Effing the Ineffable: How do we express what cannot be said?

Here's another one of scruton's. On how there's still some room for meaning.

"The temptation to take refuge in the ineffable is not confined to philosophers. Every inquiry into first principles, original causes and fundamental laws, will at some stage come up against an unanswerable question: what makes those first principles true or those fundamental laws valid? What explains those original causes or initial conditions? And the answer is that there is no answer — or no answer that can be expressed in terms of the science for which those laws, principles and causes are bedrock. And yet we want an answer. So how should we proceed? 

There is nothing wrong with referring at this point to the ineffable. The mistake is to describe it. Jankélévitch is right about music. He is right that something can be meaningful, even though its meaning eludes all attempts to put it into words. Fauré’s F sharp Ballade is an example: so is the smile on the face of the Mona Lisa; so is the evening sunlight on the hill behind my house. Wordsworth would describe such experiences as “intimations,” which is fair enough, provided you don’t add (as he did) further and better particulars. Anybody who goes through life with open mind and open heart will encounter these moments of revelation, moments that are saturated with meaning, but whose meaning cannot be put into words. These moments are precious to us. When they occur it is as though, on the winding ill-lit stairway of our life, we suddenly come across a window, through which we catch sight of another and brighter world — a world to which we belong but which we cannot enter."

"Moreover, this aspect is of the first importance. Our loves and hopes in some way hinge on it. We love each other as angels love, reaching for the unknowable “I.” We hope as angels hope: with our thoughts fixed on the moment when the things of this world fall away and we are enfolded in “the peace which passes understanding.” Putting the point that way I have already said too much. For my words make it look as though the world beyond the window is actually here, like a picture on the stairs. But it is not here; it is there, beyond the window that can never be opened."

Quick initial response:


This one gets at something that trips me up with Foucault. In history of sexuality, he talks about how the act of verbalizing things that are inherently personal, unique, and subjective serves to define and marginalize--that is, to define who/what in a given context is preferred and marginalize who/what is not--and ultimately emboldens the people, institutions, or ideals in power. That is of course troubling, but maybe even more troubling is that Foucault cannot discuss the merits of that thing--in this case, sex-- or compare its value to transhistorical forms of the thing, because to do that would be to hypocritically verbalize (and in turn, define and marginalize) that thing. He only gives himself the room to criticize what is, never comparing it to what it was before, or what it could be. But why is that troubling? Because while Foucault can speak of sex and how, step by step, it became discursive (and thus, limiting), he cannot comment on what that means. He uses the example of a man with what we would call pedophiliac tendencies and how sexuality socially verbalized led to this man's eventual arrest and commitment to an asylum. How, Foucault wonders, could something so personal and organic as sexuality be turned into a pathology, a science? But the point he makes using that story ignores the fact that the man in question was sexually involved with children. That is not to say that Foucault endorses such perversion (nor is it to say that he doesn't), but that he, restrained by his own deconstructive rules, cannot comment on it one way or the other. He cannot discuss whether the verbalization of sex was a saving alternative to children and women who believed they, as beings, were no more valuable than a man's desire to use them, have them. His deconstruction seeks to expose injustice, but it is, in my mind, finally useless in that it can never even gauge the degree to which injustice is or was committed, it can never prioritize which injustice to address, it can never choose the lesser of two evils--it can only see one injustice for being injustice and another for being another. He could of course inquire as to why the pedophile was justified in that age and time and what events led to such behavior being acceptable (and even common), but that is where his study ends. It seems very pointless in some ways. On the other hand, there are many issues other than sexuality where the consequences of dispassionate analysis removed entirely from opinion or judgment has few consequences. Those are the times, I believe, where Foucault's sort of thinking is still relevant.


Anyway, to come full circle (with scruton's article), scruton similarly advises that we leave alone the ineffable--for words, as Foucault would likely agree, reduce reality to what is commonly, publicly digestable, which is a form with invariably less purity/personal meaning than the experience itself--but he steps out onto the limb that Foucault would not, to say that to respect the ineffability of a thing is for the purpose of preserving its beauty, its sacredness to us as individuals. And we might take that a step further (which might be further than scruton is willing to go) to say that that which is ineffable ought only to be kept that way (by preserving it from limits of expression/language) when it is beautiful, and truly ought to preserved. That way what is beautiful and when it is beautiful remains in the eye of the beholder--subjective--because it remains unexpressed, untainted. So, that said, you could say that, sex in itself could be ineffable, but when the form it takes is not worth preserving (as I think most would agree that pedophilia is not) then we should talk about it and give it all the fresh air we can give to it. It should be talked to death, it should be called a pathology, an abnormality, or at least a crime--something that does not nor ever did possess any quality we want to memorialize. As I said, Scruton here goes where Foucault dared not to: he clarifies what a person should do with the ineffable things and moments, is dependent on the thing's personal value. The only question I have after all of this is: if we ought to verbalize what is effably destructive while keeping silent about what is ineffably godly/beautiful, who determines when something effably destructive has taken place? We have, with scruton, determined that it is up to the individual who experiences something ineffably beautiful to preserve it with silence--by their own judgement of what is beautiful-- but when we're talking about perversions (or what we perceive as perversions) of originally ineffably personal experience that develop into effable evil--as, I would claim, is the case with pedophilia--how are we to come to some sort of consensus as to what is ineffably perverted, so that we may make certain the thing is rightfully talked to death? In other words, to follow the example we've been using, where is the line between what, concerning sexuality, should and should not be turned into discourse? I'll save that for another day, but it seems that Scruton's step is a comforting yet small step. What is evil remains grey, but there is room for "transcendent," otherwordly, unspeakable, pure, un-deconstructable meaning.