A Philosophical Defence of Ineffability: David E. Cooper

David Cooper sees the notion of ineffability (which he refers to as ‘mystery’) as the only escape route from a philosophical tension between what he takes to be two major potential responses to the philosophical question of the meaning of life: ‘uncompensated humanism’ and ‘absolutism’. Cooper, as will become clear, takes ‘mystery’ to refer to concept of ineffability. He takes it to refer to the concept of what is ‘beyond the human’ and therefore ‘undiscursable’, ‘since any discourse inevitably captures only a “human world”’. It is appropriate, briefly, to rehearse his argument since the notion of ineffability that it defends is central to what follows in later chapters of this book. Cooper's way of arriving at the notion of ineffability, and his suggestions about the appropriate human response, form the philosophical background to my own arguments.

Cooper accepts the philosophical background to humanism, a conception of meaning reflected in what he calls the ‘humanist thesis’, which is taken up by existential phenomenology. According to this thesis, an explanation of the meaning of anything must be given in terms of its place in some broader context, in terms of its relation to something external to or beyond itself. A word's meaning owes to its place in a sentence just as the meaning of a hammer must be explained in terms of its place in the practices and projects of, for instance, carpentry or the hanging of pictures.