who have taken ineffability claims seriously. These include most notably William James ([1902a] 1963), D. T. Suzuki (1957), Ben-Ami Scharfstein (1973, 1993), and André Kukla (2005).

This difficulty has been the focus of numerous discussions. In addition to the discussions of Alston (1956), Suzuki (1957), and Scharfstein (1993), see—for example—Ayer ([1946] 1952), 118; Hoffman (1960); Stace (1960); Findlay (1970); Pletcher (1973); and Kellenberger (1979). Vladimir Jankélévitch's La musique et l'ineffable presents a special case. Arguing that music's meaning is indeed ineffable, he says the ineffable cannot be explained because there is so much to say about it: ‘such is the unfathomable mystery of God, such the inexhaustible mystery of love’ (Jankélévitch 1961, 93).

For representative examples of the foregoing, see James ([1902b] 1963), Ghiselin (1952), Happold (1970), Greeley (1975), and Franke (2007).

Langer ([1942] 1951), 197, 206–207; my italics on whole, Langer's own italics elsewhere. Langer's quotation is drawn from Mersmann (1935), 40–41. Mersmann's observations are echoed by Jankélévitch (1961), 94.

Berenson (1949), 18.

Bucke, reported in James ([1902b] 1963), 399. James indicates that he is quoting from a privately printed pamphlet, and that a different version of this passage may be found in Bucke (1901), 7–8. Cosmic Consciousness has since gone through many editions; the passage in question occurs in §4 of Part i.

Bringhurst (2009).

Weil ([1946] 1990), 297–298. There is a striking parallel to Weil's discussion in Polanyi (1958), 57. Polanyi also anticipates a connexion between this conception of meaning and Gestalt theory (56–58), and also connects both to a notion of tacit knowledge that, he claims, must remain ineffable (87–95). The latter argument explicitly eschews consideration of so-called mystical experience, however; it depends on a distinction between subsidiary and focal attention, and how these forms of attention function in practical situations.

Weil ([1946] 1990), 298.

Wertheimer (1959), 242, 252–255, 264–265.

Wertheimer (1938a).

I am not aware of a discussion of ineffability claims as such in Freud's work. The opening chapter of Civilization and Its Discontents makes clear that that he had little patience with mysticism, which he understood as a form of occultism. He also famously eschewed attempts to offer an epistemology of creativity: ‘Before the problem of the creative artist analysis must, alas, lay down its arms’ ([1928] 1961, 177).

Freud's discussions of primary and secondary process span his entire career. Core texts include Freud ([1895] 1966), ([1900] 1958), ([1911] 1958), ([1915] 1957), ([1920] 1955), and ([1923] 1961).

Freud ([1915] 1957), 186.

Freud ([1900] 1958), 596.

Freud ([1915] 1957), 187. See also Freud ([1920] 1955), §IV, 28. The detailed editorial footnote attached to the reference to timelessness in Freud ([1915] 1957) lists other passages where Freud discusses the subject.

Freud ([1915] 1957), 187; ([1900] 1958), 596. Readers who consult Freud ([1915] 1957) will discover that Freud also mentions ‘replacement of external by psychical reality’ as a characteristic of primary process. I will discuss this claim below.

Freud ([1911] 1958), 219. The pleasure principle, whose sway is opposed by the reality principle, is discussed on the preceding page of the same essay.

Freud nowhere lays out the characteristics of secondary process in a list, as he does those of primary process. This characterization is thus the distillate of a number of discussions. See in particular Freud ([1915] 1957), §VII, 196–204 and 209–215; ([1923] 1961), §II, 19–27; ([1920] 1955), §IV, and the opening of §V, 24–35; ([1900] 1958), ch. VII, §E, 598–609; and especially ([1895] 1966), pt I, §§1 and 14–18, pp. 294–297 and 322–335.

Freud ([1915] 1957), 202–203. See also the references given in n. 1, loc. cit.

See notes 19 and 20 above. See also Freud ([1911] 1958), 219n3.

Regarding jokes, see Freud ([1915] 1957), 186. Regarding slips of the tongue, see Freud ([1900] 1958), 596, and ([1901] 1960), esp. 58–59. Some of Freud's examples in the latter (notably the third and fourth) actually document conscious awareness of the chain of associations underlying a slip of the tongue.

Rycroft (1975), 29. For a related view, see Anton Ehrenzweig (1965) and (1967). Ehrenzweig, like Rycroft, argues that primary process is fundamentally important to artistic creativity. However, he views primary process not as Freud and Rycroft do, but as a completely undifferentiated ‘scanning’; thus he contends that condensation is not defining of primary process activity but is rather a function of secondary process. In addition, Ehrenzweig equates Gestalt comprehension with precision, ‘ego rigidity’, and analytic, piecemeal thinking, and so would also be unsympathetic to the view I will be developing below.

See, for example, the excerpt from Katherine Anne Porter and the letter attributed to Mozart in Ghiselin (1952). See also ‘A New Refutation of Time’, in Borges (1967), 44–64.

Cf. Naess (1989), 59.

Wertheimer (1938a), 10.

Lorenz (1971), 320.

Ibid., 281 and 282.

Ibid., 320.

Ibid., 319–320.

Ibid., 312.

Ibid., 316.

Weil ([1952] 1987), 109.

See, for example, Wertheimer (1938b), 279–280; and compare Einstein's words at the end of n. 7, p. 228, in ‘Einstein: The Thinking That Led to the Theory of Relativity’, in Wertheimer (1959), with the letter attributed to Mozart in Ghiselin (1952). See also Poincaré ([1908] 1932), passim but esp. 53–55 and 58; Lorenz (1971), passim but esp. 318 and 321; and Wittgenstein (1967), §151, and (1982), §§564–565.

Lorenz (1971), 314. Cf. Naess (1989), 60.

Polanyi (1958), 41.

Although Freud's theory requires the mutual exclusion of primary and secondary process to achieve its explanatory ends, he himself remarked, ‘A complete divergence of their trends, a total severance of the two systems, is what above all characterizes a condition of illness’ (Freud [1915] 1957, 194).

Poincaré—who uses the term le moi subliminal to refer to the part of himself that perceives deep, surprising associative connexions unsuspected by le moi conscient—appears to have come to a similar conclusion. He writes that, concerning his own activity as a mathematician, he came to the following hypothesis: ‘The subliminal ego is in no way inferior to the conscious ego; it is not purely automatic; it is capable of discernment; it has tact and lightness of touch; it can select, and it can divine. More than that, it can divine better than the conscious ego, since it succeeds where the latter fails’ (Poincaré [1908] 1932, 57).

In addition to the excerpt from Berenson quoted earlier, see Auden's superb overview of nature mysticism, ‘The Vision of Dame Kind’, in Auden (1973), 58–62.

See Freud ([1901] 1960), §5, for numerous examples. The one I have described may be found on p. 63.

By a series I intend something less organized than a sequence. A series does elapse in time, but there is no causal or logical shape to it, no constraint on the order of its constituents. So I might notice a purple scarf in a window, think about my friend who is fond of purple, remember that her mother just died, and then be put in mind of the politician who died on the same day. But I might, just as easily, have thought about the dark purplish red of the cloth draped over the politician's coffin, thought of my friend, and have been struck by the coincidence that her mother died on the same day. Or I might have thought about the politician's death, thought about my friend's mother, my friend, and ended up imagining a purple scarf. One cannot as easily perform reversals or juggling tricks in the case of causal or logical sequences without making mistakes: the light coming on does not cause the switch to be flipped; Socrates' being mortal does not entail that all humans are.

Also the earlier one. I read the Tractatus as an attempt to preserve ineffable comprehension from the distorting effects of scientizing thought. If one is precise about what can be made explicit, then one sees clearly the outline of what cannot be made explicit. Wittgenstein's aim was not that of the positivists; he did not wish to reject what cannot be made explicit, but to protect it from misrepresentation.

Wittgenstein (1967), passim; but see especially §241 and Part II, 226.

Michael Polanyi again makes a similar point in the course of an argument with a very different aim. See Polanyi (1970), 92–93. The key notions he employs there are discussed in more detail in Polanyi (1958). See, in particular, the references in note 10 above.

Lorenz (1971), 316, and Polanyi (1970), 93.

When we do this in a methodical way, we are pursuing something close to the method of collection and division as Plato understood it: a discipline demanded of us if we are to understand rightly the relation of the One and the Many.

In some general respects, Freud's early neuropsychological speculations have indeed been confirmed, and in some particulars, they have been disconfirmed. See Pribram and Gill (1976) and Edelman (1992). Other books by Edelman, such as his earlier Neural Darwinism (1987) and his more recent Second Nature (2006) cover similar ground. Freud's suggestion ([1895] 1966) that an initial ‘passage of cathexis’ facilitates subsequent passages is echoed in Edelman's central claim that ‘neurons that fire together wire together’. Freud's notion that thinking is a kind of ‘experimental acting’ is echoed directly in Edelman's later work.

Ernest Klein (1966–77).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jan Zwicky

Jan Zwicky is an independent scholar.