Indefinable
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
"Nothing is more usual than for philosophers to encroach on the province of grammarians, and to engage in disputes of words, while they imagine they are handling controversies of the deepest importance and concern." - David Hume "With regard to the other element in punishment, its fluid element, its meaning, the idea of punishment in a very late stage of civilisation (for instance, contemporary Europe) is not content with manifesting merely one meaning, but manifests a whole synthesis "of meanings." The past general history of punishment, the history of its employment for the most diverse ends, crystallises eventually into a kind of unity, which is difficult to analyse into its parts, and which, it is necessary to emphasise, absolutely defies definition. (It is nowadays impossible to say definitely the precise reason for punishment: all ideas, in which a whole process is promiscuously comprehended, elude definition; it is only that which has no history, which can be defined.)"--On the Genealogy of Morality (1887) by Nietzsche |
![This page Indefinable is part of the linguistics series. Illustration: a close-up of a mouth in the film The Big Swallow (1901)](/images/thumb/200px-The_Big_Swallow.jpg)
Illustration: a close-up of a mouth in the film The Big Swallow (1901)
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Indefinable is that which cannot be precisely defined or put into words, that which defies description; that which is indescribable.
See also
- List of unsolved problems in philosophy
- Undescribable
- Infrathin
- I know it when I see it, Potter Stewart in the case of Jacobellis v. Ohio (1964)
- Through confused and undefined things the mind is awakened to new discoveries, dictum by da Vinci
- Knowability