Music as an expression of the ineffable

Abstract

This essay will elaborate on the existing relationship between the sublime, as a category of philosophical aesthetics, and the ineffable, as a category of the phenomenology of religion. This relationship will be explored through music as an asemantic language that, paradoxically, communicates what words cannot express. It will be argued that music, in its constitutively ineffable nature, becomes a privileged vehicle for referring to the mystery of the human and the transcendent, establishing bridges between aesthetic experience and religious experience. Through this analysis, we will seek to demonstrate how music transcends the limitations of conceptual language to touch the deepest dimensions of human existence.