David Davies: "What’s ineffable, and why?"

David Davies, McGill University: "What’s ineffable, and why?"

Abstract
On the opening pages of her Language, Music, and Mind, Diana Raffman, citing relevant passages from Stanley Cavell (1967), Suzanne Langer (1942), and John Dewey (1934), describes these otherwise very different authors as ‘giving voice to one of the most deeply rooted convictions in modern aesthetics: our knowledge of artworks is, in some essential respect, ineffable. In apprehending a work of art, we come to know something we cannot put into words’ (1993, 2). And, speaking in a different philosophical tradition from Raffman, Vladimir Jankélévitch, in his book Art and the Ineffable, maintains that music is ineffable because “there are infinite and interminable things to be said of it.” (2003, 72) But, before we recognise the probative force of such uniformity in judgment amidst variety in philosophical temperament, we might ask whether we indeed have uniformity in judgment, or only a number of different views whose differences are masked by a certain equivocity in talk of ‘ineffability’. This is not an equivocity as to what it is for something to be ineffable. There is broad agreement that artistic ineffability consists in the verbal inexpressibility of something that we can come to know or understand in engaging with instances of artworks. To cite Raffman again, “in apprehending a work of art we come to know something we cannot put into words”. Rather, equivocity may arise when we ask what kind of thing it is that can supposedly be known but that cannot, by its very nature, be verbally expressed. My aim in this talk is to explore such differences, and to critically reflect upon both the significance and the plausibility of musical ineffability so understood. I shall explore three kinds of understandings that identify what is ineffable with: (1) qualities of the perceptual experiences elicited in us by musical works or performances; (2) meanings given through our perceptual experiences of musical works or performances; and (3) something given through or in our perceptual experiences of musical works or performances that is not usefully characterised as a meaning of the work, but that explains why we find music to be so meaningful.