If you describe something as indescribable, havenāt you already described it?
Great question!
17 March 2021
Some toolsālike hammers and wrenchesācan be used in different ways to achieve all sorts of things. Words are tools. So Iām going to approach your question by considering three different ways of using the word āindescribableā. And these will give me three different answers to your question.
First. We sometimes use āindescribableā in a figurative, exaggerated, way.Ģż
For example: I might say āWhen I saw her win, I was indescribably happy!ā Perhaps I really just intended to convey something like: āI was incredibly happy!ā In that case, maybe what I said was literally false since I could quite easily have described it. But we know what I mean.
It might help to compare this with someone who says, āI was literally over the moon!ā Again, this is literally false, but we know what they meant. (And anyway, who said that āliterallyā must always be understood literally?)
Second. A more subtle case is when we use āindescribableā to indicate that we canāt be fully precise about something.Ģż
For example: suppose I see a sunset and tell you the next morning āit was indescribably beautifulā. Iāve clearly tried to give you some description of the beauty of the sunset. So, am I contradicting myself?
Probably not. Iām probably saying that the sunset was beautiful, but that I cannot fully convey to you just how beautiful the sunset was, or in what ways it was beautiful. The sentiment here might be something like: āno one could appreciate its precise beauty unless they saw it for themselves.ā This kind of phrase can convey something profound about the beauty of the sunset, but it still doesnāt allow you to understand its precise beauty, so thereās no contradiction.
This sort of use of āindescribableā (or āindescribablyā) arises quite often in aesthetics, i.e. in areas where we are discussing either natural or human-made beauty. And that shouldnāt really be surprising: we shouldnāt expect that we can always translate (our reactions to) art into words!
Third. The final use of āindescribableā is the murkiest of all, but (for me) the most intriguing. This is when we want to convey that something is fully unthinkable.Ģż
Suppose I tell you: āthere is an object which is entirely indescribableā. But I donāt want you to think that I mean āindescribableā in the first sense (i.e. figuratively) or the second sense (i.e. to indicate that a certain level of precision is impossible). So I add: āit is absolutely impossible to represent this object at all: no one could possibly think about it, or refer to it, or describe it, in any way whatsoever.ā
I am clearly contradicting myself, in some sense. After all: I am trying to say something about this (weird) object, whilst simultaneously insisting that it is impossible for anyone to succeed in saying anything about that object. At the very least, you certainly shouldn't believe what Iāve told you. In fact, for just the same reason, I shouldnāt believe what I said either. And this generalises: no one should believe that there is an absolutely unrepresentable object.
But that conclusion might seem very strange. Ask yourself: couldnāt there be some object which is so strange that it is absolutely unrepresentable? In plenty of ways, humans are very limited animals; weāre just hairless apes who wear shoes. So the idea that we can represent each and every object there is might seem like a bit of a cosmic-scale coincidence.
For what itās worth, I do think that everything can be represented, and I donāt think that this is a cosmic-scale coincidence. But Iād rather leave you with this puzzle than try to answer it, since I think itās one of the most interesting puzzles there is!