GSTF Journal of General Philosophy (JPhilo) Vol.1 No.2, March 2015
Ineffability and Aesthetic Force1
York H. Gunther
aesthetic experience or, more precisely, to its content, might
be considered to be a way of praising or even expressing
contempt toward the experience (and perhaps also the artwork
eliciting it). Or, the claim that an aesthetic content cannot in
principle be articulated through language might be interpreted
as a prohibition, in the way some tribes forbid utterances of
the names of their dead, whether out of respect or contempt. I
recognize that there are such normative senses of 'ineffability,'
but they don't concern me here. My focus is, rather, on its
descriptive sense. Hence, an ineffable aesthetic content isn't
one whose experience is more praiseworthy or contemptuous
than the experiences of other contents, nor is it that one ought
not to articulate it linguistically, but rather one that cannot in
principle be articulated through language. In particular, I want
to take seriously the idea expressed by Copland, Humphrey
and others that ineffability is not only a descriptive property
but an invariable property.
Abstract - So many artists, aestheticians and audiences are
committed to the idea that nonverbal art is ineffable. The
challenge, however, is to clarify and substantiate this view. In
this paper I argue that an adequate model of ineffability must
account for three features, viz. invariability, intentionality and
flexibility. After reviewing several recent attempts at explaining
ineffabilty, I offer an alternative based on two claims: that the
force of artworks is essentially functionless and that this force is
an indissoluble aspect of aesthetic content. With these claims, I
argue for a more convincing and substantial model.
Keywords: ineffable; art; aesthetics; intentionality
I. INTRODUCTION
In What to Listen for in Music, Aaron Copland considers
whether music has meaning. "My answer to that", he
maintains, "would be, 'Yes'". "Can you state in so many words
what the meaning is?' My answer to that would be, 'No'". [1]
Doris Humphrey makes a similar claim: "The dancer believes
that his art has something to say which cannot be expressed in
words or in any other way than by dancing". [2] What Copland
and Humphrey claim about music and dance is commonly held
true of all nonverbal art, viz. that the content of aesthetic
experiences elicited by them cannot in principle be articulated
through language.
The invariability of ineffability has two aspects:
indefeasibility and absoluteness. To claim that an aesthetic
content cannot in principle be articulated through language is
to claim that its ineffability is indefeasible. In other words, no
advancement in the vocabulary or concepts of an individual, a
discipline, a culture or humankind generally will enable one to
articulate the content through language. Unlike scientific
advancements that may one day allow physicists to formulate
a unified description of the fundamental forces of nature, no
advancements in aesthetics or music criticism, say, will allow
someone to articulate the aesthetic content elicited by Sibelius'
Second Symphony. Moreover, the phrase 'cannot in principle'
also suggests that ineffability is an absolute as opposed to
relative property. That is, the same type of aesthetic content
cannot be 'effable' and ineffable to a single individual at
different times or to different individuals at the same time (or
different times). And furthermore, the same type of content
cannot vary in degree, e.g., its ineffability cannot diminish for
an individual over time or be greater for one individual and
lesser for another.
Yet, as widespread as the view is, few have attempted to
substantiate the view and, to my knowledge, none have
succeeded. Two challenges face the proponent of aesthetic
ineffability. The first is to offer an account of the property of
ineffability, and the second is to establish that such a property
is instantiated by aesthetic contents. The former, I take it, is
the more fundamental task. For without knowing what
ineffability is, it isn't apparent that one would be convinced
that it is instantiated. In what follows, I offer an account of
ineffability by assuming its instantiation. I begin by outlining
three constraints that any model should meet.
After
identifying typical problems with models, I outline an
alternative that addresses these problems and substantiates the
view to which so many, including myself, are beholden.
In acknowledging the indefeasible and absolute character
of ineffability, one is acknowledging a robust form of
ineffability. Due to its widespread attribution to aesthetic
contents, robust ineffability is perhaps the most relevant to
the philosophy of art. Moreover, because there is presently
no satisfactory explanation of it, an account is especially
needed.
II. INVARIABILITY, FLEXIBILITY, AND
INTENTIONALITY
Before outlining the constraints on an account, a
distinction between the descriptive and normative senses of
'ineffability' must be recognized. Attributing ineffability to an
One of the earliest attempts at explaining this robust form
17
DOI: 10.5176/2345-7856_1.2.13
© The Author(s) 2015. This article is published with open access by the GSTF
GSTF Journal of General Philosophy (JPhilo) Vol.1 No.2, March 2015
of aesthetic ineffability is made by Arthur Schopenhauer.
His suggestion is that musical content is ineffable (or
'inexpressible') because musical experiences have a
distinctive subject-matter: "music differs from all the other
arts by the fact that it... is directly a copy of the will itself,
and therefore expresses the metaphysical to everything
physical in the world, the thing-in-itself to every
phenomenon". [3] Because no other medium can express or
be a copy of "the will itself", according to Schopenhauer, no
other medium can articulate the content of musical
experience. Although his account of ineffability is restricted
to musical experience, it can naturally be extended to the
contents of all nonverbal aesthetic experiences: due to their
distinctive metaphysical subject-matter, the contents of
dance, painting, sculpture and so on cannot be articulated
through language.
(How else could philosophers talk about it?) An adequate
account of ineffability, it seems to me, should not attempt to
restrict the subject-matter of either aesthetic experience or
language. In fact, an adequate account should make it
apparent that an experience with any subject-matter could
have an ineffable content. I'll refer to this as the Flexibility
Constraint.
The other major problem with Schopenhauerian
approaches is their misemphasis. The assumption
underlying the account is that ineffability is a property of the
reference or subject-matter of an aesthetic experience. In
other words, it is assumed that there are certain entities that
resist being represented through language. But this is surely
mistaken. After all, the problem isn't that we cannot use
sentences or utterances to refer to entities or properties -even if we currently lack names for certain things, we could
surely create them!3 Rather, what needs explaining is why
the intentional content of an aesthetic experience cannot be
possessed (or expressed) by an indicative sentence or
assertion (or set thereof).
Of course, the natural question is, Why not? Why
suppose that musical (and other aesthetic) experiences can't
have the same subject-matter as an indicative sentence or
assertion? To address the question, many philosophers,
whether implicitly or explicitly, have appealed to a version
of the Isomorphic Representation Thesis. As Susanne
Langer explains, "[a] formal analogy, or congruence of
logical structures, is the prime requisite for the relation
between a symbol and whatever it is to mean. The symbol
and the object symbolized must have some common logical
form". [4]2 Put plainly, the thesis makes two claims. First,
it asserts that any medium, whether linguistic, mental,
artificial, and so on, must have a logical structure that is
isomorphic with the ontological structure of its reference.
For example, a propositional structure (which is taken to
have a subject-predicate logical form) is considered able to
represent only states of affairs (an entity, say, bearing a
property). And second, the thesis insists that language
necessarily has a propositional structure and nonverbal
aesthetic experiences do not. From these two claims, it is
inferred that language cannot express or represent what
nonverbal aesthetic experiences do. And in this way, the
alleged distinctive subject-matter of aesthetic experiences
renders their contents ineffable.
The concept of intentionality was re-introduced to
modern philosophy by Brentano, who claimed that
intentionality, as a property, is unique and essential to
mental states and experiences. It's in virtue of possessing this
property, he maintained, that the mental cannot be reduced
to the physical. [5] Since then, intentionality has been
attributed to meaningful utterances and artworks as a way of
distinguishing them, respectively, from nonsense and mere
objects. [6] [7] Like mental states and linguistic utterances,
artworks and the experiences they elicit are taken to be about
objects, events, states of affairs, and so on, whether real or
fictional, concrete or abstract. Ineffability, then, is a
purported property of the intentional content of an aesthetic
experience. To claim that an aesthetic experience is
linguistically articulateable (effable) is to claim that its
intentional content can be possessed by an indicative
sentence or assertion. Conversely, to claim that an aesthetic
experience is ineffable is to claim that its content cannot in
principle be possessed by an indicative sentence or assertion.
Because aesthetic experiences have other properties
besides intentionality (e.g. reference and phenomenology),
we should take care to distinguish them from it. As Frege
pointed out, different contents like those of 'Hesperus' and
'Phosphorus' can be co-referential. [8] Or consider Rodin's
Burghers of Calais and Froissart's tale of the valiant selfsacrifice of the six citizens of Calais, which refer to the same
event. Despite this, and despite the fact that both share the
same title (which suggests that their subject-matter is the
same), this doesn't imply that Froissart's tale articulates the
content elicited by the sculpture.4
Moreover, it is
conceivable that the contents of different aesthetic
experiences are distinct even though their phenomenological
character is the same. The feelings and sensations elicited by
While this general approach to ineffability remains
influential, it is problematic. To begin with, even if one
accepted the postulation of such a metaphysical subjectmatter and the dubious claim that the structure of language
is necessarily propositional and the structure of aesthetic
experience is not, why suppose that aesthetic experiences
can represent only entities with (or that are parts of) a certain
kind of ontological structure? It's implausible to restrict the
subject-matter of aesthetic experience or language in this
way. Surely a work of music, dance, painting, or sculpture
can represent the wars, journeys, fears, or triumphs that we
talk about. And surely, an indicative sentence or assertion
can be about the will itself, or anything else for that matter.
18
© The Author(s) 2015. This article is published with open access by the GSTF
GSTF Journal of General Philosophy (JPhilo) Vol.1 No.2, March 2015
Burghers of Calais, for example, may be identical to those
elicited by an appropriation of the sculpture. But, as Putnam
and Danto have vividly illustrated (the former through his
Twin Earth scenario, the latter through his Gallery of
Indiscernibles) experiences that are phenomenologically
indistinguishable may not have the same content. [9] [7]
fineness of grain that, by outstripping our memory, we are
unable to recognize or name. The shapes and shades of color
in a painting and the patterns and celerity of movement in a
dancework are more fine-grained than the course-grained
schema or concepts we possess. Hence, like N-pitches and Nintervals which we hear in music, we cannot name the Nshapes and N-shades we perceive in painting and the Npatterns and N-celerity we perceive in dance.
It is noteworthy that invariability is a property of
ineffability not intentionality. As postmodernists are fond of
claiming, aesthetic content changes from person to person,
circumstance to circumstance, and even moment to moment.
While I doubt that this is true to the extent that some allege,
the claim that aesthetic content is radically unstable or
indexical is compatible with the invariability of ineffability.
In other words, the variability of intentionality doesn't imply
the variability of ineffability.
While the model is appealing, it has two problems. The
first of these concerns its inability to account for invariability,
which is apparent in several ways. As Raffman herself
observes, "it is entirely possible that some of us, with a great
deal of practice, could acquire schema [concepts] more finegrained than our present chromatic ones". [10] Consequently,
for those able to acquire more fine-grained schema or
concepts, their aesthetic contents will be less ineffable,
suggesting that ineffability is a relative rather than absolute
property. Moreover, the course-grained structure of our
schema or concepts might be supplemented and refined
through scientific instrumentation and the acquisition of a
scientific vocabulary, suggesting that the ineffability of
aesthetic content is not only relative but defeasible. For
example, if the specific pitches and intervals we heard were
measured and named exactly according to their frequency and
pitch, we would have a means for remembering and naming
them and thereby for expressing musical content. And
furthermore, our schema or concepts might be refined through
genetic engineering, neurobiology or even evolution. In fact,
it's conceivable that aesthetic contents, as conceived of by
Raffman, are never ineffable to certain natural or artificial
entities who, by some means or other, have come to possess
the requisite fine-grained schema or concepts, which again
would suggest that the ineffability of aesthetic content is
relative and defeasible.
Where does this leave us? We now have three
constraints on a model of aesthetic ineffability:
(a) Invariability: Ineffability is an indefeasible and
absolute property
(b) Intentionality: Ineffability is a property of the
intentional content of an aesthetic experience
(c) Flexibility: The subject-matter of aesthetic
experiences with ineffable contents is unrestricted.
With these constraints in mind, I now want to consider
some recent attempts at explaining ineffability.
III. RECENT ACCOUNTS
In Language, Music and Mind, Diana Raffman offers an
account of musical ineffability based on the fine-grained
character of perceptual experience, which she contrasts with
the relative course-grained structure of our mental schema.
The idea is that while we, as human beings, are able to hear
subtle variations in pitch and intervals, we are often unable to
name them. According to Raffman, nuances of pitch and
interval (N-pitches and N-intervals) cannot be named because
we cannot recognize them, and we cannot recognize them
because we cannot remember them. The problem allegedly is
that we lack the requisite mental schema that would enable us
to remember and therefore recognize and name these musical
nuances. However, “it is overwhelmingly unlikely that we
have, or could have, interval schema as fine-grained as the Npitches and N-intervals we can hear”. [10] Hence, just as we
cannot recognize and name each shade of color we see, we
cannot recognize and name each variation in the musical
parameters we hear5.
The second problem relates to subject-matter. Raffman, of
course, doesn't blatantly restrict the potential subject-matter of
aesthetic experiences in the way Schopenhauer did. On her
account, a musical experience can be about anything,
including a war, journey, fear or triumph. However, on her
account only certain kinds of aesthetic contents are ineffable.
In the case of musical experience, the ineffable content
involves only the fine-grained nuances of pitch and interval. In
other words, the content is ineffable in virtue of the fact that
the experience is about nuances of pitch and interval, not in
virtue of its being about a war, journey, fear, and so on.
Therefore, while Raffman doesn't restrict the potential subjectmatter of aesthetic experiences, she does restrict the contents
that can be ineffable, which also constitutes a violation of the
Flexibility Constraint6.
Although Raffman focuses on the ineffability of musical
content, her account can be extended to aesthetic contents
generally. For example, like those elicited by music, the
aesthetic contents elicited by painting and dance have a
Roger Scruton offers an account of ineffability that
initially seems to address these problems. "The ineffability of
artistic meaning is", as he puts it, "simply a special case of the
ineffability of first-person awareness -- the impossibility of
19
© The Author(s) 2015. This article is published with open access by the GSTF
GSTF Journal of General Philosophy (JPhilo) Vol.1 No.2, March 2015
translating 'what it is like' into a description [or indicative
sentence]". [11] The account rests on three assumptions: first,
the mental has two distinct aspects, the subjective ('what it is
like') and the objective; second, there is a unique form of
knowledge proper to each, viz. the first- and third-person; and
third, language can express only third-person knowledge,
whereas nonverbal artworks and the experiences they elicit can
express first-person knowledge. Subjective mental aspects or
'what it's likenesses' include feelings and states of
consciousness. Objective mental aspects, in the case of human
beings, include behavior and facial expressions, and in the case
of art, include the features characteristic of an artform, e.g. in
the case of music, pitch, tempo and interval (to name a few).
Artworks, of course, express subjective aspects which
audiences experience. However, these subjective aspects can
only be understood through empathy, that is, by experiencing
the artwork first-hand, by 'first-person knowledge' -- they
cannot be understood from the third-person (with a
description).
necessarily have a distinctive subject-matter. Nor does he
suggest, as Raffman does, that the subject-matter that is
responsible for an experience's possession of ineffable content
is necessarily different from the subject-matter of indicative
sentences (or descriptions). However, he does suggest that the
subject-matter of an aesthetic experience (and the nonverbal
artwork that elicits it) is necessarily phenomenological. And if
this is correct, it suggests a far too psychologistic and
restrictive interpretation of the subject-matter of aesthetic
experiences.
But the problem isn't just with the Flexibility Constraint.
Scruton doesn't sufficiently explain invariability or ineffability
for that matter -- he merely assumes both. Consider his second
and third assumptions, viz. that the subjective and objective
aspects have unique forms of knowledge and that language can
express only third-person knowledge. It's noteworthy that both
assumptions are informed by the Isomorphic Representation
Thesis, in particular its second claim, viz. that language
necessarily has a propositional structure while aesthetic
experience does not: "its content", he maintains, "cannot be
described since it contains no proposition known". Even those
sympathetic to these assumptions will recognize that no
justification is given for either claim. Why suppose that firstperson knowledge isn't propositional? Why assume that
linguistic knowledge is? And more importantly, why suppose
that their logical structures must differ? As Thomas Nagel
himself concedes, an "objective phenomenology", that is, a
vocabulary for first-person knowledge, might be something we
could develop: "At present we are completely unequipped to
think about the subjective character of experience without
relying on the imagination -- without taking up the point of
view of the experiential subject. This should be regarded as a
challenge to form new concepts and devise a new method -- an
objective phenomenology not dependent on empathy or the
imagination". [12] What Scruton fails to explain is why
forming new concepts and devising a new method is in
principle out of the question.
Because linguistic knowledge is necessarily third-person,
the subjective aspects of artworks and the aesthetic
experiences they elicit are allegedly ineffable. Given that the
gap between first- and third-person knowledge is considered
unbridgeable, ineffability is taken to be an invariable property
of aesthetic content. It seems to be neither relative from person
to person nor circumstance to circumstance nor defeasible by
the advances of individuals, disciplines, cultures or
humankind. Moreover, unlike Schopenhauer and Raffman,
Scruton doesn't claim that an aesthetic experience and (written
or verbal) description necessarily have different subjectmatters: "The difference between being in pain and merely
observing [or describing] pain in another does not lie in the
difference between an awareness of 'subjective' facts and an
awareness of their outer expression. It lies in the difference
between a first- and a third-person perspective on one and the
same state of affairs". [11]
Scruton's focus on the subjective character of aesthetic
experiences might lead one to wonder whether he's violated
the Intentionality Constraint. On his account, it initially looks
as if ineffability is a property of an experience's
phenomenology (its 'what it's likenessness') rather than its
intentional content. However, there is a straightforward way of
interpreting his account that brings it in line with the
constraint. Nonverbal aesthetic experiences refer to
phenomenological properties and it is not these properties but
the experiential contents that are ineffable. In fact, this makes
good sense of his claim that one can have both first-person and
third-person knowledge of one and the same state of affairs.
What differentiates these two types of knowledge is not their
subject-matter but their contents.
In his account of ineffability, Laird Addis offers a partial
explanation for this. Like Scruton, Addis maintains that works
of music (and let us assume any nonverbal artwork) express
mental states like moods, emotions and other conscious
experiences. However, according to him, the experiences of
these states involve any of an infinite number of
phenomenological properties that form a "dense continuum
but for which, because of the natures of the properties
involved, there can be no 'algorithm of naming'". [13] These
infinitely subtle phenomenological properties can presumably
not be named because they are available only to the firstperson perspective of a finite being. While their infinite
subtlety can be felt by finite beings like us, our mental concepts
are too coarse-grained to allow each to be named (because
each cannot be recognized or remembered). For irrespective of
the degree to which our schema are supplemented (e.g. through
But if this is right, it suggests that Scruton violates the
Flexibility Constraint after all. Of course, unlike
Schopenhauer, he doesn't claim that aesthetic experiences
20
© The Author(s) 2015. This article is published with open access by the GSTF
GSTF Journal of General Philosophy (JPhilo) Vol.1 No.2, March 2015
scientific instrumentation) or refined (e.g. through genetic
engineering), we will, as finite beings, always fall
linguistically short.
IV. A SEMANTIC ACCOUNT
The accounts I've considered thus far fall into two
categories: psychological and metaphysical.
Raffman
explains ineffability based on an individual's conceptual or
cognitive limitations. [10] On the other hand, Addis follows
Schopenhauer in advocating a metaphysical account insofar
as he posits a metaphysical subject-matter for musical
(aesthetic) experience. The kind of account Scruton
advocates is less clear because he doesn't support his
assumption that language cannot produce a description of
'what it's like'. As I suggested, the natural question to ask is,
Why not?, to which, it should be apparent that neither a
psychological nor metaphysical answer will do.
It should be emphasized that even if Addis had a sound
explanation for invariability, his account doesn't meet the
Flexibility Constraint either. Like Scruton, according to him
the subject-matter of aesthetic experiences (and nonverbal
artworks) is necessarily phenomenological. Moreover, while
Addis seems partially to explain invariability, he leaves open
the possibility that the same type of aesthetic experience could
have varying degrees of ineffability. For example, an
individual with more refined mental concepts will be better
able to recognize and remember and, therefore, name the
phenomenological properties to which his aesthetic
experiences refer.
Given the inadequacies of psychological and
metaphysical accounts, what we need is an alternative. What
I propose is an account that is fundamentally semantic. At its
heart are two claims. The first is that aesthetic force is
essentially functionless and the second is that aesthetic
contents are partially determined by their force. With these
two claims, I believe a more promising explanation of
ineffability is available.
Yet, despite these shortcomings, one might suppose that
Addis has given a substantive explanation for why ineffable
aesthetic contents are indefeasible, which is arguably the most
significant feature of robust ineffability. Because any aesthetic
experience involves infinitely fine-grained phenomenological
properties, infinitely fine-grained concepts would be required
to name them. However, as finite material beings, humans (or
any other material beings) cannot in principle acquire such
concepts, suggesting that they could never articulate the
infinitely fine-grained phenomenology they feel.
Like sentences and intentional states, aesthetic
experiences have intentionality. [7] If they didn't, then
ascribing ineffability to them would be a category mistake
since, as I mentioned earlier, ineffability is a property of
intentional content not of reference or phenomenology. Yet
once we acknowledge that aesthetic experiences have
intentionality, it follows that they also have force. Roughly
speaking, aesthetic force is the way an experience's content is
presented, akin to the way a mental state bears its content. For
example, the content, Aaron will become a musician, can be
borne or presented by distinct mental force types, e.g. belief,
desire, and intention. Hence, I may believe that Aaron will
become a musician, you may want Aaron to become a
musician, and Aaron himself may intend to become a
musician. In this way, the same content can be presented
differently by distinct mental force types.
Of course the question is, should we accept the claim that
human beings can actually experience infinitely fine-grained
phenomenological properties? How could one remain a
materialist and accept this? It's certainly true that many
philosophers believe that experiential content is more finegrained than conceptual content. But to assume, as Addis does,
that experiential content is infinitely fine-grained is an
altogether different matter. How could any of an infinite
number of phenomenological properties supervene on a
human being, which as materialists we must assume is a finite
material base that can be arranged only in a finite number of
ways.
The objection can be formulated as dilemma. On the one
hand, Addis can deny that the phenomenological properties
supervene on physical properties (i.e. reject that a mental
difference is possible only with a physical difference), in
which case he would be advocating a form of ontological
dualism and, not unlike Schopenhauer, be positing a
metaphysical subject-matter for aesthetic experiences. On the
other hand, he can accept the supervenience of the mental on
the physical and admit that human beings can experience only
any of a finite number of phenomenological properties, in
which case his account wouldn't explain why forming new
concepts and devising a new method is in principle out of the
question. Although Addis seems to favor the former, neither
option is very welcome.
It's noteworthy that mental force types have linguistic
analogs. [14] Assertions, for example, are linguistic analogs
of beliefs and wishes (understood as speech acts) are
linguistic analogs of desires. The correspondence between
mental and linguistic force types is based primarily on their
satisfaction conditions. For example, both beliefs and
assertions have truth conditions, while both desires and
wishes have fulfillment conditions. A mental state or
utterance's satisfaction conditions are one of the ways of
identifying its force type. The same I suggest is true of
aesthetic experiences and artworks. In other words, just as
beliefs and assertions have the same force type, aesthetic
experiences and artworks have the same force type. The
question is, What is their force type?
21
© The Author(s) 2015. This article is published with open access by the GSTF
GSTF Journal of General Philosophy (JPhilo) Vol.1 No.2, March 2015
One might initially suppose that artworks and the
aesthetic experiences they elicit have the same force types as
speech acts and mental states. For example, Manet's Olympia,
which depicts a prostitute reclining on a bed to whom a female
servant brings flowers, caused quite a brouhaha when first
shown in the Musée d'Orsay in 1865. While few appreciated
the painting's significance at the time, it has since been
identified as having numerous aims, e.g. asserting the
hypocrisy of an art-going bourgeoisie, questioning the role of
spectatorship in art, and predicting the empowerment of
women by likening a Parisian prostitute to Titian's Venus of
Urbino. [15] It may, of course, have been (and continue to be)
doing all of this and more. Just as utterances can have more
than one linguistic force and content (e.g. 'Do you have a
dollar?' may serve as both a question and request), it may seem
plausible that an artwork like Olympia has various force types
and contents, similar to those we use as speakers.
painting of Jackson Pollock. But it is also generally true. For
unlike genuine speech acts, artworks have a 'life of their own',
independent of the conscious mental states of their creators
and performers.
The same considerations can be raised against the
common assumption that artworks express emotions. Like
other speech acts, expressive utterances presuppose an
experience of emotion at the time of the utterance. For
example, 'I apologize for arriving late' is a genuine apology
only if the speaker feels regret for arriving late. To say that an
artwork expresses sadness, anger or joy presupposes that the
artist or perhaps the performer experiences these emotions.
However, this need not be the case. A painter, composer,
choreographer, sculptor, and so on, or for that matter a
performer, need not experience sadness at the time they create
or perform an artwork that is expressive of sadness. 8
If artworks generally don't have the same force types as
speech acts, what kind of force do they have? As I hope is
clear, to suggest that they don't have force isn't plausible. For
if artworks and the experiences they elicit are ineffable, then
they must have content, and the fact that they have content
presupposes that they embody or bear this content in some
way, which is what their force involves. What I propose is that
artworks and aesthetic experiences have a distinctive kind of
force, which is unique to them. Like linguistic forces, aesthetic
force has a function (point). Yet, where an assertion commits
the speaker to the truth of a content and a question requires
that the speaker intends for the hearer to answer, an artwork
and the experience it elicits have a function without a function.
In other words, the way artworks and aesthetic experiences
present their contents is as functionless or purposeless. In
claiming this, I am not suggesting that artworks and aesthetic
experiences lack a function -- this would be equivalent to
saying that they lack force. Rather, what I am suggesting is
that there is a distinctive way in which aesthetic content is
presented, viz. as functionless.
I don't deny that the ascription of linguistic force types to
artworks is tempting. But it's noteworthy that such ascriptions
are rarely if ever genuine. The obvious problem is that many
artworks don't assert, question or promise anything. When
listening to Sibelius' Second Symphony or watching Merce
Cunningham's Beach Birds, most of us don't recognize
anything resembling a speech act. Of course, this hasn't
stopped critics from ascribing them to artworks. For example,
in her review of Beach Birds, Laura Jacobs explains, "As only
the cry of a gull in the air can do, the dance questions the
meaning of life, the transience, the wind". [16] But it's
apparent such ascriptions aren't literal. To be literal, the speech
act would have to meet certain conditions. For example, an
utterance like 'Doris is a dancer' can be an assertion only if the
speaker believes in the truth of the assertoric content and an
utterance like 'Do you have a dollar?' can be a question only if
the speaker intends the hearer to do something, viz. answer. 7
The problem is that artworks don't meet this condition,
which is apparent in two ways. First, in the case of artworks
with fictional subject-matters, the artist or performer need not
have the corresponding belief, intention, and so on. For
example, when painting Ophelia, Millais need not have
believed that there was a maiden spurned by Hamlet who
committed suicide. The same is, of course, true of verbal
works such as novels, poems and plays. Like Millais, neither
Shakespeare nor any actors who perform Hamlet have to
believe (or have believed) that a lovely maiden named
'Ophelia' was actually driven to suicide by an indecisive
Danish prince. [17]
Aesthetic force, I suggest, is an essential property of all
artworks, whether verbal or nonverbal. Their function without
function helps to distinguish them from other content-bearing
media, whether linguistic, mental or artificial. This is not to
say that an artwork's force is transparent. One might not
recognize the fact that the object before one has a function
without function. But this just illustrates that aesthetic force
isn't a perceptual property: an artwork doesn't wear its force on
its sleeve. This, of course, is true of utterances as well, e.g. to
recognize that 'Do you have a dollar?' is a request, we need to
appeal to something external to it, viz. an intention. Of course,
the difference is that in the case of an artwork this nonperceptual, external component need not be fixed by the artist
or performer's conscious mental states. Just what, then, might
fix an object's aesthetic force? This will depend on the theory
of art one endorses. For example, aesthetic force might be
fixed external to the artwork by appealing to the artist's
And second, to insist that an artwork's force should be
fixed by the conscious mental states that an artist has at the
time of its creation is to assume some version of the Intentional
Fallacy. [18] The implausibility of the view is perhaps most
evident in cases where aleatory techniques are employed in the
creation and/or performance of artworks, e.g. in the music of
John Cage, the choreography of Merce Cunningham, and the
22
© The Author(s) 2015. This article is published with open access by the GSTF
GSTF Journal of General Philosophy (JPhilo) Vol.1 No.2, March 2015
unconscious mental states, the social conditions of the work's
origin, the audience's experience of the work, the art
community's reception of it, and so on. In the present context,
I won't attempt to arbitrate between these theoretical options.
a difference of force entails a difference of content, this cannot
be done. For this reason, we cannot assert or describe what
Olympia is about. Of course, one could describe what the
painting refers to, suggest what Manet's intentions as a painter
were, or even ascribe metaphorical speech acts to it. But none
of these constitutes an articulation of the painting's content.
Now, let's return to ineffability. The fact that artworks and
aesthetic experiences have a distinctive kind of force doesn't
yet explain their ineffability. Recall that an experience can be
articulated (is effable) if its content can be possessed by an
indicative sentence or assertion. In the case of an artwork or
aesthetic experience, its content would be articulated if it could
be separated from its aesthetic force and reattached (so to
speak) to an indicative sentence or assertion. Hence, the
functionless presentation of content by artworks and aesthetic
experiences alone doesn't explain the ineffability of their
content. The additional assumption we need is that artworks
and aesthetic experiences violate the force/content distinction.
Let me explain.
It's worth emphasizing that both claims are required for
the semantic account. On the one hand, claiming only that
artworks and aesthetic experiences violate the force/content
distinction is insufficient to explain ineffability. The problem
is that if a nonverbal artwork had an assertoric force, its
content would be presented in the same way as an assertion,
suggesting that its content could be articulated by some
assertion. On the other hand, claiming only that aesthetic force
is functionless leaves open the possibility that the aesthetic
content could be separated from its aesthetic force and
reattached to an assertion, again suggesting that it could be
articulated. By advancing both claims, however, we seem to
have ourselves an adequate account of ineffability.
The force/content distinction states that content can be
individuated independently of force, in other words, a change
of force does not entail a change of content.9 The assumption,
commonly made in linguistics and philosophy, enables us to
account for communication and articulation. To recognize this,
suppose for a moment that force were an indissoluble aspect
of content. In such a case, if I were to assert that Doris is a
dancer and you were to question that she's a dancer, my
assertion and your question would not merely reflect
differences in the way we said things; they would reflect
differences in what we said. In addition to radically
multiplying the number of contents you and I grasp, our very
ability to disagree and, for that matter, to communicate would
be undermined. Your questions and my assertions would not
have the same content. Moreover, and more to the point, if
force were an indissoluble aspect of content, my own thoughts
and utterances might themselves be out of synch. For example,
if belief and assertion were taken to be different force types (I
don't mean to suggest they are, but consider this for a moment),
my belief that Aaron became a musician and my assertion that
he became a musician would have different contents,
suggesting that I could not in principle articulate what I think
(or think what I say). In such a case, while I could use an
assertion like 'I believe that Aaron became a musician' to refer
to my belief, such an assertion would fail to articulate the
content of the belief.
V. CONCLUSION: THE ACCOUNT’S ADEQUACY
Unlike psychological and metaphysical accounts, the
semantic account can escape the aforementioned dilemma.
Psychological accounts, recall, lack the means to explain
invariability, whereas metaphysical accounts unnecessarily
appeal to entities whose existence is controversial. My account
does neither. An artwork and aesthetic experience remains
ineffable irrespective of differences in the vocabulary,
concepts, memory, and so on, of individuals or communities.
For despite such differences, aesthetic force remains
functionless and an indissoluble aspect of aesthetic content.
Thus, there won't be any variation in the degree to which an
artwork or aesthetic experience is ineffable, suggesting that
ineffability is absolute.
But what of its indefeasible character? One might suppose
that indefeasibility isn't explained by the account because it
doesn't rule out the possibility that an object or event might at
one point in time be an artwork and at another a non-artwork.
The fact that aesthetic force itself is fixed in some sense by
human beings, whether individuals or communities (as well as
the fact that it's an indissoluble aspect of aesthetic content),
suggests the possibility that human beings could withdraw
their endorsement of an object as an artwork. And if this were
the case, it would suggest that the object (event) in question
would no longer have aesthetic force (or violate the
force/content distinction). And this, it might be supposed,
would leave its content vulnerable to articulation.
Although the contents of much of language and thought
heed the force/content distinction, the contents of art and
aesthetic experiences, I suggest, do not. Their force is an
indissoluble aspect of their contents, which is to say that their
force partially determines the kind of contents they have. This
is why the contents of, say, Olympia cannot be articulated
linguistically. To articulate the painting's content, one would
have to separate it from its force and reattach it to an assertion.
However, because the force of an artwork or aesthetic
experience is an indissoluble aspect of its content, and because
It's certainly true that the account doesn't rule out the
possibility of such ontological changes. An object might well
change its ontological status from being an artwork to being a
non-artwork, or vice versa. However, this doesn't imply that
23
© The Author(s) 2015. This article is published with open access by the GSTF
GSTF Journal of General Philosophy (JPhilo) Vol.1 No.2, March 2015
the object as an artwork could have its content articulated if it
became a non-artwork. For while an artwork, its status as an
artwork partially determines the kind of content it has. That is,
because as an artwork has aesthetic force and a non-artwork
does not, and because this force is an indissoluble aspect of its
content, to change its ontological status from artwork to nonartwork would be to change its content. In this way, while the
content of a non-artwork could be articulated, the content of
the artwork qua artwork could not, which is sufficient to
explain the indefeasible character of ineffability.
property of ineffability and to establish its instantiation by
artworks and aesthetic experiences. Although I've explicitly
undertaken the former, because my account closely connects
ineffability with what an artwork is, I've established
ineffability's instantiation. That is, if one assumes that there
are artworks and that my partial characterization of them is
correct, the instantiation of ineffability follows.
But what of significance? Well, in the case of a good
artwork, our experience of the work offers us a unique
perspective (intentional content), which may reveal a 'great
truth of life' in new light. Unlike Manet's Olympia, Sibelius'
Second Symphony, Rodin's Burghers of Calais or
Cunningham's Beach Birds, the everyday sights and sounds of
red strawberries, creaking doors, jagged stones, and fluttering
laundry don't give us experiential contents that do this.
Because the semantic account doesn't explain ineffability
psychologically (in terms of fineness of grain), as Raffman
does, such a distinction can be firmly drawn. It is also
noteworthy that the significance of aesthetic experiences need
not be explained hedonistically, as Scruton and Addis suggest.
Our tendency to search out unique perspectives may have
nothing to do with an obsession for acquiring new
phenomenological states. Artworks and aesthetic experiences
are, more often than not, about something other than our
phenomenology.
The suggestion that an object could change its ontological
status from a non-artwork to an artwork may be thought to
raise a different problem. While the semantic account explains
invariability, one might suppose that it does so only by
appealing to a metaphysical conception of art. That is, it is only
by positing aesthetic force, which seems to be a metaphysical
property, that an account of invariability is possible. Such a
concern, however, is misplaced. The fact that an object can
become an artwork doesn't constitute a metaphysical inflation.
Although mere objects can become artworks, their
transformation doesn't involve appealing to any immaterial
properties or an otherworldly realm. It's true that an object's
being an artwork depends on its having aesthetic force, which
is a non-perceptual, external property. But, as I suggested
earlier, aesthetic force might be determined in any number of
ways (e.g. by an artist's unconscious mental states, the social
conditions of its origin, an audience's experience of the work,
the art community's reception of it), none of which assumes
the existence of controversial metaphysical entities.
The critic's role is, in effect, to relay the significance of an
artwork or its experience in full knowledge of its ineffability.
This she may undertake in any number of ways. She may
mention the artist's conscious or unconscious mental states, the
social conditions of the work's origin, the difference between
its reception then and now, and so on. With such explanations,
it may be useful to regard artworks as pseudo-speech acts, to
compare the way a specific artwork or aesthetic experience
presents its content and the way a genuine speech act does.
Moreover, in attempting to specify the artwork's subjectmatter, she may set out to fix as completely as possible its
reference. Yet, if she recognizes her limitations as a critic, she
will be ever-cognizant that the contents of her review and the
artwork can at best form an unbridgeable Fregean puzzle.
While co-referential, their contents as well as their aims must
differ. And we, as audiences and readers should appreciate that
this is the best any critic can do, that nothing more can be
expected. She, as our linguistic guide, can only lead us to the
boundaries of language and leave us there, without a word, to
experience art.
The semantic account, it should be emphasized, doesn't
presuppose the truth of the Isomorphic Representation Thesis
either. Recall that the thesis claims that only media with the
same logical structure can express an artwork's content
because the medium in question must have a logical structure
that is isomorphic with the ontological structure of its
reference. Such an assumption is not needed. The ineffability
of artworks and aesthetic experiences has nothing to do with
what they are about. Nor does it have anything to do with an
aesthetic experience's phenomenology. The reason that an
artwork and aesthetic experience are ineffable concerns their
force and that fact that this force partially determines the kind
of content they have. In short, on the semantic account,
ineffability is a property of intentionality.
Of course on this account, ineffability is a property of any
aesthetic content, whether the artwork is verbal or nonverbal.
In other words, the account applies to novels, poems and plays
as well as to paintings, pieces of music and danceworks. The
reason is that I've connected an account of ineffability closely
to a characterization of art generally. While this deserves a
more detailed discussion than I'm prepared to give here, one
implication of this model is that it meets the second as well as
the first challenge. Recall that the proponent of aesthetic
ineffability faces two challenges, viz. to account for the
REFERENCES
[1] A. Copland, What to Listen for in Music. Toronto: Mentor, 1963, p. 19.
[2] J. Brown, N. Mindlin, and C. Woodford (eds.), The Vision of Modern
Dance. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Book Company, 1998, p. 59.
[3] A. Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, vol. 1, Payne
24
© The Author(s) 2015. This article is published with open access by the GSTF
GSTF Journal of General Philosophy (JPhilo) Vol.1 No.2, March 2015
(tr.). New York: Dover Publications, 1966, p. 261.
1. Thanks to Arthur Danto, Elizabeth Faulhaber, Lydia Goehr, Kim
Lockwood, Frank McGuinness, Aaron Meskin, Stephanie Ross, Tiffany
Sutton, Sarah Worth, and Takashi Yagisawa for comments. The paper is
dedicated to my late mentor and friend, Arthur C. Danto.
2. Kant suggests something similar in 'Die Vernunftlehre', Reflexionen
1676, Kants gesammelte Schriften, vol 16, p.78. Königlich Preussiche
Akademie der Wissenschaften und Deutsche Akademie der Wissenschaft zu
Berlin, eds. De Gruyter & Reimer, Berlin, 1910-1983.) Moreover, assuming
an isomorphism between representation (linguistic, mental) and reality
suggests something else as well. It suggests that the structure of
representations might reveal something about the structure of reality, and vice
versa. In fact, it may suggest, as Coffa explains (The Semantic Tradition From
Kant to Carnap. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, p. 32), why
semantic analysis was considered so relevant to metaphysics in the first half
of the 20th Century.
3. Kennick makes this point very clearly in his level-headed discussion of
ineffability. (Art and the ineffable. Journal of Philosophy, vol. 58, no. 12,
1961.)
4. My assumption here is that an aesthetic experience is not about an
artwork but about whatever the artwork is about. My commitment is that the
content of a nonverbal artwork is determined by the content of an experience
elicited by the work in certain conditions. In this way, it's mistaken to suppose
that, whereas Rodin's Burghers of Calais is about the self-sacrifice of the six
citizens of Calais, the experience elicited by the sculpture is about the
sculpture. For this reason, I speak of aesthetic experiences that are 'elicited
by' rather than 'of' or 'about' artworks.
5. Raffman also discusses structural and feeling ineffability. Neither is
relevant to the present discussion as neither is considered a property of an
artwork or experience's intentionality. Structural ineffability is regarded as a
property of an artwork's form while feeling ineffability is a property of an
experience's phenomenology.
6. Levinson (1995) and de Clerq (2000) have similar criticisms of Raffman.
Both suggest that her account is inadequte because it attempts to explain the
ineffability of only the least significant aspects of aesthetic content, viz. their
fine-grained character. (J. Levinson, "Review of Diana Raffman's Language,
Music and Mind", Mind, 104, 1995; R. De Clerq, "Aesthetic Ineffability",
Journal of Consciousness Studies, 7, 8-9, 2000.)
7. Searle refers to this as the Sincerity Condition, which is effectively a
generalization of Moore's Paradox. (Searle, J. Expression and Meaning.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979 and [14], pp. 9-10.)
8. Here I am relying on Peter Kivy's distinction between expressing emotion
and being expressive of emotion. (P. Kivy, The Corded Shell. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1980, pp. 12-17). Where the former presupposes
the Sincerity Condition (that is, requires the composer or performer to
experience the requisite emotion), the latter does not, suggesting a difference
between expressive utterances and expression in art.
9. See Y. Gunther, "General introduction". Essays on Nonconceptual
Content. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003. For discussions concerning
the violation of the force/content distinction by emotion, see Y. Gunther,
"Emotion and Force" in Essays on Nonconceptual Content and Y. Gunther,
"The Phenomenology and Intentionality of Emotion". Philosophical Studies,
117, 2004.
[4] S. Langer, Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art. New York: Scribner,
1953, p. 27.
[5] F. Brentano, Psychology from the Empirical Standpoint, Rancurello,
Terrell and McAlister (trs.). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973.
[6] L. Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico Philosophicus. New York: Routledge,
2001.
[7] A. Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1981.
[8] G. Frege, "On Sinn and Bedeutung", reprinted in The Frege Reader,
Beaney (ed.). Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1997.
[9] H. Putnam, "The Meaning of 'Meaning'". Mind, Language and Reality.
Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1975.
[10] D. Raffman, Language, Music and Mind. Cambridge: The MIT Press,
1993, p. 83.
[11] R. Scruton, The Aesthetics of Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
97, pp. 361-364.
[12] T. Nagel, "What is it like to be a bat?". Philosophical Review, vol. 83,
1974.
[13] L. Addis, Of Mind and Music. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999.
[14] J. Searle, Intentionality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.
[15] P. Saint-Victor, Review of Manet in the Salon. La Presse (1865).
Reprinted in Harrison, Wood and Gaiger (eds.), Art in Theory 18151900. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998, pp. 514-515.
[16] L. Jacobs, Petipaw. The New Criterion, vol. 20, no. 7 (March), 2002.
[17] K. Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1990.
[18] M. Beardsley and W. Wimsatt, "The intentional fallacy". The Verbal
Icon. Lexington: The University of Kentucky Press, 1954
AUTHOR’S PROFILE
Dr. York Gunther is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Mahidol
University International College in Thailand. He received his B.A. from the
University of Toronto, Canada, his M.A., M.Phil and Ph.D. from Columbia
University, USA. He has held teaching positions at Columbia University,
NYC, Stanford, Cal State Northridge and Assumption U as well as Mahidol.
York has presented papers at venues in the United States, Canada, Europe and
Asia and is the editor of Essays on Nonconceptual Content (MIT) and the
author of numerous published articles on the philosophies of mind and art.
25
© The Author(s) 2015. This article is published with open access by the GSTF