You have to love a language that has a word that means, "There is no word for it." Anything can be ineffable if its fullness and particularity are too rich, too specific for words. A good New York kosher pickle is ineffable. Doubt me? Remember the very best kosher dill pickle you've had, and now try to put it into words that will really allow your Aunt Em in Kansas to experience it. Sex is another common ineffable experience. Try to recall what you were told about sex before your first experience, and compare those words with the totality of your experiences since. A kindly and thoughtful young Scotsman tried to articulate what sex was like for me. Now that I can compare the reality to his words, I can say that he wasn't really wrong. On the other hand, his description didn't come close to the experience itself.
Sunsets are ineffable. Oh, not the mechanisms of sunset! I can write for pages about how the turning of the earth brings a location into shadow, how its latitude affects the angle of incidence and so the temporal progress of the sunset, how the volcanic dust in the air scatters light and changes the color of sunsets thousands of miles away. Does any of that bring home the particularity of this sunset, that sweeps the full horizon from pale lavender in the east to fulminant scarlet in the west? I felt my parenting was vindicated when my teenaged son gently interrupted a conversation with his friends to say, "Hey, guys! Hold on a second! Look at this sunset!"
RAGBRAI is ineffable. I tried to capture my experience with the Register's Annual Great Bike Ride Across Iowa in a diary called, Two may stand where one will fall. You'll have some notion of RAGBRAI if you read that diary, just as I had some notion of it before I got on the bike that Sunday morning. I guarantee though that my writing is not enough to convey the experience to you. Nothing I read before the ride was adequate; nothing I've read since the ride is adequate. The world divides into two groups: people who have ridden RAGBRAI, and people who haven't. No amount of poetry or imagery can bridge the two.
It should not surprise us, then, if things that are visible, tangible, gustable are ineffable, even more so are experiences that are wholly interior. One group of such subjective experiences is variously called religious, spiritual, sacred, or mystical experience. William James's studies led him to describe these experiences as commonly having four characteristics:
- Transient — the experience is temporary; the individual soon returns to a "normal" frame of mind. It is outside our normal perception of space and time.
- Ineffable — the experience cannot be adequately put into words.
- Noetic — the individual feels that he or she has learned something valuable from the experience. Gives us knowledge that is normally hidden from human understanding.
- Passive — the experience happens to the individual, largely without conscious control. Although there are activities, such as meditation (see below), that can make religious experience more likely, it is not something that can be turned on and off at will.
(Note that although these experiences are often interpreted inside a religious framework, there is nothing in James's criteria that requires that. Indeed, I know at least two atheists here at Daily Kos who have made reference to their own ineffable, transcendent experiences)
Though much could be said about these experiences (and oddly enough, has been) I want to reflect a bit on how experiences like these intersect with progressive politics. Though religion and spirituality are related, they are not identical and the paper Spiritual Liberals and Religious Conservatives made these observations:
While church and state are officially separated in many Western nations, there is nonetheless a great deal of overlap between the religious beliefs and political orientations of individual citizens. Religious individuals tend to be more conservative, placing a greater emphasis on order, obedience, and tradition. While many religious movements emphasize conservative values, there also exists a tradition of religious thought associated with equality, universalism, and transcendence—values more in line with political liberalism. [emphasis added] The current study examined whether these divergent political orientations relate to the distinction between religiousness and spirituality. Political orientation, spirituality, and religiousness were assessed in two large community samples (Study 1: N = 590; Study 2: N = 703). Although spirituality and religiousness were positively correlated, they displayed divergent associations with political orientation: conservatives tended to be more religious, while liberals tend to be more spiritual. Experimentally inducing spiritual experiences similarly resulted in more liberal political attitudes.
It is therefore within this common range of experience that a significant number of the folks at Daily Kos who are religious are so through at least in part ineffable experiences like the ones that James describes. These folks know that their own experiences do not constitute proof to anyone else, and I have rarely, perhaps never, seen such a claim made. In any case by the nature of the experience folks cannot convey the full depth and intensity to others; the experiences are ineffable. Whether they wanted to share them or not (and a reasonable person might hesitate to share such intimately personal experiences to an audience that is indeterminate in character and sometimes hostile to religion), they can't.
A florilegium of related links below the frothy orange veil -
Spirituality and political liberalism
Wikipedia on religious experience
Wikipedia on the psychological trait of openness to experience
Why conservatives are conservative
research: Why conservatives are happier
Pew: Religious experience has doubled among the young
Ph. D. thesis on mystical experience and life changes
Wikipedia on ineffability
A blind physicist studies optics