Wittgenstein was right, what cannot be said clearly shouldn't be said at all. But here's the thing: some of the most real things we experience cannot be said clearly. They exist as facts to us, we feel them in our bones, yet the moment we try to articulate them, something essential gets lost. This isn't just about being inarticulate. This is about a fundamental limitation in how language works and what it can carry.
Intuitions are real. They're not mystical or magical. Think of them like a calculator. Instead of adding one by one manually, you jump to the conclusion by leaping through all the steps in between. Your mind has processed patterns from the physical world, compressed them, and delivered an answer without showing its work. The intuition is grounded in things you've seen with your eyes, real observations, but processed below conscious awareness.
Yet try explaining an intuition to someone. Try conveying that feeling of "knowing" something before you can prove it. The words never quite match the certainty you feel. Is this because we lack vocabulary? Or is language itself the wrong tool for this job?
Let me be clear about what I consider facts. The river flows regardless of what we think about it. Physical phenomena exist independent of our subjective experience. These are the real things. For millennia, we built our languages around these observable realities. Water, stone, fire, movement. Simple pointing at what is.
But then something happened. We couldn't distinguish our sense of self from the objective anymore. Every time someone failed to separate their psychological projections from what was actually there, they polluted the language a little more. Now when we say "river," we're not just pointing at flowing water. We're invoking boundaries that don't exist, beginnings and endings we've invented, a discrete "thing" where there's really just flow.
The word carries all this accumulated conceptual weight. The distance between our eyes and our brain's perception is cluttered with every interpretation we've heard before. We don't see the thing anymore. We see our idea of the thing.
This pollution problem becomes most acute when we try to examine consciousness itself. There are very few traditions that genuinely emphasize self reflection. Buddhism, Advaita Vedanta, certain non dual philosophies. They have produced the best literature on consciousness we have. Yet most of the world follows teachings that point outward, that never confront the nature of the self directly.
Why? Because it's easier to codify external behaviors than internal recognition. "Don't steal" is simple to convey. "Investigate who or what is experiencing this moment" breaks language. The traditions that do attempt this resort to paradox, negation, or pointing rather than description. The Zen koan deliberately shatters logical language. The Upanishads say "neti neti," not this, not that. They're trying to gesture at something that can't be said.
There's no accountability conveyed in most religious or social texts about the actual nature of self. They don't ask you to look at who's doing the looking. This might not be language failing. This might be language protecting itself from questions it cannot answer.
We turn to art when words fail, but art is just another language with the same limitations. When you look at a painting and feel something profound while someone else sees just colors, what's happening? The artist intended something, you received something else, a third person experiences something entirely different.
This isn't failed communication. It's the revelation that meaning isn't transmitted but created in the space between expression and reception. The artist provides a catalyst, not a message. But even this is pollution in its own way. We're still adding layers of interpretation onto raw experience.
Art is philosophy made tangible, philosophy through gesture rather than argument. But it falls into the same cracks between subjective and objective. We cannot escape this divide by changing mediums.
Here's what becomes clear after wrestling with these ideas: subjective experiences might be as objective as anything gets. We all feel the same things. Pain is pain, joy is joy, the experience of seeing blue is the experience of seeing blue. It's just our understanding and articulation of these experiences that differs. Language creates the separation, not the experience itself.
You cannot feel the objective without going through all the illusions of your subjective experience. You have to see yourself in everything to see anything clearly. Everything around you has characteristics you possess. It's just a matter of being able to recognize it.
But the moment you try to convey this recognition, you're back in language, back in pollution. Even writing this, I'm creating more conceptual overlay on something that should be direct experience.
Understanding this doesn't solve the problem. We're still here using language to discuss language's limits. We're still creating art about the impossibility of perfect transmission. The pollution might be permanent.
But something does change. Once you see the pollution as pollution rather than mistaking it for reality itself, you relate to everything differently. You can use language while knowing its limits. You can appreciate art without expecting it to deliver truth. You can engage with philosophy knowing it's pointing at something rather than containing it.
The greatest illusion was thinking subjective and objective were separate categories rather than two faces of the same unknowable thing. We are windows to the void, peering through history, trying to make sense of it all. A proper language should never fail us in this task. But perhaps the failure is the message. Perhaps the cracks are where the light gets in.
Some thoughts become clearer over time, like these have for me over months of reading and reflection. They were always there, real as facts, but needed patience to find their form. Not because language created the insights, but because I had to slowly chip away at the conceptual pollution to find words that pointed cleanly at what I already knew.
What cannot be said clearly perhaps shouldn't be said at all. But sometimes we have to try anyway. Sometimes the attempt, even in its failure, is the closest we can get to truth.