As we have seen with Cooper's philosophical defence of the idea, the concept of ineffability provides the measure for human concepts precisely by evoking that which is not invested with those concepts, including that of existence and cannot therefore be construed as an entity or object, bound by the finite conditions of time and space. When we consider the concept of ineffability, we must, in Heidegger's language, be mindful of the ontological difference. The philosophical analysis considered in Chapter 1 revealed the need for this in the form of the objection that claims of ineffability are self-stultifying. The way round this was to deny that the idea of ‘ineffable objects’ makes sense and to claim, instead, that the meaning of the claim ‘x is ineffable’ should be interpreted as ‘the word “x” refers to the concept of ineffability’. Concomitantly, when it comes to the experience of the ineffable, it was suggested with the help of Cooper and Heidegger that we should think not so much of the experience of some object by a subject but rather of a situation in which subjective and objective dimensions to experience are undifferentiated.

The idea of self-stultification recurs in a religious connection with, for example, Boyer's conception of the ‘elusive objects’ of religion, the supreme example of which is God. But, as we saw, no object, however elusive, can be regarded to be ineffable in my sense.