Speaking the unspeakable about 21st century technologies

Abstract

Writing in 1841 to a friend who had asked him what his Songs Without Words meant, Felix Mendelssohn challenged the idea that words could say as much as he had already said in his music: People frequently complain that music is too ambiguous; that it is unclear to them what they should be thinking about when they hear it, whereas everyone understands words. For me, it is exactly the reverse...The thoughts I find ex-pressed in music that I love are not too indefinite, but on the contrary, too defi-nite to put into words. (Mendelssohn, 1978, p. 3) Mendelssohn’s romantic invention of the song without words resonated with the romantic spirit of the mid-nineteenth century, embodying the idea that passions, faiths, and aesthetic responses, indeed, all that really matters, were too much for words, or at least for prose. The view that the important things in life lie beyond the realm of the analytical echoes in the enigmatic final few pages of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus (1961), when he tells us that “in [the world] no value exists, ” “ethics cannot be put into words, ” “death is not an event in life, ” “the riddle does not exist, ” or “anyone who un-