Scharfstein describes the extraordinary powers that have been attributed to language everywhere, and then looks at ineffability as it has appeared in the thought of the great philosophical cultures: India, China, Japan, and the West. He argues that there is something of our prosaic, everyday difficulty with words in the ineffable reality of the philosophers and theologians, just as there is something unformulable, and finally mysterious in the prosaic, everyday successes and failures of words.

Ben-Ami Scharfstein is the author of The Philosophers: Their Lives and the Nature of Their Thought; Of Birds, Beasts, and Other Artists: An Essay on the Universality of Art; and The Dilemma of Context.