Silence, The Phenomenon and Its Ontological Significance 0253110211

Table of contents :
Preface - vii

Part I - The Phenomenon of Silence
1. The Phenomenon of Silence--First Approximations - 3
2. Types of Discourse and Silence - 26
3. An Intentional Analysis of Silence - 54

Part II - The Ontological Significance of Silence
4. Some Salvageable Mis-takings of Silence - 85
5. Some Appreciative Attendings to Silence - 109
6. The Ontological Significance of the Phenomenon of Silence - 140
7. Further Justification of the Proposed Ontological Interpretation of Silence - 176

Notes - 197

Citation preview

*@ Szlence Lhe Phenomenon and Its Ontolozical Stenificance BERNARD

P. DAUENHAUER

Silence

STUDIES IN PHENOMENOLOGY EXISTENTIAL PHILOSOPHY General Editor JAMES M. EDIE Consulting Editors David Carr

William L. McBride

Edward S. Casey

J. N. Mohanty

Stanley Cavell Roderick M. Chisholm Hubert L. Dreyfus William Earle

Maurice Natanson Frederick Olafson Paul Ricoeur

J. N. Findlay Dagfinn F¢llesdal

Marjorie Grene Dieter Henrich Don Ihde Emmanuel Levinas Alphonso Lingis

John Sallis George Schrader Calvin O. Schrag Robert Sokolowski Herbert Spiegelberg

Charles Taylor Samuel J. Todes Bruce W. Wilshire

AND

Silence The Phenomenon and Its Ontological Significance

BERNARD P. DAUENHAUVER

it INDIANA

UNIVERSITY Bloomington

PRESS

For

Mary Hughes Dauenhauer

Copyright © 1980 Bernard P. Dauenhauer All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system,

without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses’ Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.

Manufactured in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Dauenhauer, Bernard P

Silence, the phenomenon and its ontological significance. (Studies in phenomenology and existential philosophy) 1. Silence (Philosophy) I. Title. BD360.D38 111 80-7683 ISBN 0-253-11021-1_ 1 2 3 4 5 84 83 82 81 80

Contents

Vii

PREFACE

Partl

The Phenomenon of Silence . The Phenomenon of Silence—First Approximations . Types of Discourse and Silence . An Intentional Analysis of Silence

Part

26

54

II

pb

The Ontological Significance of Silence

. Some Salvageable Mis-takings of Silence

mn

. Some Appreciative Attendings to Silence . The Ontological Significance of the Phenomenon of Silence 7: Further Justification of the Proposed Ontological Interpretation of Silence Notes

85 109

140 176

107

I do not know which to prefer,

The beauty of inflections

Or the beauty of innuendoes, The blackbird whistling Or just after.

—Wa ace STEVENS “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”

PREFACE

SILENCE is a complex, positive phenomenon. It is not the mere absence of something else. Poets and other thinkers throughout recorded history have, with greater or lesser explicitness, recognized this fact. Archilochus, Pindar, and Sophocles knew it. Both Eastern and Western mystics have long

known it. Many philosophers have, in one way or another, acknowledged it. Twentieth-century philosophy has by no means overlooked the phenomenon of silence in either its complexity or its positivity. In 1913, for example, Max Scheler wrote: “Persons, in fact, can be silent and keep their thought to themselves, and that is quite different from simply saying nothing. It is an active attitude.”! Silence also figures prominently in the

works of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. It is by no means absent from the thought of Marcel. To my knowledge, the most explicit and concrete detailing of the great variety of ways in which silence phenomenally appears is to be found in Max Picard’s The World of Silence.? In this relatively short, but wide-

ranging, provocative, evocative book, Picard points out how silence belongs somehow

to almost every

dimension

both

of man’s

activity

and

of the

world he inhabits. For Picard, silence is a force, a constitutive principle distinct from but associated with other forces, such as spirit and word, in the constitution of the human world. That is, silence is an ontological

principle. But The World of Silence does not pretend to be systematic. The term “silence”

is used

to clarify there is no Thus, so developed

in several

different ways.

Moreover,

no

attempt

is made

the fundamental features of the phenomenon of silence. And explicit formulation of the ontological significance of silence. far as I know, no one has heretofore proposed to give a wellaccount of both the phenomenon of silence and its ontological

significance, This is precisely what my work claims to provide. While my account owes a great deal to the works of Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Marcel,

and

Picard,

its focus

is constantly

on the phenomenon

itself. Building upon the fact that silence is always connected

of silence

somehow

with

discourse, I find in my investigations that the complexity of discourse must be attended to if the complexity of silence is to be discovered. However,

Vii

viii

PREFACE

although

I have

described

discourse

at some

length,

the basic

questions

which have guided my whole study are: What is silence? And what is its ontological significance? I do not claim that this is the definitive work on silence. In fact, study of silence leads me to argue that, strictly speaking, there can be such thing as a definitive work. Nevertheless, this study, thorough comprehensive, effects a progressively more profound understanding of phenomenon of silence. In

Chapter

One,

I distinguish

and

describe

a number

of more

or

my no and the less

generally recognized aspects of silence and formulate an initial, provisional, but basically sound account of the fundamental features of silence. Chapter Two is devoted to showing the distinctive ways in which silence appears in conjunction with distinct regions and types of discourse, significantly expanding the recognized range of the phenomenon of silence beyond that noticed in Chapter One. The first two chapters provide the evidence required for undertaking the intentional analysis of silence presented in Chapter Three. The resulting well-founded account of the essential characteristics of silence is then tested against the insights into and claims

about silence which can be drawn from the works of some major nineteenth- and twentieth-century thinkers. In Chapter Four I consider theses in which the importance of silence fails to be reflected. In Chapter Five I

consider theses which do manifest its proper character. The investigations in both of these chapters furnish important clues concerning what a suffi-

ciently comprehensive

ontological interpretation of the phenomenon

silence must cover. Armed

of

with the results of the intentional analysis of

the phenomenon of silence and with the clues gleaned from the thought of other philosophers, I present and begin the defense of my ontological interpretation of the significance of the phenomenon of silence in Chapter Six. I conclude my defense in Chapter Seven by showing that my interpretation is suitably comprehensive and by illustrating its fruitfulness. I acknowledge,

of course,

that my

ontological

interpretation

of silence

does not amount to an all-encompassing ontology. No one phenomenon can provide a basis for such an ontology. For example, a detailed examina-

tion of the phenomenon of love, or of hope, might well lead to substantial modifications in the ontological account I am advancing. Such a study, for instance, might well justify claims concerning the question of God which go well beyond what very little I am entitled to say on the basis of

the study of silence. Nonetheless, what the phenomenon of silence leads to, ontologically, is secure and would have to be given place in any more inclusive ontology. Thus, though there are substantial ontological issues which I must leave unresolved, the ontological claims which I do make here are well founded. This study has been in progress for several years. Throughout that time I have been heartened by the interest and support of Herbert Speigelberg. I am most grateful to him. Calvin Schrag, Michael Zimmerman,

and John

Preface

ix

Granrose have also helped me by their incisive criticisms of parts of the text. To

them,

also, I am

deeply

thankful.

I want to thank the editors of the following journals for permissions to

make such use as I needed of articles of mine which they had previously published: Research in Phenomenology, “On Silence,” 3 (1973): 9-27, and “Silence—An Intentional Analysis,” 6 (1976): 63-83; The Review of Metaphysics, “Renovating the Problem of Politics,” 29 (1976): 626-641, and “Discourse, Silence, and Tradition,” 23 (1979): 437-451; Philosophy Today, “On Speech and Temporality,” 18 (1974): 171-180. And, finally, I want to thank Ellen Johnson for preparation of the typescript.

PART

|]

The Phenomenon of Silence

7

ea

oe ar, a

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7a a fe ie

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[1] The Phenomenon of Silence— First Approximations

SILENCE Is a rich and complex phenomenon. Some of its aspects are obvious and widely recognized. Others can be detected only through close scrutiny. The task of Chapter One is to provide an initial de-

scription of this variegated

phenomenon.

This

first account, appro-

priately taking its point of departure from some of the more obvious ways in which silence appears, unearths new and fundamental issues which require the deeper investigations undertaken in the subsequent chapters, culminating in an intentional analysis of silence. The results of those investigations clarify, extend, and in part emend the initial careful descriptions. Far from being mere irrelevant misapprehensions, those descriptions of silence which are mended by later analyses are ontologically significant in that an acceptable ontological interpretation of silence must account for their apparent truth. Thus the roots of both a full phenomenological description and, ultimately, an ontology of the phenomenon of silence are in these first approximations.

I.

SILENCE

AS

ACTIVE

PERFORMANCE

Silence occurs and is encountered only as somehow linked to some active, as opposed to spontaneous, human performances. Silence occurs most obviously in conjuction with those human performances which engender sounds, for example, cries, speech, and music. But, as even cursory reflection shows, silence also occurs in conjunction with human performances in which no sounds are engendered. It occurs in many of the performing arts which employ gestures and disciplined movements rather than sounds, such as mime. Likewise, silence is in-

4

SILENCE

volved in private reading. And it occurs even in the nonperforming arts, such as painting and sculpture. A well-known example of the latter is to be found in much Oriental painting.’ That silence can occur without sound is shown by two facts. First, the totally deaf can and do encounter silence. The very possibility of sign language depends upon this capacity. Second, in activities like private reading or viewing paintings or sculpture, just as in hearing sounds, one can be so distracted or so preoccupied that the work in question does not convey what it could convey. Silence in such cases is experienced as absent. The occurrence of silence in conjunction with other phenomena besides sounds points to a further fact about silence. Silence is not merely linked with some active human performance. It itself is an active performance. That is, silence is neither muteness nor mere absence of audible sound. The difference between muteness and silence is com-

parable to the difference between

being without sight and having

one’s eyes closed. Muteness is simply the inarticulateness of that which is incapable of any sort of signifying performances. A man cannot be absolutely and permanently mute unless he can be completely and permanently unconscious. Unlike muteness, silence necessarily involves conscious activity. But precisely because silence does involve conscious activity, the occurrence or nonoccurrence of passively or spontaneously encountered noise, of itself, can neither prevent nor produce silence.? Even though silence can occur in conjunction with phenomena other than sounds, it is nonetheless essentially linked to one or more types of active human performances which I will hereafter call, for brevity’s sake, utterances. An utterance is any performance employing systematically related signs, sounds, gestures, or marks having recognizable meanings to express thoughts, feelings, states of affairs, etc. In short, every self-initiated deployment of any sort of language is counted here as an utterance. Each particular utterance is a moment of what I will call discourse. Without utterance there can be no silence. In Susan Sontag’s words:

“ ‘Silence’ never ceases to imply its opposite and to depend on its pre-

sence: just as there can’t be ‘up’ without ‘down’ . . . so one must acknowledge a surrounding environment of sound or language in order to recognize silence.”? Because silence appears in its more obvious occurrences as either the foil to or a component of verbal utter-

First Approximations

5

ances, this initial description of the phenomenon upon its connection with the use of spoken words.

of silence

focuses

It is for precisely the same reason that silence can be mistakenly regarded as fundamentally either a enon. Sometimes it is taken to be string of spoken words, a gap which own. At other times it is taken to be

negative or a derivative phenoma mere gap between or within a has no positive significance of its merely a derivative phenomenon.

That is, silence is regarded as an utterance of a peculiar kind, a way of “saying” something determinate. No doubt there is the phenomenon of “keeping silent” which is a sort of utterance. For example, we

might say that someone’s refusal to answer

questions eloquently ex-

pressed his loyalty to his comrades. Phenomena of this sort are indeed derivative upon verbal utterances. On the other hand, initial evidence of the positive character of silence can be found in numerous plays. Harold Pinter, for example, explicitly distinguishes between pauses and silences. They do different kinds of work. The former punctuate or pace a theme but the latter serve to shift from one theme to another. Sartre, too, includes directions in his scripts calling for performances of silence. In another vein, silence can be seen at work in the interaction between Oedipus

and Teiresias in Oedipus Rex. Much tween

these characters

of the tension within and be-

hinges on the issue of what

is to be said and

what is not to be said. And in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, silence is a pervading atmosphere. I will argue that there is a nonderivative silence which is both positive and complex. In fact, this book rests upon the thesis that silence is a phenomenon which is at least equiprimordial with utterance. The thesis that silence is a positive phenomenon involves two claims. First, silence is a necessary condition for utterance and is somehow coordinate with utterance. The specification of this “somehow” can be provided only through the intentional analysis of silence which will be presented in Chapter Three. The second claim is that silence has a describable temporality of its own and thus its temporality is not radically derived from the temporality of the utterance with which it is conjoined. ; At least two of the ways in which silence appears as linked to utterances are readily detected. I will call them intervening silence and fore-and-after silence.* My description of them here provides a most useful approximation of what the intentional analysis in Chapter

6

SILENCE

Three uncovers as more fundamental. A third aspect of silence, which

I will call deep silence, though not as obvious as the aspects of inter-

vening silence and fore-and-after silence, has often been recognized by thoughtful people. When this aspect is noticed it is, with some exceptions, not mistaken as a merely negative or derivative phenom-

enon. But, like the other aspects, deep silence is recognized as being necessarily bound up with utterance. An account of some of the modes of deep silence will round out the initial description of silence. These descriptions provide the first approximations to a thorough account of silence and its significance.

Il

INTERVENING

SILENCE

Intervening silence is that occurrence or sequence of occurrences of silence which punctuates both the words and phrases of a spoken sentence and the string of sentences which fit together in discourse. When one tells a story or a joke, his use of intervening silence is especially noticeable. But it is at play throughout all sorts of discourse. With intervening silences a cry can be “expanded” into a more or less determinate utterance and words can be kept from running into an incomprehensible jumble. The importance of this aspect of silence shows up with stark clarity when the listener or reader cannot detect the intervening silences. For example, if I hear a speech in a language I do not understand and cannot detect the intervening silences, I hear something which approximates mere babble. Similarly, old Latin or Greek manuscripts are practically illegible to anyone unskilled in paleography even if he knows the language. Intervening silences are also at work in the pacing of a literary work. They likewise punctuate musical phrases and are involved in the pacing of

musical

works.

ponents—word

In brief, intervening silences phrases,

musical

notes,

punctuate

gestures,

painted

those or

com-

sculpted

shapes, etc.—which belong to an utterance taken as a whole. However, for convenience, I will use any sort of utterance.

“sound

phrases”

for the

components

of

The punctuating effected by intervening silence functions both “melodically” and “rhythmically.” In its melodic function, intervening silence involves an apparent closing-opening operation. An occur-

rence of intervening silence terminates one sound phrase and, in some

First Approximations

a,

fashion, clears the way for the next sound phrase. But the claim that one finds here a bipolarity between the sound phrase and the intervening silence is excessive. The sense of the first sound phrase is oriented to that of the second and the sense of the second harks back to that of the first. The conjoined sense of sound phrases A and B spans the intervening silence A’ in a way that intervening silences A’ and B’ do not span sound phrase B. The overarching sense of all the sound phrases taken as a whole spans all the intervening occurrences of silence. But the converse is not the case. It is rather easy to find the unitary totality of an utterance, the constituents of which are its

sound

phrases. But one would

be hard

pressed to descry a unitary

totality of the occurrences of silence which are found within it. Intervening silence, in its melodic function, appears then to be in the service of the sound phrases it punctuates. Attention to the rhythmic function of intervening silence, however, refines the view of this way in which silence appears. When a story or a musical composition or a painting is taken as a totality, one finds that the occurrences of silence do not merely punctuate the sound phrases. These occurrences of silence are just as essential to the rhythm of the totality as are any of the sound phrases which make up the utterance. The appropriate number, placement, and duration of intervening silences are just as important to the dramatic, if not to

the lexical, sense of a story as the appropriately proportioned length, internal balance, etc., of the sound phrases. This fact is especially evident when one considers a piece of music. But it holds good for discourse of all sorts. In its melodic function, then, intervening silence appears as subordinated to the sound phrases of an utterance. But in its rhythmic function intervening silence is just as weighty as sound phrases are in constituting the concrete utterance. There is no obvious reason for according the melodic function a primacy over the rhythmic function, or vice versa. Another feature of intervening silence should not be overlooked. As the aspect of silence which is involved in timing and pacing, intervening silence has its own temporal structure in addition to the temporal structure which it has by reason of its being a constituent of a concrete utterance. That is, intervening silence A’, occurring between sound phrases A and B, has its own distinctive time structure. Each

8 intervening

SILENCE silence,

like

each

Clues provided by Husserl’s

sound

phrase,

is temporally

The Phenomenology

complex.

of Internal

Time

Consciousness® are useful in describing this complexity. The first moment of intervening silence A’ is heavily freighted, but not exhaustively filled, with the retained sense of sound phrase A. As A’ perdures, a “running off” of the retained sense of A “empties” A’ of some but not all of the retained sense of A. A’ could not be

totally emptied of A without destroying the unity of the utterance. Correlated to the emptying, there is the filling up of A’ with the protended sense of sound phrase B. But again, A’ is never exhaustively filled with the sense of B. Thus there is always in A’ something of the senses of both A and B. In truth, in each particular interven-

_ ing silence there is something of the sense of every sound phrase belonging to the utterance, and not merely something of the sense of ‘only the two sound phrases which immediately frame it. Otherwise, the utterance would have no unity except in retrospect. Thus think-

ing of either the sound phrases or the intervening silences as isolated blocks from which utterances are fashioned makes no sense. There is what can be called an ordinary pattern to the duration of both sound phrases and the intervening silences which punctuate them. If one uses the ordinary pattern, the “habitual way of discoursing,” he somehow yields to a rather strong determination by sound phrase A of what sound phrase B is going to be and do. If, however, one modifies the ordinary duration of the intervening silence, he in some measure resists the determination of B by A. Thus at least part of the sense of intervening silence seems to be that it is one of the ways in which an utterance or a sequence of sound phrases can be

stamped as “peculiarly mine,” “anyone’s,” “yours and mine,” etc. The intentional analysis in Chapter Three will clarify the status of those stampings.” The consideration of the question of the time structure of intervening silence thus shows (1) that intervening silence is complex and

perdures for more than one moment or “now”; (2) that in varying ways it bears the senses of both of its surrounding sound phrases; and (3) that it bears a sense of its own inasmuch as it can play a distinctive role in marking etc.

a sequence

of sound

phrases

as “mine,”

“anyone’s,”

Moreover, since each occurrence of intervening silence bears the senses of its surrounding sound phrases in such a way that the weight

First Approximations

9

shifts from the retained to the protended, as well as bearing a sense of its own, each “now” of the occurrence of intervening silence itself has retentional and protentional aspects of its own. With the last “now” of sound phrase A, intervening silence A’ is fully protended. With the first “now” of sound phrase B, it is fully retained. The time structure of intervening silence, therefore, is in many respects like the time structure of a tone as Husserl describes it. Unlike a tone, however, intervening silence necessarily points beyond itself to some sound phrase B, which in turn refers back to some prior sound phrase A. If the intervening silence were to lose that reference, a reference which of course need not be fulfilled, it would cease to be intervening silence. Thus intervening silence cannot, in principle, be either the first or the last component of an utterance. A further consequence revealed by this description is that the duration of the intervening silence is, within limits, at the discretion of the author of the utterance. Intervening silence appears to have the objective characteristic of stamping utterances as “mine,” “anyone’s,” etc. But apparently it must mark them somehow. The interpretation by the audience of the duration of the intervening silence employed by the author and of the consequent stamping of the utterance involves no fewer difficulties than does the interpretation of any other

component

of utterances.

But neither is there anything peculiarly

mysterious or subjective about it. Silence, however, does not appear only within utterances or discourse. Particular utterances and discourses both start and stop. A different aspect of silence is associated with this starting and stopping.

Ill.

FORE-AND-AFTER

SILENCE

If one focuses on an utterance as a whole, instead of concentrating on the distinguishable sound phrases and intervening silences which are its parts, he notices that the utterance is surrounded by a fringe of silence. This silence is fore-and-after silence. This aspect of the phenomenon of silence is constituted by the occurrence of silence which immediately precedes the first sound phrase of an utterance and the occurrence of silence which immediately follows its last sound phrase. These two occurrences of silence bear some resemblance to intervening silence but are also strikingly different from it. On the one hand, the two occurrences in question here do have a function

10

SILENCE

similar to the melodic function of intervening silence. The first of the occurrences, fore-silence, does perform an opening operation. But it does not perform any immediately obvious closing operation. The second of these occurrences, after-silence, performs a closing operation, but no obvious opening one. This obscurity is made fully explicit and dissipated in the intentional analysis. On the other hand, unlike intervening silences, neither of these two occurrences appears as rhythmically significant. Now what is the connection between fore-silence and after-silence, neither of which behaves completely like intervening silence? Are

they two

fundamentally

distinct ways

in which

silence

appears?

Is

each of them relatively independent of the other, but at the same time basically dependent for its specification as fore-silence or aftersilence upon the utterance which separates them? Or are these two occurrences moments of one and the same fringe which appears as the background against which some figure, for example, a story or

a song, stands out? And further, over and above the question of the connection between fore- and after-silence, what is the connection between the occurrences of these fringing silences and those of intervening silence? After-silence is the more striking of the fringing silences. It is the silence which terminates an utterance. Its positivity as a phenomenon appears when one realizes that had it not occurred when it did, had the utterance continued, the utterance would have lost rather than gained in expressive force. This realization is more likely to come

about when

one is considering a novel, poem,

or musical composi-

tion. But in principle it can come about in conjunction with any utterance. The size of a canvas is not irrelevant to the picture painted on it. They need to fit each other. And too long a tale of one’s arthritic aches benumbs rather than moves the audience. This after-silence is quite different from an intervening silence which is left unspanned by a protended sound phrase. In the latter case, an unresolved chord, for example, the utterance is unfinished. It is quite the contrary with after-silence. If the after-silence is tampered with or transgressed by some additional sound phrase or utterance, then the utterance which had come to completion in the after-silence is at least partially undone. The claim that every utterance or set of utterances has some unique ideal final terminus or even a well-defined class of possible final termini which can be confidently specified in

First Approximations

1

advance has, of course, no evident justification. But one can recognize

the distinctive character of after-silence by assuming, for example, that Eliot’s Waste Land is a well-crafted unity and then asking himself: What would happen to The Waste Land had Eliot not ended it where he did? To see the difference between an unspanned interven-

ing silence and an after-silence, one has then only to consider what would have happened had Eliot never written the last few lines. The discrimination and description of fore-silence is complicated by the fact that, unlike after-silence, it is ordinarily not directly attended to. Rather, it is usually attended to only because it is missed or because of a transfer of sense, to use a Husserlian expression, from after-silence. Fore-silence is sometimes attended to by being missed when one experiences that an utterance has been begun without sufficient “open space” for it. A certain wrenching is experienced if an utterance is forcibly introduced, even by oneself, into an already crowded expressive space. One experiences that either the time or the place in which the utterance occurs is inappropriate. The wrenching occurs because the fore-silence is missed. On other occasions, fore-silence comes to attention when one notices that, just as an utterance has an appropriate point of termination, so it has an appropriate point of departure, a point of departure in an open space. Then fore-silence is attended to through a transfer of sense, because one determines, or

even raises questions about, the appropriate fore-silence only from the vantage point of having already encountered after-silence precisely as after-silence. Not all fore-silence, however, is encountered either indirectly or retrospectively. Some fore-silences are directly encountered. These fore-silences can be called occurrences of anticipatory alertness. In anticipatory alertness, fore-silence is experienced both as present, though horizonally so, and as either more or less intense. One readies himself to say or hear. What he readies himself to say or hear is somehow detected as novel or different, as not simply flowing in a fully predelineated way from what was said or heard before. In the course of anticipatory alertness one recognizes, at least unthematically, that his experience of discursive continuity has been cut. Even though he cannot mark the location of this cut with precision, he can recognize that a new saying or hearing is being readied in the anticipatory silence.

12

SILENCE

Corresponding to anticipatory alertness, which presents fore-silence horizonally, is savoring, which presents after-silence horizonally. Savoring, to be sure, involves both remembering and imagining. But it involves more than these. On the one hand, savoring integrates the several components of a just concluded utterance into a well-rounded

synthesis. On the other hand, savoring integrates the just concluded utterance with previous utterances and with other possible utterances. That is, one fits this just concluded but still, in Husserl’s sense, retained concrete utterance with its constituent silences into a larger context of past and future, actual or possible utterance-silence complexes. This integration occurs in a way that can well be characterized

by the metaphor of digesting. One incorporates or digests the just concluded utterance, in silence, into the complex web of his experience of previous and other possible utterances. For example, at the conclusion of hearing one of the Brandenberg concertos, one can di-

gest that performance by drawing together its several moments into a unity,

by

incorporating

it with

remembered

previous

hearings

of

that particular concerto, with other possible performances of it, with other possible or actual performances of other Bach concertos or other compositions of either Bach or someone else, etc. Now even though fore-silence is noticed sometimes by reason of its absence, sometimes by reason of a transfer of sense from aftersilence, and at still other times as a horizon around an anticipated saying or hearing, all these modes of occurrences are properly described as instances of one and the same aspect of silence, namely, fore-silence, because all the modes of its appearances are directly and immediately connected to the single consideration of the appropriateness of having an utterance start when and where one does start. This claim is strengthened by examining the time structure belonging specifically to fore-silence and after-silence. Before this examination is undertaken, however, the relation between fore-silence and after-silence has to be clarified. First, fore-silence is not always as easily detected as after-silence is. More importantly, after-silence functions as the closing of an utterance, whereas foresilence functions as an opening for it. Nonetheless, a strong reason exists for claiming that fore-silence and after-silence are two facets of

one and the same way in which silence appears, namely, fore-and-after silence. Both fore-silence and after-silence primordially show themselves as constituting the framing for a determinate utterance. It makes

First Approximations no

sense

to say

that

after-silence

is either

13

thinkable

or

perceptible,

precisely as after-silence, without recognizing its opposite face, foresilence. Precisely what permits the distinguishing of these two faces, with their distinctive characteristics, is the utterance which is framed by them. This claim will be confirmed in the course of the intentional analysis of silence. But even now it can be seen that the utterance is the “figure” for which fore-and-after-silence taken as a unity is the “background.” Merleau-Ponty speaks of the end of a speech or text as the “lifting of a spell.”® If after-silence lifts a spell, then fore-silence casts a spell. The casting and lifting belong together. An examination of the time structure of fore-and-after-silence is facilitated by initially taking it in conjunction with the utterance it frames. The utterance precisely as utterance has its own intrinsic time structure. But all that has to be noticed here is that the utterance is a complex temporal unity. The first now-moment of after-silence retains the last now-moment of the utterance. But the successive moments of after-silence tend progressively to release the “tones” and sense of the individual sound phrases of the utterance and to retain only the sense of the utterance as a whole. This retention, of course,

may

be accompanied

by, but is distinct from, the remembering

or

imagining of individual “tones” and component senses. The retained sense of the utterance as a whole, then, with a speed inversely related to its psychological weight for the one who says or hears it, slides from retention into the simply remembered past. When the utterance is first simply remembered, or first forgotten, its after-silence has come to an end. Fore-silence, on the other hand, originates with a now-moment carrying a two-fold sense. First, there is the sense that some utterance with its after-silence is now past. (There is no such thing as an en-

countered first utterance.)

Secondly, there is the sense that someone

or other can and indeed might well begin a new utterance. Successive

now-moments refine,

of fore-silence retain this first sense and progressively

in conjunction

with

various

perceptual,

cognitive,

and

emo-

tional modifications of anticipation, the second sense in such a way that both those who can and might utter as well as something of what might well be uttered are made more and more specific. The culmination of fore-silence is reached in that now-moment which expects an imminent now-moment to carry the first “tone” of a new utterance. This last moment of fore-silence fully predelineates the oc-

14

SILENCE

currence,

If no new

but

not the

utterance

after-silence which

complete

occurs,

concrete

fore-silence

retains the

“tone”

sense,

silence

as just

described

junction with literary and musical

this first “tone.”

is directly terminated

pre-delineated

ment of fore-silence. In this case fore-and-after frame. Fore-and-after

of

by

in the last mo-

silence is an empty

is fairly

obvious

in con-

utterances. But it is not confined

to the dramatic realm. It occurs in conjunction with all discourse. All discourse is at least in intention intersubjective. All discourse of itself, regardless of the plans and purposes of its author, tends to be heard. For discourse to be heard there must be room for it. That is, there

must be a frame of silence into which it can fit.

An important question crops up in the wake of the claim that every utterance is framed by fore-and-after silence. All utterances take place

in or enter into the constitution of a history. Further, if the foregoing

description of the time structure of fore-and-after silence is correct, the sense

of utterance

A

is retained

B’ originates in the recognition

in after-silence

A’. Fore-silence

that after-silence A’, whatever

content of utterance A, has now come to an end. But one of the that fore-silence B’ carries is the sense that some utterance is now Can one go further and claim that fore-silence B’ carries some tent residue of utterance A? Perhaps such a residue is what is in tion when Merleau-Ponty says: In me as well as in the listener who

the

senses past. conques-

finds it in hearing me, the signi-

ficative intention (even if it is subsequently to fructify in ‘thoughts’) is at the moment no more than a determinate gap to be filled by words—the excess of what or has already been said.®

I intend

to say over what

is being said

If fore-silence B’ does contain content residue of utterance A, then does it not follow that in some relevant sense every utterance, regardless of its internal structural peculiarities (grammatical, lexical, etc.),

originates as response and terminates as interrogation? At this level of description, the resources are not available for giving a reasoned answer

to this question.

But

the

question

is not

to

be dismissed.

It

points to the need both for performing an intentional analysis of silence and for proffering an ontological interpretation of the sense of silence which is laid bare by that analysis. Now, however, the connection between fore-and-after silence and

First Approximations

15

intervening silence must be specified. More significant than the differences between these two ways in which silence appears is the radical

similarity between them. Both have to do with opening and closing utterances or components of utterances. Fore-and-after silence is involved in making a particular utterance distinct from every other utterance. Intervening silence is involved in making a particular sound phrase distinct from every other sound

phrase. The sameness of their function points to a basic unity which embraces these two aspects of silence. This unity can be expressed thus: These two aspects of silence, namely, fore-and-after silence and intervening silence, constitute a positive unity within which some determinate utterance unfolds. These aspects constitute the unitary “back-

ground” against which the always filigreed “figure” of some determinate

utterance

begins,

runs

its

course,

and

comes

to

completion.

Without the utterance, of course, the silence would not have a plurality of actual aspects. The utterance as figure brings texture to the silence as background and vice versa. The unity of the utterance, at least in

part, depends upon the unity of the background silence just as the unity of the two aspects of silence in question here depends, at least in part, upon the unity of the utterance. It is worth noting in this connection that even if there is a fundamental discontinuity between word and sentence, as neo-Humboldtian reflection on language would have it, there is no fundamental discontinuity between sound phrase and

utterance or between intervening silence and fore-and-after silence. In short, these two

ways

in which

silence appears

are not funda-

mentally distinguished from one another by some feature which is peculiar to either of them. Rather, they are basically distinguishable from each other only by virtue of the determinate utterance and its constituent sound phrases with which they are conjoined. Thus, just as the utterance itself is a positive complex unity, so is the background silence against which it unfolds.!! This claim is buttressed by the fact that each moment of this silence, whether it be a moment of intervening silence or of fore-and-after silence, can exemplify the same range of emotional coloration as does any other moment of this unitary silence. Any moment of silence can be experienced as surprising or expected, as brusque or smooth, etc.!?

Though these two aspects of silence can be distinguished only by virtue of the utterance which stands out against them, this fact does not give utterance any primacy over these two ways in which silence

16

SILENCE

appears. But it does show that even if silence is a positive phenomenon, at least two readily detectable aspects of silence cannot come to light without some determinate utterance. At least two aspects of silence cannot enjoy a radical independence from or hegemony over utterance. If anything, they seem to be somehow subordinate to utterance. But the evidence uncovered thus far is too slight to establish

any such subordination. At this juncture, the description of a third widely recognized aspect of silence, an aspect I call deep silence, will bring to light new dimensions both of the link between silence and utterance and of the temporality of silence.

IV.

DEEP

SILENCE

Deep silence has been recognized and thematically treated by many artists, scholars, and other reflective people, often in the making and discussion of literary works, in the discussion of religious ritual, and

in accounts of interpersonal intimacy, but particularly when the topic is either discourse or language itself. My claim here is that deep silence is at play in all utterances of whatever sort. Occurrences of this aspect of silence do not appear to be subordinate to utterance. In fact, at least sometimes they appear to enjoy a primacy over utterance, But

questions of priority are not in order at this point. Rather, deep silence needs to be described.

Unlike the previously discussed ways in which silence appears, deep silence is not correlated with a specific utterance in a fashion which would permit reciprocal mapping. One cannot point to some deter-

minate utterance which

deep silence frames.

Nor

does silence play

either a rhythmic or a melodic role in a specific utterance. But there is no reason, as will become plain shortly, to claim that deep silence can

occur apart from any utterance whatsoever.

On

the contrary, deep

silence, like the aspects already described, can occur only if some utterance is associated with it. What distinguishes deep silence from

both intervening silence and fore-and-after silence is that numerically

distinct occurrences of deep silence cannot be identified for all occurrences of utterances. Deep silence can occur in many modes. It will suffice here to discuss three of them, namely, the silence of intimates, liturgical silence,

First Approximations and the silence of the to-be-said. This last mode tive” silence.

Among

intimates—and

The Silence of Intimates there is the intimacy

17 is a kind of “norma-

of hate,

of lengthy

bearing with one another in resignation, as well as the intimacy of love—an

aura

of silence pervades

the

utterances

they

exchange.

The

conversation among intimates has no specific achievement as its primary goal. It is not primarily an exchange of information, though probably some information

must be exchanged.

Nor

is the conversa-

tion well defined in the sense of having clearly demarcated beginnings and ends. Intimates take up their conversation where they left off. But

they take up their conversation not as though

it were an unfinished

but finishable set of utterances. Rather, intimates stand in an abiding, settled-though-unsettleable silence which is interwoven or interspersed with utterance. No specific utterance is necessary for the occurrence or maintenance of the silence in which intimates abide. But utterance is not irrelevant to the silence of intimates. The silence of intimates is in some fashion, certainly not causally, engendered by some utterance or set of utterances. Further, once it has begun, the silence of intimates is somehow maintained through utterances. But the number and frequency of these sustaining utterances in principle cannot be specified. This description is obviously vague. But the phenomenon which it describes is itself opaque. Full transparency will not be

achieved even by an intentional analysis of silence; an ontological interpretation will be needed. What deserves notice here is, not only the absence of a necessary conjunction between deep silence and any particular determinate utterance, but also the preeminence of silence over any particular utterance that serves either to engender or maintain the silence of intimates. The utterance engaged in among intimates is oriented to and finds its place in the silence in which the intimates abide. The utterances which came before the occurrence of the silence of intimates, if indeed they did contribute to the engendering of the silence, are seen differently once that silence occurs. For example, the utterances exchanged between two people before they came to love or hate each other can be recognized only later as having contributed to the occurrence of this

18 intimacy

SILENCE and

as having

a sense which

prior to the engendering

could

not have

of that silence. Thus

been

detected

the most profound

sense of an utterance occurring in the nexus of the silence of intimates lies in the contribution it makes to that silence. Nevertheless, apparently an abiding, imperturbable, pure silence of intimates, a silence unnourished by utterance, is a fiction.

Liturgical Silence A second mode of deep silence is that which I call liturgical silence. Whether liturgical silence is to be found in all ritual worship is not the question here, though it will be touched upon later. At this point,

I wish simply to take note of a mode of deep silence that occurs in at least some instances of ritual worship. Therefore, discussion of only two instances of liturgical silence, namely, silence in Roman Catholic worship and in Quaker worship is sufficient for my purposes. Anton Baumstark, a major historian of Catholic liturgy, has shown that the evolution in Catholic liturgy tends to move from ritual aus-

terity to richness, “from simplicity and brevity towards ever greater richness and prolixity.”!* Specifically, the tendency in liturgical development is to add gestures to verbal formulas and vice versa, as well as to fill in pauses in the liturgical act with complications of the

formulas and gestures already used. On the other hand, liturgical reforms tend to simplify formulas and gestures and to reintroduce silent spaces into the flow of the liturgical act. And at a more profound level, liturgical reform movements have emphasized that liturgical

action taken as a whole

does not constitute a full life of piety but

collapses into sterile ritualism unless it is sustained

by

private,

silent

prayer. However necessary silence is to the Catholic liturgy, it does not reach there the obvious and explicit level that it has attained in Quaker

worship.

For the Quaker, worship

itself is fundamentally hush or

silence. And within worship, silence is the ground of both action and

speech. The hush of worship overflows the actual Quaker meeting and, now manifest as restraint, influences a Quaker’s participation in business and the arts. Indeed it becomes ingredient in all important

decision making."* As Rudolph Otto makes clear, the Quaker does not understand

silence to be

an undifferentiated

void.

Silence

is seen

as

both a positive and a differentiated phenomenon which is given an ontological interpretation in Quaker

theology.’

First Approximations

1g

What is common to these two examples of silence in ritual worship is the expectation that God will work within the space of silence the worshipers hold open. On the one hand, the space of silence is not provided by an individual worshiper acting alone. On the other hand, the space of silence is not provided so that one, some, or all of the worshipers can do something further. It is opened for God’s activity. But the silent space is not opened so that God will do some X specified in advance by the worshipers. Rather it is opened for Him to do there what He wills, even if He wills to do nothing which the worshipers can recognize as a doing. Here, in a fashion comparable to the silence among intimates, silence is not intrinsically coordinated with some specific utterance or deed that is awaited. And, as in the silence

among intimates, silence has a certain preeminence, but an abiding pure silence unnourished by some utterances or deeds, here the wor-

shipers giving voice to the fact or the expectation of God’s doing or

revealing something, makes no sense.

This mode of deep silence, liturgical silence, shares with the silence

of intimates the characteristic of being explicitly intersubjective in its origin and maintenance.

It shares with

a third mode

of deep silence,

which I call silence of the to-be-said, a reference to something which in principle lies beyond what human endeavors.

agents can achieve by their own

The Silence of the To-Be-Said A third mode of deep silence, the silence of the to-be-said, is that silence beyond all saying, the silence of the what-ought-to-be-said in which what-is-said is embedded.1® Or perhaps better, the silence of the to-be-said tests all that is said. This mode of silence might thus be said to be a normative or philosophical silence. But if so, then it appears to be likewise closely akin to what should be called mystic silence. Thinkers from widely differing traditions have pointed to it and have found themselves constrained to deal with it. Here, however, sketching a description of it is enough to show both that it is a mode of deep silence and how it is connected to the other modes of deep silence described above. At bottom, in all utterance there is an appeal beyond the utterance for an authentication of the utterance. No utterance is ultimately and definitively authenticated by another utterance or set of utterances. The coherence and consistency of utterances provides final warrant

20

SILENCE

neither for a particular utterance nor for the entire set. Authentication must be awaited in silence. Whatever is uttered is either validated or invalidated by the silent to-be-said which the encountered world presents to man for his originary response.’ From another standpoint, the silent to-be-said can be recognized in the phenomenon of tact, the phenomenon in which the not-to-besaid is acknowledged. Tact is a particular sensitiveness to situations. The tactful person knows how to behave in these situations, but this

knowledge is not derived from general principles. Thus, as Gadamer says, “an essential part of tact is inexplicitness and inexpressibility.’’1®

Tact is closely linked with good sense, le bon sens, which is the task of governing our relationships with others by adapting general principles to reality so that justice and practical truth can be concretely achieved. To behave with tact and good sense is not to hide something and leave it unsaid. But, to cite Gadamer again: To pass over something does not mean to avert the gaze from something, but to watch it in such a way that rather than knock against it, one slips by it. Thus tact helps one to preserve distance, it avoids

the offensive, . . . the violation of the intimate sphere of the person.'9 As in the silence of initmates and liturgical silence, so in the silence of the to-be-said, the silence is not intrinsically correlated with any

specifiable utterance. And, again, the silence is somehow preeminent over and primordial to any determinate utterance whatsoever. Nonetheless, the silence of the to-be-said is not isomorphic to the other modes of deep silence discussed here. In both the silence of intimates and liturgical silence, there is someone for whom silence leaves room

to engage in utterance. But in the silence of the to-be-said there is no evident someone or something to whom an appeal is made with the hope or expectation of a response. Yet something comparable to an

appeal is present there. Utterance appeals to the to-be-said for its authentication. But the “response,” of course, is not an utterance. It should be noted that the appeal to the to-be-said can be inter-

preted theologically or metaphysically as an appeal to God. On such an interpretation the distinction between the second and third modes of deep silence is attenuated. Further, a theological or metaphysical interpretation could be developed which would include this God as a necessary member of any circle of intimacy. Then the distinction

First Approximations between

21

the first and the other two modes of deep silence discussed likewise be foreshortened if not entirely collapsed.

here would

But at this level of description either to propose or to reject such interpretations would be premature. What should be noticed here, rather, is that the description of these modes of deep silence, like the description of intervening silence and fore-and-after silence, reveals the need for some sort of ontological interpretation of the significance of the phenomenon of silence. Liturgical silence, for example, has been understood by worshipers to be not only an appeal for a divine response but also a response to a divine call. That is, the “gesture” of assembling the worshipers, the

liturgical utterances, and the liturgical silence can be taken as a response to that to-be-said which is beneath all verbalized commands, creeds, etc., namely, the silent call issued by the divine. Similarly, all utterance can plausibly be regarded not only as appealing to the tobe-said for authentication, but also as originating in response to a claim which the to-be-said makes to be said, and to be said well. In short, this level of description provides no foundation for grant-

ing preeminence either to the aspect of appeal or to the aspect of response in the phenomena of to-be-said. One is entitled to deep silence, as in the case of reciprocity between appeal

liturgical silence and the silence of the claim only that in these two modes of the silence of intimates, there is a certain and response. Prior to the intentional

analysis of silence as a whole, this reciprocity cannot be unambiguously specified. In like manner, until ambiguities such as this are resolved, there can be no well-founded ontological interpretation either

of the sense of deep silence in any of its modes or of the entire phenomenon

of silence.

Also, this level of description leaves the time structure of deep silence in utter darkness. Deep silence is encountered as the silence which pervades utterance. It runs through utterance, intervening silence, and fore-and-after silence. At least in the modes examined above, it appears not to flow but to abide. Unlike intervening silence and fore-and-after silence, deep silence is not intrinsically correlated to some determinate utterance. Occurrences of deep silence are thus not measured against anything other than the persons participating in deep silence. Further, deep silence refers somehow not simply to persons but to persons relating themselves to that which does not have

22

SILENCE

the determinateness of an object. There is, therefore, no reason to assume that the time structure of deep silence is fundamentally anal-

ogous to that of intervening silence or fore-and-after silence. Rather, its time structure

seems

difference is will appear

to be quite

only

different. But

what

the

precise

by virtue of the intentional analysis

of silence. Similarly, at the present level of analysis very little can be said concerning the connection between deep silence on the one hand and intervening silence and fore-and-after silence on the other hand. Ob-

viously they are linked together by the utterances which fertilize and maintain deep silence and which are both framed by and interspersed with the other two aspects of silence. But since deep silence is not

necessarily connected to any specific utterance, and since both intervening silence and fore-and-after silence are so conjoined, there is no

basis for claiming a causal connection among these ways in which silence appears. Nor is there justification for claiming that deep silence

simply belongs to the background whence utterances as figures stand out. For deep silence shows itself as more prominent than the utterances which serve to maintain it. Beyond these negative conclusions, at this level not much else can be said concerning how these three aspects of silence are connected. However, one further common characteristic of these three aspects of silence should be noticed. They are all polyvalent in their emotional impact. Silence and its aspects have thus far been described for the most part in benign terms. But silence can be malign as well. This

appears most clearly in the silence of intimates. Recall, for example, the silence with which Shakespeare’s Richard III responds to his victims who ask to speak with him before their

execution. Kierkegaard, in Fear and Trembling, calls this silence demoniacal.”° Castle, in Graham Greene’s The Human Factor, experiences both the benign and the malign wife, Sarah. Greene writes:

dimensions

of silence with his

He sat down in the usual chair and the usual silence fell between them.

Normally he felt the silence like a comforting shawl thrown round his shoulders.

unnecessary

Silence was relaxation, silence meant

between

the two

of them.

...

But

that words

were

this

.

night

silence was like a vacuum in which he couldn’t breathe: silence was a lack of everything, even trust, it was a foretaste of the tomb.?!

First Approximations But silence

can

occur

as malign

in any

23

of the ways

in which

it

appears. Each aspect of silence can be as distressing and misery-laden as it can be consoling and peace-bearing or familiar and untroubling. To see this, one has only to recall the fearful intervening silence which intersperses the small boy’s nervous and hesitant public recitation of a poem. Suppose he cannot span the intervening silence with the right word! Or recall the sorrow-laden after-silence in which the funeral service for one’s beloved ends? What a well of misery is the silence of a ruptured friendship, or the hole whence the agonized cry “Where

is my God?”

emanates, or the gnawing silence within which one

doubts the worth of his life’s work or indeed of his life itself. Silence can also appear as odd, as curious or strange. An example is found in Walker Percy’s The Last Gentleman: He

sat down

under

the

cistern

and

sniffed

a handful

of

soil. The

silence was disjunct. It ran concurrently with one and did not flow from the past. Each passing second was packaged in cottony silence. It had no antecedent.22

This evidence shows that silence does not always appear as either untroubling or comforting. But is there an order among these possible emotional impacts? That is, can one say some emotional impacts of silence are more appropriate or more fundamental than others? An ontological interpretation of the phenomenon of silence should provide some clue to the resolution of this question. At this level of description, however, one has no warrant for proposing an answer.

This first approximation of a proper account of silence, its quandries and zones of obscurity notwithstanding, has been fruitful. It has revealed that the phenomenon of silence is encountered in every segment of human experience in which utterance takes place. That is, the phenomenon of silence is neither a rare phenomenon nor one belong-

ing to only a more or less narrowly circumscribed portion of life. Further,

this description

has yielded

abundant

evidence

in favor

of

my claim that silence is a positive, complex, nonderivative phenomenon. It has also provided support for my claim that silence is a necessary condition for, and somehow coordinate with, discourse. But more than buttressing these relatively formal claims, this description makes possible at least a preliminary formulation of some important material

24

SILENCE

characteristics which thus far.

V.

belong to all of the aspects of silence

SOME

discussed

FUNDAMENTAL

CHARACTERISTICS

OF

SILENCE

Intervening silence, fore-and-after silence, and deep silence have at least four important characteristics in common. In all three of

these ways of appearing, (1) silence is an active human performance

which always appears in connection with an utterance, (2) silence is never an act of unmitigated autonomy. Rather, (3) silence involves a yielding following upon an awareness of finitude and awe. The yielding involved in silence is peculiar inasmuch as (4) it is a yielding

which binds and joins. These four characteristics are not all logically independent of one another. But for expository purposes it is useful to take explicit notice of each of them. The first characteristic need not be explained at length. Even when

a man performs silence out of habit or routine, just as when he utters something habitually or routinely, he is still performing it in a culturally rather than a biologically established way. The silence he performs is not reducible to reflex behavior. Nor is silence simply a phase of passive receptivity. However habitual the performance is, all performances of silence are in some measure active. But silence cannot be a radically automonous act. This second characteristic is not an ontological claim. What is at stake here is not the question concerning the foundation of the possibility of performances of silence. On the logical plane, this claim simply makes explicit what is implied by the claim that silence is somehow coordinate with utterance. Utterance of course, is public. But something more than a formal implication is being expressed here. If an individual man thought that no one or nothing else was in any way his equal or superior, then the phenomenon of silence would contain a core of nonsense. The phenomenon of silence is polyvalent in the emotional impact it can have. If the performance of silence were purely autonomous, then its author should be able to determine the impact it would have on him. But obviously he cannot do this. Phenomenally, then, silence shows itself as an act that cannot be performed in radical independence. Someone must indeed act for there to be silence. But he must act in concert

First Approximations with someone him.”4

or

something

which

is

fundamentally

25 distinct

from

In attributing to silence its third characteristic, namely, that silence involves a yielding, I am simply spelling out what is implicit in the acknowledgment that the performer of silence is not radically autonomous. This yielding is a yielding before some power which is beyond one’s control. It is a yielding which is experienced as motivated by finitude and awe. In performing silence one acknowledges some center

of significance of which he is not the source, a center to be wondered at, to be in awe of. The very doing of silence is the acknowledgment of the agent’s finitude and of the awesomeness of that of which he

is not the source. But correlatively, the agent is aware that the doing of silence opens him to meet that which lies beyond his control. This other reaches the agent only through the agent’s yielding. Thus there is the awe-filled realization that he who engages in active performances has a responsibility for letting this other appear. The silence of the agent acknowledges this awesome responsibility.

Finally, silence’s fourth characteristic is its appearance as a yielding which binds and joins. Intervening silence in its closing-opening function binds the already said to the predelineated sayable. Within an utterance, when a said word is closed off, an opening for the predelineated yet-to-be-said takes place. Fore-and-after silence binds the utterance into a unity. Perhaps the unity is fragile, but it is final. And deep silence binds him who performs it to that which is other and not inferior to him, however this other is interpreted.

[2] Types of Discourse and Silence

THE INITIAL approximation of the phenomenon of preceding chapter showed, among other things, always intertwined with discourse, that (2) silence phenomenon, and that (3) an examination of the

silence given in the that (1) silence is itself is a complex time structures of

the different ways in which silence appears sheds significant light upon both the particular aspects of silence and upon the phenomenon

of

silence taken as a whole. Starting from these insights in an attempt to describe

with

more

approximation

subtlety

focuses

the

complexity

on the types

of silence,

of discourse,

this

second

their conjoined

silences, and the temporal dimensions of both. Discourse is commonly divided into two major regions, which

are

frequently labeled public discourse and private discourse. Though I will abandon this terminology because of some of its misleading connotations,

the reason for drawing

such a distinction is well founded,

as are the reasons for the customary

distinctions among

the several

basic types of discourse within each of these major regions. The identification of the type of discourse to which a particular utterance be-

longs is a crucial element in assessing the sense both of the particular utterance and of the string of utterances taken as a whole.’ Of course,

any actual string of utterances may contain utterances belonging not only to different types of discourse but even to different regions. I. THE

TWO

REGIONS

OF

DISCOURSE

Discoursing is a double-rayed act. A utters p about x to B (where A and B may,

but need not, be distinct persons).

The

essential double-

Types of Discourse and Silence

27

ness of this ray allows for a shifting of emphasis between two general

regions of discourse, If the primary ray is directed to the subject matter, the x, then the utterance belongs to discourse. If the primary ray is directed course, the B, then the utterance belongs centered discourse. So far as I can tell,

the region of topic-centered to the audience of the disto the region of interlocutorthe rays are never of equal

primacy. One is always subordinate to the other.” The differences between these two regions of discourse are numerous. However, singling out two of the most prominent differences is enough for present purposes. One salient difference between the topic-centered and the interlocutor-centered regions follows straightforwardly from the different objects toward which the primary ray is directed. In interlocutorcentered discourse, the primary responsibility of the participants is to

care for one another’s individual needs and aspirations. But in topiccentered

discourse,

both

the

author

and

the

audience

have

as their

primary responsibility the task of ensuring that the subject matter is adequately expressed. How these respective primary responsibilities are

discharged

is an essential element

in determining

whether

an ut-

terance articulates what is to be uttered, when it is to be uttered, and

how it is to be uttered. For each of these regions of discourse, though, the primary responsibility in one region is a not inconsequential secondary responsibility in the other region.

The recognition of the distinctive primary responsibility belonging to each region of discourse can introduce a higher degree of sophistication into the discussion of a number of complicated issues. For example, such a recognition would help to refine the terms of debates like that concerning the dissemination of pornography and the First Amendment provisions of the United States Constitution. What it is

permissible to say in topic-centered discourse might not be permissible in interlocutor-centered discourse, and vice versa. Paul Ricoeur provides a lead which can be modified to describe a second salient difference between these two regions. Interlocutorcentered discourse is, at bottom, ostensive and refers focally to the

participants’ spatiotemporal situation. Interlocutor-centered utterances refer to something which (1) belongs to the dialogical situation at hand precisely as an element of that situation and which (2) can be designated

either by pointing

or by

ostensive components

of the ut-

28

SILENCE

terance itself (for example, some adverbial demonstratives). As ostensive, this sort of discourse equiprimordially points back to the actual-

ly involved interlocutors. Topic-centered discourse, by contrast, is focally nonostensive and refers beyond the interlocutors’ situation to what can be called a world. In this context, a world is a unitary ensemble of actual and possible referents which can be referred to, in principle, by any person whatsoever. Whenever the reference of an utterance is intended in such a way that it escapes the confines of the interlocutors’ situation, then the discourse projects a world. Utter-

ances which focally intend a situation belong to the region of interlocutor-centered

discourse.

Utterances

which

focally intend

a world

belong to the region of topic-centered discourse. To paraphrase Ricoeur, the coming to language of the sense and reference of topiccentered discourse is the coming to language of a world. But the com-

ing to language

of the sense and reference of interlocutor-centered

discourse is the coming to recognition of the participants in their concrete, situated individuality.’ Thus in interlocutor-centered discourse the author of the utterance

and his audience (1) are acquainted with one another, (2) share a common spatiotemporal situation, and (3) do not and need not concern themselves with how their discourse would be taken by those who do not share their situation. By contrast, in topic-centered dis-

course the first two of these conditions are irrelevant. And contrary to the third condition, in topic-centered discourse no present or future

person is in principle excluded from becoming part of the audience. In fact, only the factual condition of death rules past persons out of the

audience.* Interlocutor-centered discourse, then, is born and dies in a particular situation. The effacement of the situation is the effacement of the focal referent of interlocutor-centered discourse. Topic-centered discourse, in principle, does not depend for its life upon the continued existence

of the situation in which it was initially uttered. Among other things, this difference between these two regions of discourse accounts for the indecency or silliness of treating interlocutor-centered discourse as though it were topic-centered or of insisting upon engaging in

topic-centered discourse when one’s interlocutors are, with justification, interested in engaging in interlocutor-centered discourse. These two regions are not closed to one another. What is focally intended in the one is horizonally intended in the other. Therefore,

Types of Discourse and Silence

29

topic-centered discourse can be converted into interlocutor-centered discourse and vice versa. For example, assume that “The moon is full”

is a topic-centered utterance. A couple in love might convert that utterance into part of a private code they use only when they are alone with each other. Conversely, an intimate conversation among lovers

might be recorded and made available for anyone to read or hear. But for present purposes, the distance more important than their proximity.

between

these two

regions is

The significance of the fact that topic-centered discourse refers to a world and not merely to a situation is clarified by noticing that the detachment from confinement to a particular situation, a detachment which is expressed by the very sense of topic-centered discourse, can move in several directions. The individuation of the author of the utterance may be heightened, with a concomitant extension of his audience beyond the bounds of those who share his situation. An artist

might well exemplify this sort of detachment. Or the detachment of both the author and his immediate audience may withhold from effective manifestation their respective individuating characteristics, characteristics which distinguish them from other persons. This sort of detachment allows either the author or the audience or both to represent some absent persons or groups as well as to be present themselves in the discourse. Or again, the detachment of the participants in the discourse may transform all the determinations which tend to distinguish one person from another into an abiding communion. An example of

this sort of detachment is that of a community of monks engaging in communal worship. It follows that whether an utterance belongs to the region of topiccentered discourse or to that of interlocutor-centered discourse is not fully at the discretion of its author. The aim of the author, the way in which the audience understands the utterance, what is uttered

itself, and the context in which it is uttered all enter into the constitution of a particular utterance as belonging to one or the other re-

gion. The multiplicity of the elements at play here accounts for the possibility of both deception and error concerning the region to which an utterance belongs. The author is, in principle, neither more nor less prone to err about such matters than is any member of his audience. The regions of topic-centered and interlocutor-centered discourse differ in many other ways, for example, in appropriate style, vocabu-

30

SILENCE

lary, length of the string of utterances on a given occasion, choice of allusions, and reasons for interrupting. But for the present purpose of

uncovering the complex correlation between silence and discourse, the differences between these two regions need not be described further. Considering some of the principal types of discourse which are found in these regions is more profitable.

Il.

TYPES

OF

INTERLOCUTOR-CENTERED DISCOURSE

Within the region of interlocutor-centered discourse, the region in which the primary ray of the act of uttering is directed to the audience rather than to the subject matter, three types of discourse can

be usefully distinguished: and discourse with

familial discourse, discourse

acquaintances.® For present purposes,

with

friends,

not much

is

to be gained by discussing the distinction between the first two. So I will deal here only with the difference between discourse with acquaintances on the one hand and discourse with family or friends on the other. Precisely how some particular person or group of people draws the

distinction between family, friends, and acquaintances and whether a person has or even wants a family or friends are irrelevant issues here. What does matter is that these distinctions can be and have been

drawn and that they reflect discernible differences among types of interlocutor-centered discourse. Only those differences which are pertinent to the elucidation of the phenomenon of silence in its constant conjunction with discourse will be noted here.

Utterances belonging to discourse among acquaintances always begin and perdure with a certain provisional character. The background silence, the fore-and-after silence, against which these utter-

ances stand out and unfold, is fragile. The fore-silence which opens the way for discourse with acquaintances always has the sense of containing a proviso that the discourse can be fittingly cancelled or at least interrupted at any moment when the motivation, in the Husserlian sense of the term, for a shift to either familial discourse or discourse among friends arises. Consider, for example, the situation in which, while I am talking with an acquaintance, a friend of mine comes upon the scene and in-

Types of Discourse and Silence

31

dicates that he wishes a word with me. If I continue to engage in discourse with acquaintances,

after motivation

for a shift is present, I

will be pressing my utterances into an expressive space now claimed by the utterances predelineated in my friend’s beckon. This crowding of the expressive space occurs even if motivation for my continuing the discourse with my acquaintance is also present. Of course, the claim of my friend need not and sometimes should not be honored. But my friend’s claim is there with effective weight and with the sense that, all things being equal, it should have priority. Thus, the very fore-and-after silence within which the discourse among acquaintances

unfolds already carries the sense that it may at any time have to yield the right of way. In contrast, the fore-silence which opens the way for familial discourse or discourse among friends has the sense that what it opens the

way for deserves to run its full course, to override casual claims from acquaintances,

and

to be esteemed

for its worth

even

when

it yields

temporarily to urgent claims from acquaintances. This difference between

discourse among

acquaintances

and discourse among

family or

friends is confirmed by the contrast between the experience of having interlocutor-centered discourse with an acquaintance interrupted by one’s beloved and having interlocutor-centered discourse with one’s beloved interrupted by an acquaintance. Similarly, the after-silence in which discourse among acquaintances terminates is qualitatively different from the after-silence in which the discourse of family or friends stops. The after-silence at the end of a string of utterances belonging to familial discourse or to discourse among friends suspends but does not terminate the discourse. In an important sense, discourse among friends or family, so long as the re-

lationship endures, never ends but is only interrupted. But the aftersilence in which a particular set of utterances among acquaintances terminates carries the sense of bringing the dialogue to a full stop. The dialogue is not suspended. It is finished. The present set of utterances and its after-silence provides only the minimal motivated anticipation or expectation that one will again converse with these same people. And if a second dialogue should occur, it will appear as one which is as discontinuous with the first dialogue as any two dialogues between the same people can be. An extreme example of discourse among acquaintances is the brief

32

SILENCE

exchange of pleasantries in which one engages while buying a newspaper in a hamlet through which he is passing for the first time and to which he expects never to return. Of course, in real life the line between friends and acquaintances is not clear-cut. Therefore, the aftersilence of much actual discourse among acquaintances is only more or less final. Conversely, ties of friendship and family can slacken to the point that conversations of this sort come close to termination rather

than mere suspension. This absence of clear-cut demarcations among different sorts of relationships accounts for the possibility of the confusion and pain which can be experienced when one partner in a dia-

logue takes another to be his friend and speaks accordingly, but the other partner considers the conversation to be simply one between ac-

quaintances. Another difference among these types of interlocutor-centered discourse concerns the connection between their respective utterances

and deep silence. Obviously, what was said in Chapter One about the silence of intimates holds good for the deep silence conjoined with the utterances of both familial discourse and discourse among friends.

It does not hold for the deep silence conjoined with discourse among acquaintances. Utterances belonging to each type of interlocutor-centered discourse also have their own proper connection with the silence of the

to-be-said. Each type of utterance has its own “bounds of propriety” to observe. Each type of interlocutor-centered discourse has its own peculiar way of manifesting that the primary responsibility of the interlocutors is to take care of one another’s needs and aspirations. To

discharge this responsibility whatever is said needs to find authentication in the unsayable, silent to-be-said which is correlated to the type

of interlocutor-centered

discourse to which

the utterance belongs.

Quite simply, some of what is to be said is to be said to friends or family but not to acquaintances, and vice versa. Though the “bounds of propriety” cannot be given any linguistic formulation which is even

remotely comprehensive, what these bounds are for one type of discourse is manifestly different What is to be uttered, when it tered all vary depending upon tances, friends, or members of

from what they are for other types. is to be uttered and how it is to be utwhether the interlocutors are acquainthe same family.

Tact, good sense, and the silence of the to-be-said do not merely

Types of Discourse and Silence

33

restrict utterances. They also call for utterances. The respective “bounds of propriety” belonging to each type of interlocutor-centered discourse can be transgressed by not saying what was called for as

well as by saying what was uncalled for. One can be less forthcoming with his family or friends than he should be. One can fail to exchange appropriate greetings, etc., among acquaintances. These considerations confirm what was said in Chapter

One

about tact and good sense

(le

bon sens) and their connection with silence. Il.

TYPES

OF

TOPIC-CENTERED

DISCOURSE In topic-centered discourse the primary responsibility of both the author and the audience is to ensure that the subject matter is appro-

priately expressed. Further, since topic-centered discourse focally refers to a ticipants in several tachment

world, it involves an explicit detachment of some or all parfrom confinement to a situation. This detachment can move directions. These points were all mentioned before. The deinvolved in topic-centered discourse can release the partici-

pants into one or more of those “areas” customarily spoken of as the world of art, the world

of politics, the world of religion, etc. If this

clue from ordinary usage is followed and several types of topic-centered discourse and the worlds to which they refer are distinguished, then the description of the connection between silence and discourse

can be substantially refined. To achieve this refinement,

the

customary,

standard

distinctions

which have been drawn among types of topic-centered discourse will suffice. The list of types need not be exhaustive nor the discussion of

any particular type elaborate. But attending to the prominent differences between the following types of topic-centered discourse will prove useful: scientific discourse, technological discourse, political

discourse, moral discourse, religious discourse, and artistic discourse. Obviously, to engage in one type of discourse a person has to refrain from, to be silent in, other types of discourse. Such a remark, however, is abstract to the point of triviality. But the observation upon which it is based can be rescued from triviality by noticing just how silence, that particular yielding in the face of finitude and awe which binds and joins, is connected with each of these types of topic-

SILENCE

34

centered discourse. A key consideration here is to determine the sort of temporality which reigns in the various worlds to which these types of discourse refer.

Scientific Discourse The type of discourse in question here is employed in what has come to be called “normal” science, science which assumes an objec-

tive universe which science

endeavors

to describe and explain.” One

central feature of the world to which scientific discourse refers is that, on the one hand, it has no privileged moments and, on the other hand,

it is concerned with abstract, general objects and not with particular objects. For example, a particular drop of water has scientific interest only as an instance of water. It has no interest by reason of its being this drop of water on this particular petal in this particular light. The same condition holds for scientific interest in a bird or a man. To say that the world of science has no privileged moments is to

say that beginning and ending moments of the processes with which science concerns itself have no more weight than does any intervening moment.

In fact, it is to deny that there is any fundamental legitimacy

to thinking in terms of beginning, middle, and end. One consequence of the absence of qualitative differentiation in the temporality of the processes and objects studied by science is that, in principle, whatever is uttered appropriately about the world can be appropriately uttered

at any moment.

Of

course, the discourse can describe sequences of

states of affairs. But in principle these sequences and the discourse referring to them are ahistorical. The date of their occurrence in history is fundamentally irrelevant. The history of scientific discourse, as his-

tory, is of no scientific interest.

Similarly, the particular is of scientific interest only as an instance of the general. An experiment is of interest, not for what happens to and among its elements considered in their particularity, but for what it manifests about the general. Whatever is peculiar to the particular

is to be ignored. The discourse which refers to the experiment is properly scientific only insofar as it refers exclusively to the general.

A second, closely related, feature of scientific discourse is that it expressly refrains from referring to any world other than its own. For example, any reference to a world populated by particulars taken in

their particularity is taken to be a lapse from scientific discourse which contaminates

the discourse. As a consequence,

scientific discourse en-

Types of Discourse and Silence

35

sures its own purity by taking as irrelevant the specific identity of both its author and its audience. In principle, though it does not ex-

plicitly deny worlds other than its own, it does not positively acknowledge

any of them.® Nor,

of course,

does it positively acknowl-

edge the legitimacy of any discourse except scientific discourse. The

silence which is conjoined

with

scientific discourse involves a

setting aside by the participants of the articulation of everything which individuates them as persons and of their respective interests in

the particular as particular. No claim arising from any form of particularity is granted. But this asceticism does not terminate in isolating those

who

perform

this kind

of yielding.

Rather

it binds

and

joins

them to all others, of whatever era, who are or may become similarly ascetic. It binds them

to a community

which

is in principle open to

every man and in which, in principle, no distinctions can be drawn among particular men. In so doing, this ascetic yielding binds and joins the community of scientists to a world which always is as it is and which is always sovereignly indifferent to whatever is transient, whe-

ther particular person, thing, or event. The silence which opens the way for scientific discourse, opens the way for utterances which are, in the final analysis, neither mine nor

yours, neither those of a Frenchman nor of an Argentinean. The utterances, in principle, simply employ the scientist as mouthpiece. And he both knows and positively appreciates that one mouthpiece is interchangeable with another. What motivates the silence which opens the way for scientific discourse is the recognition of the limitations weighing upon even the richest of particular things or events and the most favorably endowed individual persons. Each of these is both transient and deficient in something possessed by another. Each particular tends to block the

recognition of other particulars, to confine what can be uttered by or about one particular to that which others find irrelevant either for themselves or about other particular things. These recognized manifestations of finitude are correlated to an awe. The awe arises from the realization that particulars hang together in patterns and constitute a universe. This universe and its patterns are recognized as having been there before the individual person came on the scene and as destined to endure beyond his lifetime. Through being a mouthpiece for this abiding universe, the individual can give the discourse in which he participates a permanent significance which is tied to the universe and

36

SILENCE

which can survive both his own death and the forgetting of him in his particularity by all other persons. This particular mode of the

experience of finitude and awe

motivates the silence against which

scientific discourse unfolds.

What

Heidegger

Technological Discourse says about technology and science in his essays

“The Question Concerning Technology” and “The Age of the World Picture,” as well as elsewhere, is, I think, extremely important and

basically sound. But here I wish to limit myself to considering some

more

obvious and less controversial

features of the type of discourse

belonging to technology. To begin this description, I follow, with some modifications, clues provided

In The Decline

of Wisdom,

by Gabriel Marcel.

Marcel

points out three intertwined

characteristics of what he calls techniques which transform the world.

These techniques are: perfectible, transmissible, and both specialized and tending to further specialization. A technique is perfectible insofar as it tends to bring about the highest possible ratio of output to

input. It is transmissible to the extent that an ever larger number of people can perform the technique. Transmissibility would be maximal when no person need perform the technique and the entire performance can be given over to a machine.!° A technique is specialized to

the extent that it has minimal side effects. Technological discourse refers to the ensemble of techniques of this sort and the objects upon which they are exercised. The object to which technological discourse ultimately refers is a universe conceived of as a stock of indefinitely plastic raw material." Apparent qualitative differentiations within the universe are irrelevant. Only quantitative ones are significant.! One important characteristic of the world to which technological discourse refers is that in it the future has unequivocal primacy. The future in question here, however, is not vague or fundamentally indefinite. Rather, it is a foreseeable, predelineated future. It is the notyet, the about-to-be. Techniques and their products, as well as the discourse which refers to them, are all meant, from their inception, to

be replaced. In fact, the product is not the end to which the technique is the means. Each is rather a moment in the progressive exploration of the plasticity of the universe of raw material. A second important characteristic of the world of raw material is

Types of Discourse and Silence

37

rather paradoxical. In this world, the technologist has his own

pur-

poses and works his will. The products are products he elects to bring about. But his purposes are admissible only so long as they further technological transformations. This world requires that he have purposes of his own, but his purposes are sanctioned only so long as they are “stages on technology’s way.” The silence which is conjoined to technological discouse is a two-

fold yielding or restraint. To engage in technological discourse one must

refrain

from

attending

to any

apparent

qualitative

differentia-

tions in one’s topic except those which are themselves technologically induced. That is, only those differences which arise from the application of technological

processes

are appropriate

referents

for techno-

logical discourse. But the attention to even these differences is caught under the requirement of a second dimension of the restraint or yield-

ing which is intertwined with this sort of discourse. To engage in technological discourse one must refrain from considering any of his purposes

or achievements

as anything

more

than

transitory moments

in a process which proceeds according to its own inner momentum. His achievements, whether discursive or fabricational, are to be assessed as moments destined to be absorbed in the larger process with-

out leaving a discernible abiding trace.

This second dimension of the yielding in question here can be put in another way. The background silence against which a particular technological

utterance

or set of utterances

unfolds

is such

that the

savoring of what has just been said or achieved is held to a minimum. What matters is the opening for the next utterance. The which a technological utterance terminates, then, is more

silence similar

in to

intervening silence than it is to after-silence. That is, without the predelineated next utterance the present utterance with its silence lacks full sense. The silence connected with technological discourse also binds and joins the participants to a distinct community, the community of men dedicated primordially to the exaltation of Man or the Spirit of Man. This exaltation is seen as consisting in the power to shape the universe to the will of Man. Power over matter is manifested by the ease of transforming it. Technology is not, then, geared to satisfy the will of some particular man or men. Their wills and purposes are subordinate to a sort of general will of Man, to the Spirit of Man, which transcends the partialness of each man.

38

SILENCE

Technological discourse and the silence which opens the way for it is partially motivated by the recognition of the limitations, the finitude, of the individual man’s purposes and achievements when taken alone. Unaided by a discipline to which he subordinates himself, he is a victim both of the universe and of his own limitations. The other dimension of the motivation for engaging in technological discourse and the silence which permits it is awe in the face of man’s ability to control his own finitude through the practice of a disciplined way of

interacting with the universe. The exploration of this awesome capacity is the task to which the community bound together logical discourse and its conjoined silence is dedicated.

Technological

discourse,

however,

has

a

in techno-

paradoxical

character

which is worthy of notice. It is both modest and ambitious. The individual participant in the technological discourse is required, as a con-

dition of participation, to be modest about his own performances. But, likewise as a condition of participation, he is required to be so ambitious for the technological program and its anticipated achievements that he will not acknowledge any definitive limits either to the submission which he will give to the program or to the power which can be amassed by Man."8 Obviously,

and

not

surprisingly,

the

distinction

between

scientific

discourse and technological discourse is obscure, in part, because one and the same person engages in many types of discourse. In this respect, none of the distinctions drawn between types of discourse can be ironclad. But the distinction between scientific discourse and technological

discourse

present

a special

difficulty.

Today,

the

interde-

pendence in practice of so much of science and technology tends to make each of these types of discourse take on characteristics of the other type. Nonetheless, a distinction such as I have drawn between them is fruitful both for present and for other purposes. Political Discourse Ongoing political discourse refers to a world and an originary discourse which have an unmistakable beginning. That moment of origin enjoys a privileged position. What is uttered subsequently is assessed

against the original utterance taken as a standard of legitimacy. However, the originary discourse cannot arbitrarily take just any shape. As Aristotle, Montesquieu, and Rousseau all recognized, the founding discourse must fit the founding community and the circumstances to

Types of Discourse and Silence

39

which it is addressed if it is to acquire authority. But once the founding discourse is accepted as founding, then subsequent discourse is measured against it. Political discourse, however, whether founding or extending, is not in any fashion oriented to an ending in which the discourse would be complete. The primary task to every state is to be stable and endure.” In principle, neither the world to which political discourse refers nor the discourse itself has an intrinsic final terminus. Political worlds can and do, of course, fade away or fall apart. One world is replaced by another. But nothing about either the temporal-

ity or the content of political discourse, qua political, can be said to entail

its replacement

by

another

specific

political

world.

That

is,

neither the author nor the audience of political discourse can, so long as their discourse is political, attempt to bring their discourse either to a unique culmination or to a definitive conclusion. The ending of a political

world

and

the

discourse

associated

with

it can

be

noticed

only by those who inhabit another world. But both the author and the audience must always at least implicitly refer political utterances to the origin of their political world. Putative political discourse which does not satisfy the foregoing requirement that political discourse not aim for an ideal culmination is, for example, talk about a thousand- -year Reich, or the culminating classless society, or some of Hegel’s talk about Napoleon. Talk of this sort may satisfy the formal requirements for scientific discourse, re-

gardless of its truth or falsity or consistency. But, because of the temporality of the world to which cannot refer to a political world.

Unlike

scientific discourse,

political

political

discourse

discourse

refers,

by nature

such

seeks

talk

to

accommodate within itself the other types of topic-centered discourse. It also seeks to ensure the preservation of the entire region of topiccentered discourse against the claims of interlocutor-centered discourse. But in the course of accommodating the other types of discourse, it also seeks to circumscribe their scope and exercise and to

determine their respective importance. Political discourse, then, tends to take its world as a “world of worlds.”® The silence which is conjoined to political discourse involves a special binding and joining of the present author and audience to the “founding fathers” of their political community. What is uttered in the present is meant to prolong, preserve, and develop what was ini-

40

SILENCE

tiated in the beginning. Not to keep one’s utterances under the aegis of the discourse of the founding fathers is to revolt. To place one’s utterances under the aegis of the political discourse of aliens is to commit treason. Whatever has intervened between the founding fathers and the present, a listening to and heeding of the originating discourse

is always called for. The heeding, of course, is not a repeating. But it does involve deference. This deference, a kind of restraint,!° also points to the sort of finitude and awe which is implicated in the silence conjoined with political discourse. Since what the present participants in political dis-

course utter can be legitimate only if it has its roots in some founding discourse, no present utterance can approximately aspire to autonomy. On the other hand, since the founding discourse can have current efficacy only by virtue of present utterances, the present participants confront in awe the fact that without their own utterances, the political world into which they have been introduced is doomed. Thus the

necessary dependence upon the moment of origin is coupled with an irremediable fragility. Present political utterance, then, unfolds against a twofold silence: the silence which lets the founding discourse be

heard anew, and the silence which opens the way for that which, however founded it is in the origin, is fresh, never uttered before, and

yet destined to yield to a subsequent, dependent, but fresh political utterance.!”

:

Moral Discourse Like the world to which scientific discourse refers, the world to which moral discourse refers is one with no privileged moments. In both of these worlds everyone, or at least all those who are in the

same position in these worlds, can Of course, if the moral

world

and should utter the same thing.

changes or if there are different posi-

tions in the moral world, then what is to be uttered about these differing circumstances is itself different. But it belongs to the very sense of moral discourse that if Brutus had been an English contemporary of Bishop Butler or Butler a Roman contemporary of Brutus, then both of them could and should have made the same moral utterances. And if the moral world has dimensions which do not change, then everyone can and should utter the same thing about those dimensions.

Unlike the scientific world, however, the moral world is such that all of the discourse which

refers to it involves appraisal. For appraisal

Types of Discourse and Silence

41

to be possible, what is referred to must have some element which in fact belongs to it but whose place could have been taken by some other equally contingent element. Thus, if something deserves ap-

proval, then at least some component of it could have been replaced either by another component which would render it still deserving of approval

or by a component

which would

render it not deserving of

approval. But nothing can belong to the moral world which does not

require that the discourse which refers to it involves appraisal. Moral discourse, then, refers to a world whose structure is such that whatever can or does transpire within it requires for its complete sense that

it be appraised in terms of how it might have been otherwise. Nothing in the world of science allows for this kind of appraisal. More specifically, for this appraisal to be possible, what transpires must be taken as involving in some fashion human conduct over which

some person has control. The conduct may be that of ignoring or neglecting, but some controlled conduct must be involved. This necessary condition for appraisal shows that the moral world, in contrast to the scientific world, is intrinsically man-marked. That is, nothing can have complete sense in the moral world except that which necessarily requires an appraisal of the human conduct involved in what transpires.'® But the man who is at the center of the moral world is not a particular man. It is Everyman or Any-appropriately-placed-man. The man-marked character of the moral world to which moral discourse necessarily refers differs, however, from the focus on human

doings in political discourse. The claim of privilege for some utterances and the moments to which they refer, which privilege is a necessary feature of political discourse, is in principle disallowed in moral

discourse. The

utterances

of political founding

fathers are not

sources of legitimacy in moral discourse. Political utterances, like any other utterance bearing on the appraisal of human conduct, must be measured in moral discourse against the standard constituted by that which everyone should utter. In the moral world political discourse cannot provide its own legitimation. This general characterization of what distinguishes the moral world

and the discourse which refers to it from other worlds and types of discourse can be moral discourse such discourse. distinction is to

usefully supplemented by noticing that the history of reveals a rather clear distinction between two sorts of A ready, and somewhat rough, way to indicate this say that one sort of moral discourse aspires to be an

42

SILENCE

expression of episteme, whereas the other aspires to be an expression of phronesis.!9 The

former

bears

striking formal resemblances

to sci-

entific discourse; the latter to political discourse. It is episteme-resembling moral discourse which most obviously can clash with political discourse.29 The relevant point here is that each of these two sorts of moral discourse is conjoined with a distinct sort of silence. The silence con-

joined with science-resembling moral discourse involves a yielding of all references, or of as much reference as is possible, to the particular-

izing features of the moral world. This yielding is oriented to opening the way for utterances having universality or at least maximal exten-

sion in their reference to men, the kind of conduct under man’s control, and the appraisals of what transpires in the moral world. The silence conjoined with politics-resembling moral discourse, in the face of the particularizing features of the moral world, restrains the quest for universality or maximum extension. This restraint leaves room for utterances having maximal intension in their reference to the conduct

subject to man’s control

and the appraisal of what transpires in the

moral world. Probably no actual developed moral doctrine, not even that of Kant, has been exclusively expressed in only one of these sorts of moral discourse. But in principle, it is at least emptily possible that

such a case could occur. If it did, regardless of which of these two sorts of discourse

was employed,

the discourse

would

still be moral

because whatever is uttered has the sense of being that which could and should be uttered by anyone appropriately positioned in the moral world. The silence which is conjoined with moral utterance involves a yielding of one’s own particular appraisals of controlled human conduct to the court constituted by the appraisals which anyone can and should utter. My appraisal is a moral utterance only insofar as its very sense is that it is irrelevant to its legitimacy that it is my appraisal rather than anyone else’s. This yielding of one’s appraisal to the court

of universal appraisal has the effect of binding and joining the man who

engages

in moral

discourse

to the

omnitemporal

community

of

appraisers. In this community, in principle, all those who occupy the

same position enjoy unqualified equality. My appraisal, if it satisfies the court to which it is yielded, achieves a status it could .not have achieved

had it not been submitted

to that court.

Types of Discourse and Silence Further,

the silence

which

opens

the

way

for

43 moral

discourse

is

motivated by the recognition that both the conduct which men control and

the

appraisals of that conduct

by

particular

men

could

be

other than they are. That is, neither the particular conduct nor the particular

appraisal is legitimated by

curred. Things

could

have transpired

the mere

fact that it has oc-

differently. This

recognition

is

a recognition of finitude. My conduct and my appraisals are seen to require a legitimation which I cannot given them by myself.

But the recognition that my conduct and my appraisals could be other than they are likewise engenders an awe which motivates a silence. The awe arises in the face of the twofold realization that the world is, at least to some extent, what human conduct makes it to be and that the appraisal of human conduct is simply a human and not a

necessitated appraisal. The silence which involves the acknowledgment of this sort of finitude and awe opens the way for utterances aimed at fashioning the world in a way in which it need not be fashioned. And

these utterances, insofar as they belong to moral discourse, themselves aim to be utterances which and should utter.

any

appropriately

positioned

person

can

Religious Discourse Like political discourse and unlike moral discourse or scientific discourse, religious discourse refers to a world in which the moment of

its inauguration is a privileged moment.”

Other moments hark back

to the beginning moment, which, although it may be expressed in legend rather than being assigned to a date in a supposedly neutral time, is sufficiently well defined that no other moment can be mistaken for it. But unlike the world to which political discourse refers, the world of religious discourse has an end which is envisaged from the outset. The end, like the beginning, is a privileged moment. In some cases, the beginning and the end coincide. If they do, then the tem-

porality of the world is essentially circular. In other cases, the end is distinct from, and generally better than, the beginning.

But in every

case, both the beginning and the end of the world to which religious discourse refers are singled out from other moments. They are recognized as having an importance which surpasses that of other moments. Religious discourse, like political discourse, cannot unequivocally grant that in the final analysis its utterances are to be measured against the standard constituted by moral discourse, the standard con-

44

SILENCE

stituted by what everyone can and should utter in appraisal of human conduct.

Religious discourse, like political discourse, seeks to accommodate within itself all other types of discourse and their respective referents, whether these be interlocutor-centered or topic-centered. But in this accommodation, religious discourse, again like political discourse, seeks to circumscribe the scope and exercise of other types of discourse and

to determine their respective importance. In short, religious discourse, like political discourse, tends to refer to a “world of worlds.”2 In terms of the scope and role which

each of them

can have with

reference to other types of discourse, political discourse and religious discourse cannot be distinguished. But the distinction can be drawn between them by virtue of the differences between the silences to which they are respectively conjoined. The silence which goes with religious utterances binds and joins them to an originary utterance. The originary utterance is itself understood as a response to the manifest appearance of that which is

greater than man, that which is divine. It likewise binds and joins the present utterances

to all past

and

future

religious

utterances

of the

same religion which occur between the beginning and the end. That is, each religious utterance is taken to be a repetition of what has been uttered ever since the beginning and is to be uttered until the end. The present utterance is religious only so long as it is bound in this way to

past and future utterances. To utter something different in religious discourse is to blaspheme. The present utterance is also joined to the end, whether the end be taken as an utterance, for example, the Last

Judgment, or as the cessation of the possibility of utterance.

Thus

religious utterances in the between-times are understood by the participants themselves to get their full sense and justification only in conjunction with and in subordination to the beginning and the end.

The specific mode of finitude and awe that is constitutive of the silence which is conjoined with religious discourse consists in the paradoxical recognition by the utterer both that he is to utter what has already been uttered and that his uttering it matters mightily. In awe he realizes that regardless of what else has or will transpire he himself is called to respond to the divine. But he is likewise aware, and this is the recognition of finitude, that the only satisfactory response is pre-

cisely that which both has been made by his predecessors’ and will be made

by those who

come

after him. And

this regularly repeated

re-

Types of Discourse and Silence

45

sponse

itself occurs only within the space enclosed by a well-determined beginning and end. On the basis of the difference between the kind of silence conjoined with religious discourse and that conjoined with political discourse, the differences between the two “worlds of worlds” to which they respectively refer becomes clearer. To state the difference crisply, the silence of political discourse opens the way for an utterance which must be “Pelagian”; the silence of religious discourse, for one which must be “anti-Pelagian.”

Though political discourse with its silence always claims to be legitimated by the deeds and words which founded the political community, this discourse is always new. It always utters what has never been uttered before. And the responsibility for this new utterance

rests upon the present author. He is responding to the founding utterances, but his response is to make its own unique contribution. In this sense, he must be “Pelagian.” He must save himself by his own efforts if he is to be saved at all.

Religious

discourse

with

its silence,

on the other

hand,

eschews

uttering the novel. The participants’ responsibility is precisely to utter what has already been uttered and is to be uttered hereafter. They must be “anti-Pelagian.” If they are to be saved, they must submit to what has been granted to them. To introduce something novel is to court destruction. Artistic Discourse The set of objects populating the world to which

artistic discourse

refers is fundamentally distinct from the objects populating the worlds to which other types of topic-centered discourse refer. Of course, one and the same perceptual “thing” can be an object in more than one

world as, for example, a Lorenzetti crucifix is for a Christian, an Italian nonreligious patriot, and a nonreligious, politically unengaged art lover. Among

the distinctive characteristics of the objects populating

the world to which artistic discourse refers are the following: (1) These objects are distinct and complete unities. They are not open-ended processes. (2) Each object always leaves room for a person concurrently to have a sensible and responsible commitment of basically the same intensity and permanence

to a multitude

of other

artistic objects. I can, for example, esteem and cherish concurrently both Picasso’s Guernica and T. S. Eliot’s Waste Land. In this respect,

46

SILENCE

these

objects

differ

from

which tend to preclude

more

political

states

and,

probably,

religions,

their participants’ adhering simultaneously

than one political state or religion.

some sensuous embodiment

to

(3) These objects require

if they are to come to presence, either in

perception or in memory. In this respect they differ from mathematical and logical objects. (4) These objects can be lost and rediscovered.

They

can

appear

and

disappear,

in

principle,

any

number

of times without suffering any transformation into a different object. Again, in this respect these artistic objects differ from political states. A state which has disappeared, which has no living members, can never be resurrected as the same state it was of old. The world which is constituted by objects of this sort and to which

artistic discourse refers is a world whose temporality is marked by a plurality of privileged moments. These are moments in which either a fresh object is first brought to presence or an old, once absent, but still fresh object is brought back to presence. There can be any number of such moments. With respect to one another, in principle, none of these moments is absolutely privileged. But some privileged moments can be major and some minor. The occurrence of privileged moments cannot be deduced or inferred from previous moments, whether privileged or not. No one can say in advance when a privileged moment will occur, or that it is due, or what it would involve.

In fact, a privileged moment

can be recognized

at the earliest only

once it is underway. And quite possibly it can be recognized leged only retrospectively.

Much

as privi-

the same point can be seen by noting that a fresh object is

not merely one which comes to be for the first time. Nor is it one which is merely not a copy of a previous object. In this context, an object is fresh only to the extent that it both is not the expression of what has already been expressed or directly prepared for in other artistic objects, and is the expression of that which is the point of departure for a sequence of expressions. The greater the freshness of

the expressions for which it serves as point of departure, privileged is the moment after being absent.

of its first appearance

Some nontrivial consequences

the more

or of its reappearance

follow from the consideration

of the

object’s freshness. First, neither the author of the object nor any segment of the object’s actual, as opposed to possible, audience can guarantee the freshness of the object. Second, no segment of the object’s

Types of Discourse and Silence

47

actual audience can definitely certify it as stale. Third, authors can express something fresh even if they do not aim to do so. Fourth, what was once fresh may not always be fresh, but it may become so

again. That is, the freshness of the object is not an intrinsic property of the object nor is it exhaustively determined either by the author or by any actual present audience.” There are obvious and important distinctions to be made within the sphere of artistic discourse. The discourse of the performing arts is

markedly different from that of the nonperforming arts such as sculp-

ture. Similarly, the discourse of the primarily visual arts is quite different from that of the primarily aural arts. And both of these are noticeably different from the discourse of the dramatic arts. But these

differences need not be explored here. It will be sufficient simply to point out key characteristics artistic discourse.

of the silence

which

is involved

in all

The yielding conjoined to artistic utterance is that which surrenders

what is customary or habitual, what has gone before and is now sedimented in routine. Artistic discourse is bound by the requirement to overcome the tendency to blindness which commonplace discourse threatens to induce. Far from being merely a gratuitous form of play, artistic discourse must overcome the referential values of routine dis-

course in order to allow new expressions of the meaning of reality to

be articulated.”4

The yielding at play here binds author and audience to one another in a unique way. The bonds between them are not pretested by time. Or better, their relationship is not mediated by what is already established as a definite and settled medium in which author and audience can meet. In the yielding which is intertwined with artistic utterance, both author and audience assume risks. The author risks being either unintelligible or not understood. The audience risks either wast-

ing its resources or having its stable world shaken. This yielding, with its peculiar binding and joining, is motivated by

a twofold recognition. On the one hand, every previous human utterance and deed, taken either singly or in collections, is seen to have failed to articulate or even to prepare

for the articulation of what is

presently available for utterance. On the other hand, both the author

and audience take themselves to be capable, for the first time ever, respectively of uttering and of hearing something new. Together they embark upon a new venture.

48

SILENCE But even in embarking

upon

this new

venture,

all the participants

confront in awe the inexhaustibleness of that to which their utterances refer. The universe is unencompassable in discourse and, with greater or lesser rapidity, reveals the need for new utterances. Even that which the present audience and author are capable of expressing is

recognized from the outset as that which sooner or later will have to yield to another, unforeseeable utterance. Thus, the new utterance itself at the very

moment

of its origin,

is infected

with

that

silence

which reveals not merely the finitude of previous artistic discourse but precisely its own finitude.

This brief delineation of significant differences among types of topic-centered discourse and the specific silences which are conjoined with each type provides further evidence of the complexity of the positive phenomenon of silence. But it leaves open the question of

how these multiple worlds hold together so that individual people can inhabit several or all of them

at the same time and so that communi-

ties of people who give different weights to these several worlds can not only endure but even prosper. Indeed, as John Stuart Mill hints, it may be that they actually enrich each other’s lives by the diversity

of the weights which each person or group assigns to the worlds they respectively inhabit. This issue, naturally, is not confined to the region of topic-centered discourse. It extends to the question of how the

topic-centered and the interlocutor-centered regions are held together and yet are preserved in their distinctiveness. Further reflection on the silences which are conjoined with the sev-

eral types of discourse provides a lead to at least part of the solution to this question. It shows that, in the terms used in Chapter One, each of these silences

is a kind

of fore-and-after

silence. That is, each

of

them opens the way for an utterance which is not merely a continuation of the preceding string of utterances. Further, these silences bring to a close a string of utterances belonging to a specific type of discourse. And, finally, each of these silences can be said to be the back-

ground against which an utterance or sequence of utterances unfolds. But if silence is a positive, and not merely a negative, human performance, then what determines whether and when one type of dis-

course, with its conjoined fore-and-after silence, is to give way to another type? This is tantamount to the pun-sounding question: What

silences these several particular silences and that for which each serves as a filigreed background?

That is, what calls for the termination of,

Types of Discourse and Silence say, the

fore-and-after silence

against which

49

a particular

act of reli-

gious worship with its utterances unfolds and the subsequent opening for a fore-and-after silence against which a particular political discussion can be articulated? That some such “thing” does silence these particular silences is indicated by the evident poverty of a life lived almost exclusively in either the interlocutor-centered region of discourse or the topic-centered region, to say nothing of the poverty of a life lived almost exclusively in only one or a few types of one of these regions. At least

part of that which measures the scope to be allotted to each type of discourse, that which

IV.

silences particular silences, is tradition.

TRADITION REGIONS

Tradition

includes,

of course,

AND

OF

THE

TWO

DISCOURSE

sedimented

utterances,

for

example,

sayings, which show up in utterances belonging to every type of discourse, whether interlocutor-centered

or topic-centered. They

infect,

at least at some levels, every sort of discourse. But tradition itself is not simply

a set of sedimented

utterances

plus sedimented

ways

of

doing things. Rather, it is at bottom an allotment, understood both as a process and as the result of a process. Tradition allots to each “thing,” each world, and each type of discourse both its space and time in which to appear and its relative weight. The weight of each need not be directly proportional to its extent. For example, religious discourse may be allotted a briefer span than political discourse but still be allotted greater weight. But in allotting to each “thing’’ its place to appear, tradition likewise restrains it, keeps it from usurping something else’s place. I will not attempt to give a detailed account of tradition here. For present purposes it is enough simply to note some of its principal characteristics. Tradition has no clear-cut points of origin, transition, or termination. But it is nonetheless unquestionably a temporal phenomenon. Tradition is the synthesis of a vast multiplicity of human performances. But no individual person can autonomously ensure that any of his particular performances will have effective weight in it.

That is, in addition to unifying a multiplicity of performances, tradition exercises a selectivity both in what it preserves and in how it evaluates what it preserves. Even though this selection and evalua-

50

SILENCE

tion come about through human performances, they cannot be attributed exclusively to the explicit choices of identifiable individual

people. Tradition, to use Ricoeur’s distinction again, does not belong exclusively to either a situation or a world. Rather, it somehow makes both situations and worlds possible. How tradition contributes to the possibility of both situations and worlds will become clearer in the

light of the ontological interpretation mulated in Chapter Six. Tradition, then, is fertile. It provides

of silence which will be forfor those who

live under

its

sway (1) some of the necessary antecedents for present and future discourse; (2) a loose but not indeterminate orientation for subsequent utterances; (3) a guide to what is appropriate subject matter for each

of the regions of discourse; and (4) clues to the bounds of acceptable rhythms

for the shuttling between

the regions

of interlocutor-cen-

tered and topic-centered discourse. It makes no sense to speak about the first human utterance. Every utterance follows in the wake of some utterance that has gone before. To be an utterance, a human performance must both have discernible utterances as antecedents and be compatible with the orientation furnished by those antecedents. Tradition supplies both the antecedents and the orientation. Similarly, there is no evident justification for claiming that there is some ahistorical foundation for the discrimination between the re-

gions of interlocutor-centered and topic-centered discourse in terms of the subject matter appropriate to each, or in terms of their relative dignity, or in terms

of the appropriate

allocation of time

and

space

to each of them. Nonetheless, it is commonly acknowledged, in deed if not in word, that the regions must be distinguished in at least some of these respects. It is likewise generally acknowledged that to lead a

normal life a person must shuttle both between these two regions and among at least some of the types of discourse within each region. While no positive fixed rules mandate the adoption of one or more

well-defined rhythms of shuttling among types of discourse, the sway which is to be given to any particular type or region of discourse has at least fuzzy limits. It is tradition which reveals and maintains these limits. In this sense, as indicated above, tradition prevents any world of discourse from achieving absolute hegemony over other worlds. No world, not even that of politics or of religion, is permitted to be the unchallenged “world of worlds.” By the same token, tradition pre-

Types of Discourse and Silence

51

serves each world. It ensures that no world’s space will be taken over by another world. Tradition, then,

conserves

and

saves

but

also

forgets

and

sloughs

off. It retains, but it does so in such a way that it provides a future. Tradition is a fertile point of departure, but it is no more than a point of departure. If the future utterances for which

way

do not go beyond

this point

tradition prepares the

of departure

but rather merely

repeat what tradition retains, then tradition ossifies. In these respects, the relationship between tradition and the present and future utterances for which it prepares the way is comparable to that which ob-

tains between langue or language and parole or speech.

First, as language gives unity to speaking, so tradition gives unity to multiple occurrences of present discourse. Present discourse aims at

becoming part of that interrelated ensemble of linguistically formu-

lated judgments, in Husserl’s broad sense, which are time and again accepted, verified as true, or at least confirmed as meaningful. In effect, present discourse aims at becoming part of the tradition which

future generations of people will accept. Like parole, then, present discourse makes sense only if it is fitted into a context larger than itself, a context which involves discourse other than that in which the present authors are engaged. Second, language is not a function of the speaker but rather is pas-

sively assimilated by the individual. Similarly, tradition does not get its specific

intentional

efficacy exclusively from

the discourse of any

presently performing person, but rather, tradition is presupposed for the intentional efficacy of any present discourse and in fact contributes an efficacy of its own. This relationship explains in part why we are unable completely and definitively to determine just what our discourse will mean and to ensure that our audience will understand it in precisely the way we try to prescribe, From another standpoint, the dependence of present discourse upon tradition for its intentional efficacy is part of the reason the author is never the unqualifiedly best interpreter of his own discourse. Present discourse, then, is not engaged in at the expense of tradition but rather

takes its point of departure

from tradition and acquires its own

full

significance in and through its connection with tradition. Third, tradition, like language, evolves. But no person or group of persons can be cited as having full control over either the pace or the

direction of the evolution. With respect to language, the French Aca-

52

SILENCE

demy

is guided

as much

as it guides. With

respect to tradition, a far

more complex matter than language, something like the French Academy has not even been tried. Nonetheless, tradition, like language, is both invigorated and modified through present discourse. Present discourse is necessary for the maintenance of lively tradition. Finally, like language, tradition limits both the scope and the degree of newness which can be effected by present discourse. But this limitation is not lamentable. Rather, it is a necessary condition for present discourse to achieve enduring efficacy. Far from cancelling the free-

dom of present authors, tradition enables their freedom to have an influence which

outlives them. In fact, like language, tradition pro-

vides both for continuity and for the change which continuity necessarily implies. Thus, to use de Saussure’s distinctions again, tradition,

like language,

has

both

synchronic

and

diachronic

dimensions.

As

such, tradition is not an immobile system. It is an open texture which requires newness or change to survive. But from a different standpoint, tradition bears striking similarities to silence, as well as to langue. In one respect, tradition, like silence, involves a yielding, here to the claims of what has gone before, which also involves a binding and joining. Tradition binds the new generation of people to the older generation.*® Adherence to tradition is motivated by finitude and awe. On the one hand, an awareness of the

vastness of reality which a person must confront with relatively meager resources evokes a sense of finitude. On the other hand, aware-

ness of the riskiness involved in one’s capacity to do something new evokes

awe.

In another respect,

tradition, like fore-and-after

silence,

is the background against which present and future utterances of all types unfold. And like the deep silence of the to-be-said, tradition is the unutterable criterion which both authorizes utterances and provides norms for their interpretation. Tradition has these characteristics because it itself is in part con-

stituted by silence. But it itself is not silence. Tradition itself must be silenced if it is to remain fertile and not ossify. It is so constituted that it calls for continued renovation. To paraphrase the Lutheran dictum: Tradition is always to be reformed. This renovation could not occur if tradition itself were not conjoined with silence. What silences tradition is not the new utterance as utterance. It is

that

active

performance

which

allots to tradition

its place

as old

utterance conjoined with its own proper sort of silence. In so doing,

Types of Discourse and Silence

53

this performance is itself an act of silence. Of course, the allotting of tradition as old utterance to a bounded place, far from abolishing tradition or rendering it impotent, preserves it as powerful. For, as I said above, the new utterance can be an utterance only if it has been

prepared for by previous utterances. But it can be new only if the old is restrained within a delimited place.

In summary, tended

the investigations presented in this chapter have ex-

the results achieved

in Chapter

One.

They

have

shown

that

just as discourse has many facets, so too does silence. Each distinct facet of discourse, whether of present discourse or of the sedimented

discourse of tradition, shows itself as conjoined with a distinct aspect of silence. These aspects of silence, like the facets positive and not privative phenomena.

But a crucial question remains:

What

of discourse,

are

is the unitary sense of the

complex phenomenon of silence? The investigations in these first two chapters have shown its complexity. But the essential features which characterize silence in all of its ways of appearing can be established only by an intentional analysis of silence.

[3] An Intentional Analysis of Silence

IN THE course of the first two chapters, the complexity of the phenomenon

of silence has been

displayed.

Silence

appears sometimes

as

fragile and other times as sturdy, sometimes as benign and other times

as malign. It also appears as that which enters into the constitution of different

regions

and

types

of

discourse.

This

plethora

of ways

in

which silence appears raises the question of just how silence is to be most basically characterized. That is, the unifying sense, the essence,

of the phenomenon of silence has yet to be distilled and brought to light precisely as the fundamental sense which is at the root of every occurrence of any sort of silence. The distillation of the fundamental sense of silence requires a careful intentional analysis of this complex

phenomenon. This analysis will use heuristically a method

derived

basically from Husserl.' Thus the first question to be asked is whether, in the phenomenon of silence, one can specify both noetic and noematic correlates. The second task in this analysis is to uncover the genesis of the sense of silence.

I.

SILENCE

AND

NOETIC-NOEMATIC

THE SCHEME

In trying to identify the noetic and noematic correlates in the phenomenon of silence, one could take a clue from the obvious connection between silence and discourse. One might then propose that the noemata of silence are the same as those of the utterances to which the silence is correlated. The intentional matter both of these utterances and of silence would then be the same. On this proposal, what distinguishes silence from discourse is the quality of the noesis, the in-

An Intentional Analysis of Silence

55

tentional act, and nothing else. The x which is either uttered or kept by silence from being uttered is the same. In other words, the apparently obvious candidate for the noematic

element in silence is the set of all the things, all the expressions— verbal, gestural, or musical—which it is motivatedly possible for the author of an utterance to employ or refrain from employing. Abstaining from employing any or all of these expressions is on the face of it a positive performance and thus an act which could be taken to be the noetic correlate of the phenomenon of silence. Silence then would be the positive abstinence from employing some determinate

expression. Before this proposal is assessed, two clarifications should be made. First, the only expressions which are candidates here for the noematic element of silence are those which it is motivatedly, not merely emptily (merely noncontradictorily or noncountersensically), possible

for some specific utterer to employ. Thus the set of expressions which are motivatedly available for the violinist Isaac Stern both to play and to hear include many expressions which are not motivatedly available for the young child either to employ or to hear. Second, the proposal in question presupposes an already constituted realm of determinate expressions. Exactly how such a realm would come about or be internally structured is irrelevant here. The relevant point is that, on

the proposal at hand, both every occurrence of silence and every

actual utterance would be exhaustively dependent for their motivated possibility upon an antecedently established predicative realm containing determinate expressions as its elements. Several considerations arising out of the description of the manifest occurrences of silence, considerations which led in Chapter One to the identification of the aspects of fore-silence and deep silence, stand in the way of accepting this proposal. The basic problem is that the proposal cannot account for all occurrences of silence. Three cases of silence will illustrate this point. The proposal appears to work well in the first case, creaks in the second, and falls apart in the third. In case 1, A abstains from uttering x to make way for an uttering of

y by A or someone else, where x and y are both determinate members of the set of motivatedly employable both the utterances in question

expressions.” In this case

and the occurrence

of silence clearly

depend exhaustively upon the domain of the predicative as an already

56

SILENCE

constituted domain containing determinate expressions. The proposal in question seems to handle cases of this sort with ease. In case 2, however, suppose that y is not presently determinate. For example, I meet someone and give him a chance, by abstaining from

employing all presently determinate expressions available to me, to utter something mew, something that I presently have neither any notion

or experience

of nor

any

specifiable

reason

to think

that

this

somebody can utter. Instead of, as in case 1, uttering or abstaining from uttering some determinate x to someone, I simply keep silence before him. Whether or not this person does or even can avail himself of the opening I provide for something new to be uttered, I have accomplished silence and can say that “he had his chance.” Parenthetically, so far as I can tell, this someone can be one’s own self. For example, a poet can “get quiet” to see whether he can say something new even to himself.

About what, in case 2, am I silent? I am silent about the set of already determinate motivatedly performable or expectable utterances for the sake of some not presently determinate but hopefully to be determined utterance. Here the silence before y is of a different character than the silence before y in case 1. In case 1, the silence is close to intervening silence inasmuch as the y is substantially predelineated by the x. This predelineation is precisely what is absent in case 2. Further, in case 1, fulfillment of the intention is virtually assured, whereas in case 2 fulfillment is much more open to doubt.

If genuine cases of this second sort exist, as evidently they do, then the proposal under

consideration

here must

be interpreted as presup-

posing only a set of determinate expressions to which additions can be made. If the proposal is to be defended, it cannot be taken to require that the set of determinate expressions already be complete. How such additions must be understood to come about if the proposal

is to be saved will be indicated after case 3 is presented. Case 3 involves an experience of deep silence. For present purposes I will concentrate on the mode of deep silence called liturgical silence in Chapter One. But a consideration of other modes of deep silence would also yield cases of the third sort. In some instances, liturgical silence leaves room for the uttering of some possible but not presently determinate expressions. But it does not thereby either explicitly expect such an utterance or even necessarily hope for one. That is, some liturgical silence does not call for an expression to be uttered to ful-

An Intentional Analysis of Silence fill it. Whatever

57

it is that the abstaining here intends, no particular

utterance as such is necessary to fulfill it. The worshiper abstains from

uttering expressions for the sake of what is, in intention, not necessarily utterable.*

What is of special interest in cases 2 and 3 is that the silence intends something not presently determinate. Silence here intends the nondeterminate. How can I silently intend the nondeterminate?* I can do so

only by abstaining from employing any element of the concrete set of determinate expressions available to me. Given the protentional dimension of all attending to what is deter-

minate, here a concrete set of determinate expressions, the abstaining is a severing or detaching from absorption in the set of actual and motivatedly possible expressions in which I had been living. It in-

volves a change of interest. In principle, the set of motivated determinate expressions in which I had been living is inexhaustible. That is, in principle, without shifting from that set I could engage in and abstain from utterance forever. The severing is an interference with the stream of utterances and silences which would “naturally” follow, in a sense akin to Husserl’s sense of “and so forth,” from what had hitherto been uttered or constituted as utterable. The silence involved

in cases 2 and 3 appears as a rupturing of this sort of “and so forth.” Can the proposal under consideration here—namely, the proposal that every occurrence of silence and every actual utterance are ex-

haustively dependent for their motivated possibility upon an antecedently

established

predicative

realm

containing

determinate

expres-

sions as its elements—handle the ruptures involved in cases 2 and 3? What has been said thus far would seem to indicate that even the silences involved in cases 2 and 3 follow upon and in some sense presuppose the prior uttering of some determinate expression as the foun-

dation of their possibility. That is, apparently something

old has to

have been uttered before way can be made for something new. In fact, the way in which this proposal would have to handle these

ruptures is precisely by claiming that whatever followed the ruptures already belonged to the inner horizon, in a sense of this term akin to

Husserl’s, of the concrete set of determinate expressions available to the interlocutors. The new would have to be simply an actualization of possibilities either fully resident or at least substantially delineated in the set of old, determinate expressions. In effect, then, the change

of interest, the severing of the “and so forth” would amount to no

58

SILENCE

more

than

a shift from

remaining

content

with

previous

possessions

to an exploration of what those possessions might generate as further possessions. Since a thing’s inner horizon is given with the thing and is available

for exploration,

then

the silences, the ruptures,

involved

in

cases 2 and 3 as well as the something new which is uttered could be said to be dependent upon an already established realm of determinate expressions for their motivated possibility.

This sort of application of the proposal to case 3, however, is patently unacceptable. By hypothesis, no new determinate expression is intended by the silence involved in case 3. Whatever is intended

by this silence simply cannot be construed as belonging to the antecedently established inner horizon of old, determinate expressions. Even if the uttering of some new expression does occur, the new expression cannot be construed as being fundamentally dependent upon the old, because the occurrence

of the new expression is not essential

for the fulfillment of the silence which ruptures the “and so forth.” A further consideration of the silence which opens the way for uttering something new likewise shows that the application of the pro-

posal to case 2 is not satisfactory. This point can be illustrated by modifying

case 2. Instead of noticing the silence which,

after the ut-

tering of x, opened the way for the hoped for but not presently determinate y, consider what

opened

the way

for the now

already deter-

minate x. What is the shift of interest involved there? The shift which initially opens the way for any discourse whatsoever is that which Husserl describes as the move from pre-predicative experience to predicative experience.®

The domain of discourse can be established only if there is a shift away

from

the pre-predicative,

spontaneous exploration

of one’s sur-

roundings. In principle, one could continue simply attending pre-predicatively to his surroundings ad infinitum. The cut which interrupts the “and so forth” of this spontaneity is a radical shift in interest. This cut is required if any expression is to be possible. If this is correct, then a certain kind of silence is a necessary condi-

tion for any expression whatsoever. This kind of silence, by interrupting the stream of pre-predicative experience, makes expression possible but it does not predelineate any specific set of determinate expressions. Nor does it abstain from any specific moment of pre-predicative experience, which specific moment might be taken as sufficient to elicit

some

predelineated

determinate

expression.

Rather

this

originary

An Intentional Analysis of Silence silence simply

detaches one from

59

absorption in spontaneous,

pre-pre-

dicative experience. This kind of silence, of course, is not a sufficient condition for expression. Unless perception had occurred there would be nothing to express. But this silence is a necessary condition. Now if these considerations are brought to bear upon case 2, the

following points become clear. First, even if the silence which detaches from the “and so forth” of the stream of determinate expressions x to open the way for a hoped-for y somehow belongs to the inner horizon of x, the kind of silence which is a necessary condition for any expression whatsoever cannot be part of the inner horizon

of x. This fact undercuts a necessary presupposition of the proposal under consideration, the presupposition that prior to any silence or actual utterance there is an already constituted realm of fully determinate expressions. The only way to save the proposal seems to re-

quire the claim that the silence which opens the way for the predicative domain and the silences which occur once the predicative domain has been inaugurated are not aspects of the unitary phenomenon of silence but rather are different phenomena. I can find no good reason to accept this claim. Second, even if one grants the claim that there are these two unrelated silences, the further claim needed to apply the proposal to

case 2, namely, that both the y and the silence which opens the way for it are fully dependent upon x, is gratuitous until it is specified just what it is about x that motivates its own interruption. In the absence of such a motivation, one could effectively maintain that y and the

silence that opens the way for it are fully dependent upon x only by collapsing case 2 back into case 1. But such a collapsing is ruled out by

hypothesis. There is, then, no apparent reason for assigning any priority other than a temporal one to x over y and the silence which opens the way

for y. And

temporal

priority

is inconsequential

in this con-

text.

Thus the proposal being considered cannot satisfactorily account for the silence which is requisite for the emergence of the domain of discourse, or for the occurrence of some new expression available for utterance, or for the silence which arises in connection with the domain of discourse.° Even though silence and the domain of discourse

are clearly intertwined, there is no foundation for claiming that silence

in all of its dimensions is founded upon a realm of expression. The suggestion

that abstaining

could

be

identified

as the noetic

correlate

in

60

SILENCE

silence and that some set of determinate expressions could be identified as its noematic correlate is not acceptable. All that one can say, on the basis of the examination of the three

cases given above, is that silence is an abstaining from some previously

engaged in stream of experience. As such it is an act rather than a spontaneous performance. The peculiar act quality or noetic element constitutive of silence is the severing or detaching from some specific

set of performances, predicative or pre-predicative, which in principle could continue indefinitely without interruption. But to say this is to provide only a formal characterization of the noetic correlate involved in silence.

Similarly, at this level of analysis, one can only give a formal characterization of the noematic correlate. The “and so forth” of a specific set of performances which is abstained from is no more than a formal characteristic of that from which silence originates. This “and so forth” obviously is not everything that the severing intends. The discussion of the three cases above shows that, at least in some cases, silence is a positive phenomenon, whose “noematic correlate,” whatever it is, is not merely the noematic correlate of a determinate expression which an author refuses to utter. But at this level of analysis nothing determinate can be specified as the intentional matter of silence. If no intentional matter can be identified for every occurrence of the phenomenon of silence, then a

fortiori the noematic correlate can be no more than merely formally

specified. Since

a determinate intentional object is not involved in

each and every occurrence of silence, some occurrences of silence— case 3 is an example of such an occurrence—involve no determinate noematic phases. Thus, an analysis of silence in terms of the noetic-noematic

scheme

yields little more than sheerly formal characteristics of the phenomenon of silence. Nonetheless,

the application of this scheme

to the

phenomenon of silence has not been useless. It has revealed the point of departure for the abstaining involved in silence. It has allowed the specification of that abstaining as a severing or detaching. And

finally, it has shown that, however intimately silence is associated with the domain of discourse, there is no justification for saying that silence is in all respects exhaustively stituted realm of expression.

founded

upon

an already

con-

Thus a noetic-noematic analysis does go some way toward clarify-

An Intentional Analysis of Silence

61

ing the formal sense of the phenomenon of silence. But it leaves open major questions concerning both the motivation for silence and its intrinsic material sense. The next three sections are addressed to these two issues.

Il.

THE

GENESIS DISCOURSE

OF

SILENCE

FROM

PRE-PREDICATIVE

AND

THE DOMAIN

For the second, genetic, stage of the intentional analysis of silence,

the point of departure is again the evident close connection between silence and discourse. The actual structure of discourse, as mentioned in Chapter Two, is: A utters p about x to B, where A and B are usually but not necessarily different persons. The

analysis naturally falls

into two parts: the genesis of p from x, the genesis of the predicative from

pre-predicative,

will

be

dealt with

here;

the

genesis

of inter-

personal discourse, in the next section. In Appendix III of the Crisis, Husserl writes: Every sort of communication naturally presupposes the commonality of the surrounding world, which is established as soon as we are persons for one another at all—though this can be completely empty,

inactive. But it is something else to have them as fellows in communal life,

to talk

with

them,

to share

their

concerns

and

strivings,

to

be

bound to them in friendship and enmity, love and hate. It is only here that we enter the sphere of the social-historical world.” I take it for granted that Husserl is correct here in identifying both the commonality of the surrounding world and the recognized multiplicity of persons as necessary presuppositions for all discourse. The

questions now are: What motivates the shift from the inactive empty possibility of discourse to actual discourse? And what development of sense occurs through this shift which inaugurates the unfolding of the sociohistorical sphere in discourse? A further useful clue can be gleaned from Husserl, though his concerns in this context are clearly different from what is at issue here. The shift from the inactive empty possibility of discourse to actual or motivatedly possible discourse is a shift from the non-thematic to the thematic. Now, to make thematic is

62

SILENCE in a certain sense . . . to “abstract,” although this must [not] at first (and thus not necessarily) be understood as an active abstractingfrom-something

but rather, as is usual, only

[as] an exclusive

looking-

at-something which consequently notices nothing else. These

clues provide the basis for proposing that the motivation for

the shift to actual discourse lies in the capacity of what is given prepredicatively to be made

thematic, coupled

with

the availability of

other persons to whom the discourse can be addressed. Making something thematic, by itself, is not enough to move into the predicative

domain.

But it does constitute what

is made

thematic

as something

determinate.

Actually the shift from the inactive, empty possibility of discourse to motivated discourse involves three distinguishable cuts or sever-

ings. The first is an “exclusive looking-at-something which consequently notices nothing else.”® This cut segments the pregiven whole’ of spontaneous, pre-predicative experience, rendering each theme determinate. There is a sense in which the severed themes are made “mine,” thus lifting the anonymity which characterizes non-thematized spontaneous, pre-predicative experience.

The second cut is that which cancels the putative exclusive “mineness”

of my

determinate

themes

and

conversely

opens

the

way

for

recognizing that what another thematizes in his perceptual experience can become available to me. It is this second cut which penultimately lays the foundation for and motivates discourse. Thus, the first cut

opens the way for a individualized, differentiated world as the totality of that which can be made determinate. The second cut opens the way for this differentiated world to be a social one. And together they provide almost everything necessary for the constitution of the sociohistorical world.

It should be noticed, however,

that both of these cuts interrupt

what I called in Section I an “and so forth.” The first cut interrupts the anonymous stream of passive, nondeterminate, pre-predicative ex-

perience which apparently could, in principle, flow on indefinitely as non-thematic, This cut itself does not constitute any particular determinate theme but is presupposed for any such constitution. The cut itself, however, precipitates out one’s own individuality as an individ-

ual self which can thematize this stream of passive experience.” But this precipitated self is itself senseless and empty until it actually the-

An Intentional Analysis of Silence

63

matizes. And even when this self is rendered senseful by thematizing the passive stream of experience, the realm of the predicative, of expression, has not yet been reached.

The second cut interrupts the self’s thematizing activity and acknowledges that there are other selves who thematize.!? Thus, though

the individual self could in principle uninterruptedly and indefinitely explore the set of determinate objects together with their determinate or determinable horizons which are constituted by its own thematizing, it realizes that this set cannot exhaust the possibility of thematizing. And in fact other thematizing, which itself cannot exhaust the possibility of thematizing, occurs. The second cut, unlike the first, interrupts a stream of determinations. It opens the way for encountering determinate thematizations

performed by other thematizers. Though this cut occurs prior to entry into the predicative domain, it provides the basis for both uttering and listening. It has the effect of shifting from the “and so forth” of what falls within the range of one thematizer’s unaided ex-

ploration to a concern for what can be thematized only with help from another thematizer. This cut, together with the first cut, opens the way for thematizing determinate objects as, in principle, public objects. But these cuts are still not sufficient, of themselves, to open the way for discourse. For discourse to be possible a third cut is required.

This third cut suspends the entire stream of perceptual experience by distancing the thematizer from what has up to now absorbed his

thematic interest. This cut opens the way for signifying performances or discourse properly so called. It is neither an element of discourse nor does it enter positively into the actual constitution of determinate

elements of discourse. Rather it suspends the peculiar “and so forth” which characterizes thematized perceptual experience, thus providing space for mediating perceptual experience through symbols and signs.14 This third cut is motivated by the recognition that perceptual experience is, in principle, incapable of ascertaining with confidence any

more than that there is a common ence,

what

the sense

or

content

world. Within perceptual experiof that public

world

might

be can

only be hypothetical. Exhaustive reliance upon the “and so forth” of perceptual experience cannot remedy

this situation. The

only remedy

64

SILENCE

is to attempt to overcome or at least mitigate the restrictions imposed by the specific perspectival character or perceptual experience. These recognized restrictions are enough to motivate and give sense to this

third cut. And this cut, when joined to the first two, is sufficient to found a motivatedly possible domain of discourse. The first two cuts and the performances for which

they open the

way make possible and actually achieve the constitution of what might be called determinate intentional matter. In effect, they constitute a world as the totality of differentiated and differentiatable ob-

jects of perceptual experience. Each of these

two cuts is directly

oriented to the elaboration of the differentiations which

can be made

on the basis of originary, passive, spontaneous, anonymous experience. The third cut, however, interrupts the entire “and so forth” of the perceptual, concrete experience of a differentiated world. In so doing, it does not primordially aim at further elaboration of differentiations of fundamentally the same sort. Rather it opens the way for the self to mediate its perceptual experience both to itself and to other selves through symbolic performances which can be both initiated and received. Though an argument might be made which would show that even the first of these three cuts is indeed an occurrence of silence, I will limit myself to claiming that at least the third cut is unquestionably an occurrence of silence. By limiting my claim in this way, I clearly respect the common sense view that silence and discourse are intimately intertwined. But more importantly, by restricting my claim, I respect the distinction between the perceptual and pictorial performances of consciousness on the one hand and its signitive performances on the other. The cut which decisively opens the way for the shift from perceptual performances to signitive performances is of special interest because of its role in opening the way for the entire domain of discourse, for opening the way for the sociohistorical world. It is precisely this third cut which is the originary fore-silence mentioned in Chapter One. This

analysis,

thus

far, has explicated

in the formula for discourse:

sufficiently

the

p and

the

x

A utters p about x to B. That is, the

analysis has shown how something comes to be sayable. Now attention can be turned to the A and the B. What can this analysis of silence reveal about the authors and the audience involved in discourse?

An Intentional Analysis of Silence Ill.

THE

GENESIS

DIMENSIONS

OF OF

THE BOTH

65

INTERPERSONAL SILENCE

AND

DISCOURSE The complex domain of discourse permits the identification both of distinct levels of interpersonal involvement in discourse and of

cuts, or silences, between the levels. There are three basic levels, each of which is itself complex.!® The first level of is effected with some degree of anonymity. It taken in a broad sense. Both the author of the ber or members of the intended audience are unique individuals.

discourse is that which is the level of soliloquy, utterance and the memnot fully thematized as

The Level of Soliloquy in the Broad Sense The level of soliloquy is itself complex, shapes. The description of the complexity

appearing in three distinct of soliloquy will be facili-

tated by drawing examples from Molly Bloom’s soliloquy in James Joyce’s Ulysses. Her soliloquy contains a number of different sorts of sentences. Some express generalizations, others explanations, or counterfactuals, or quotations, or wishes, or specific clock-time locations, etc. Several sentences have no definite grammatical subject. A few rare sentences indicate some reflection, in the form of either of a plan or of an evaluation. These different sorts of sentences illustrate at least in part how complex soliloquy is.!® One shape in which the level of soliloquy appears is that in which the perceptual, imaginative, or pictorial theme to be expressed, though now suspended by the cut which opens the way for the predicative

domain, fully regulates and determines the discourse. Discourse here is merely anonymous soliloquy. In this shape, discourse can signify only determinate themes. It cannot signify determinate thematizings. In this shape, everything expressed is in principle that which could be uttered by anyone to anyone. On the one hand, whoever engages in this shape of discourse does not, in so doing, express anything of his own specific individuality. On the other hand, the question of the sameness or otherness of the A who utters with respect to the B who hears does not even arise. Examples of this shape show up in Molly’s soliloquy in those sentences with no determinate grammatical subject. The grammatical subject is “you” in the sense of “they” or “I-or-any” one,” in the sense of the French om.

66

SILENCE

A further important aspect of this anonymous soliloquy is that no elaborated temporal scheme is at play. Discourse in this shape utilizes only the grammatical present tense which simply has the force of “now or any time.” In individualized soliloquy, a second shape in which the first level of interpersonal involvement in discourse appears, there is some specification both of the author and of the audience. But what is uttered is merely the “sayings” which have been received from tradition and simply taken over unchanged. Through the traditional “saying” the

discourse here is released from

the dominance of the immediately

available pre-predicative phenomena. But responsibility for the discourse is not yet thematically identified as belonging to the actual author. The author, even though he recognizes his individuality, is still basically a mouthpiece for uttering that which it goes without saying is now to be uttered. In this shape, tradition is a point of departure from which the author has not departed. It is a fertility which has not yet been activated. Examples of this shape of discourse are

found in some of Molly’s generalizations (“They’re [men] so weak and puling when they’re sick.”), explanations (“That is why we had the standup row over politics.”), and quotations from Boylan and Leopold

Bloom.

It is worth noticing that discourse in this shape involves an differentiation between the past and the present, although the is not yet explicit. Similarly, the pronomial scheme available author is now partially differentiated. Molly can speak of I

explicit future to the and he

and they, but there is still no well-defined, individuated second person pronoun available. In fact, neither the you nor the he is thematized as a full-fledged person. The only determinate member of the audience is the author. Discourse in this shape is still soliloquous. But it is no longer anonymous. A

third shape

in which

this level of interpersonal

involvement

in

discourse appears is the most improverished of all shapes of discourse. This shape is that in which prereflective chatter occurs. This chatter is a sort of daydreaming which appears to go on often in us when we are not thinking about or attending to any specific thing. That is, discourse in this shape has no stable theme. We apparently “wake up”

to this chatter already in progress and, unfortunately for purposes of analysis, the awakening

transforms

the chatter.

Once

awakened

we

find it even harder to recall what was going on in this condition than

An Intentional Analysis of Silence

67

to recall what took place in many dreams. We recall only that something was going on and that it might very well have made some sense. This shape of discourse shows no discernible trace of either pronomial or temporal discrimination. It is more accurate to say that upon “awakening” I found a discoursing in me rather than to say I found that I was discoursing. This shape of discourse is, in a strict sense, presoliloquous. Just how the three shapes of this first level are connected to one another is not completely clear. In terms of the actual structure of discourse—namely, A utters p about x to B, where A and B are usually but not necessarily different persons obviously the shape of prereflective chatter barely manifests this structure, the shape of anonymous soliloquy manifests it somewhat better, and the shape of individualized soliloquy manifests it better than either of the other two. Just

as obviously, to progress from anonymous soliloquy to individualized soliloquy a cut or silence seems required. But the difficulty involved in trying to focus on prereflective chatter obscures whether these higher shapes replace chatter or simply hide it by being laid over it. Nonetheless, however this nontrivial difficulty is to be resolved, what is common to the three shapes of soliloquy in the broad sense is that the B, the audience involved in the structure of discourse, is basically unthematized. In sum, in all the shapes of this first level of interpersonal involvement in discourse, the discourse is at bottom regulated and determined by themes which are already fully settled prior to present discourse. Neither the author nor the audience is sufficiently explicit to provide an effective counterweight against a fundamental absorption in themes which are given as already settled and to be taken for granted as the full scope of what is available for discourse. At this level, either the immediate perceptual or imaginative context or that dimension of tradition which is constituted by the sedimented “sayings” and topics for discourse holds full sway. The uttering is no more than a reuttering of what has already been made available for discourse or a minimally reflective response to one’s immediate environment. Nonetheless, even the themes which are given in this way are given as constituted by the thematizing performances of multiple thematizers. This fact motivates the cut which interrupts the absorption in the “and so forth” stream of these preestablished determinate themes.

68

SILENCE

This cut, which I will call personalizing silence, opens the way for making the thematizing itself thematic for discourse, that is for a second level of interpersonal involvement in discourse, a level on

which the thematizer or thematizers, gua thematizers, can be explicitly recognized and signified. This is achieved by opening the way for the noetic component to be explicitly articulated. All the components of the basic structure of all discourse, namely, A utters p about x to B, where A and B may be either the same or different persons, can now be given explicit recognition. Thus the way is opened for a shift

from discourse which is fully under the sway of that which is other than, anterior to, and substantially independent of those who can presently engage in discourse, under the sway of the “contents” of tradition, to discourse which, at least in part, depends, not merely for its occurrence, but also for its sense upon the present authors as those who are responsible both for the uttering and what is uttered.

Personalizing

silence, the cut between

these two

levels of inter-

personal involvement in discourse, does not correspond to any of the aspects of silence identified in Chapter One. Rather it is a distinct aspect in its own right. It is that aspect of silence by virtue of which discourse is released from the dominance of preestablished themes, by virtue of which it becomes possible for discourse to be claimed as that for which one can and does take some responsibility. This way in which silence appears is in fact the aspect from which the sense of the intervening silence discussed in Chapter One is proximately derived.

Explicitly Bipolar Discourse and Silence At the second level, discourse is, with lesser or greater explicitness, thematized both as someone’s discourse and as addressed to some thematized audience. Discourse at this level is explicitly bipolar. It is

intrinsically

interpersonal.

Unlike

the

third

level

of

interpersonal

discourse, which will be dealt with below, interpersonal discourse at this second level, bipolar discourse, in principle requires the specification of two discrete, determinate poles, namely, the author and the

audience. Each of these poles is understood to have its proper role in the discourse. One is to utter, the other is to hear.

Of equal importance, at this level the persons involved in the discourse are understood to exercise initiative and control over the discourse. The participants explicitly determine which of the two rays

An Intentional Analysis of Silence

69

of the act of discoursing, the ray emphasizing the x or the ray emphasizing the B, gets priority. Similarly, what the audience is prepared to hear exercises control over what is uttered, and vice versa. Writing also first becomes possible at the level of bipolar discourse. Writing itself involves a cut which allows for a greater distancing of both what is said and that about which it is said from the author on one hand and the audience on the other. The cut which opens the way for writing comes to be motivated only at this level. Only when both the author and audience are thematized can the shift to writing make sense. More specifically, only when one attends sufficiently to both the author and to the audience to notice that each itself has a horizon

does it make full sense to introduce the distance required for writing. The cut which opens the way for writing, though, does not introduce any substantially new dimension into the phenomena of discourse or silence. Writing remains a special case of discourse. It is a most important capability, to be sure. But writing, for its sense, remains fundamentally dependent upon speaking, gesturing, etc., especially insofar as the latter are not mere soliloquous repetitions of traditional utterances.!” The second level of interpersonal involvement in discourse, the level of bipolar discourse, is itself complex. It appears in two basic shapes,

monologue and dialogue. There is a discernible cut between them,

which

I will call interpersonalizing silence. In the first shape, mono-

logue, the author claims maximal control over the discourse and minimizes the audience’s initiative. But even here the author cannot claim exhaustive control. On the basis of the recognition of other thematizing selves, who can thematize other things than he does or expects to do on his own, the author has to acknowledge the audience’s initia-

tive, however minimal it may be. Otherwise there is no monologue,

only soliloquy. This same recognition of other thematizers also motivates the author to cut off his monologue. This cut, interpersonalizing silence, opens a space for another self to address the initial author.!8

Interpersonalizing silence opens the way shape

for dialogue, the second

of discourse at this level. In this shape there is the permanent

possibility of both a shifting of roles (the hearer becomes the author)

and a blocking a some utterance (the audience leaves). This blocking is not of itself a cut of the sort in question here, for the audience may

simply “turn the dial” to another speaker. The kind of cut at play here is also the penultimate

foundation

for the possibility

of a shift

70

SILENCE

from bipolar discourse, discourse in which the hearer is distinct from

and in correlative opposition to the author, to the third level of interpersonal

involvement

in

discourse,

namely,

level will be dealt with below. Interpersonalizing silence opens the way

to engage in discourse audience,

change

topics,

the act of discoursing.

codiscourse.

This

third

not only for another self

but also for the original author to change or change

In this

the

sense,

priority

of the

too, occurrences

two

rays

of

of interper-

sonalizing silence interrupt the “and so forth” of specific monologues. The depth of the cut which occurs between these two shapes depends upon the sort of case in which it occurs. In case 1 of the noeticnoematic analysis, the cut is incomplete and rather superficial. The dis-

course which follows such a cut is simply a more or less attenuated

monologue. In case 2, the cut is more radical and genuine dialogue results. No ment.

case 3 silences occur at this level of interpersonal involve-

Occurrences of case 1

silence, it is worth

mentioning

here, involve

what might be called I-he discourse. The he is partially determinate but is still taken to be someone for whom substitutes can readily be found. Occurrences of case 2 silence involve what can be called I-you discourse. The

you

is more

determinate

than the he. That

is, substi-

tution, if possible at all, is more restricted than in occurrences of case 1 silence. Codiscourse and Silence

The first two levels of interpersonal involvement in discourse, namely, the level of soliloquous discourse and that of personal bipolar dis-

course, together with the cut between them, are foundational for a higher level of discourse, codiscourse. In codiscourse the distinction between author and audience is sublated. There is no longer an I-you. There is now a we. Any observers of the discourse are in principle

irrelevant. Examples of such codiscourse are the discourse between intimates (in hate or indifference as well as in love), making music together, and participating in festivals or rituals. Deindividualizing silence, the cut which inaugurates this third level, is the interruption of all the streams of expressive performances which

are properly identifiable as the autonomous utterances of some proper subset of the set of participants in the discourse. Such streams of utterances are those which some one or several persons can accomplish

An Intentional Analysis of Silence

71

regardless of what their fellow participants in the discourse do. The streams of utterances which occur at the second level of interpersonal

involvement in discourse are, of course, in practice intertwined with

other streams. But in principle they are separable streams belonging to individualized

selves. At the third level

of interpersonal

involvement,

however, there are in principle no such separable streams. What remotely motivates deindividualizing silence and the level of interpersonal involvement for which it opens the way is the spontaneous, pre-predicative experience of the commonality of the referent, the x, to which the participants in discourse refer in their utterances, in p. Most proximately, what motivates the inauguration of this third level is the anticipation that synchronic discourse can bring to expression something which cannot be articulated diachronically.”° In other words, what motivates the cut is the anticipation that codiscourse or we-discourse can articulate what is in principle inarticulable

by any bipolar discourse, however interwoven the multiple strands of such discourse might in fact be. If one focuses on the cut which opens the way for this third level of discourse, he finds that it interrupts the “and so forth” of the stream of all bipolar discourse, which contains at least implicitly the claim that at least one individual is exercising autonomous control over that stream. Bipolar discourse involves the claim that it is important that it is I, and perhaps also you, who exercise initiative in utter-

ing whatever is uttered. That is, some self fundamentally on his own inherent or acquired authority determines when, where, how, and to whom what is expressed is in fact expressed. Deindividualizing silence suppresses this claim. A shift of focus from this cut to the discourse which occurs at the third level shows that discourse here requires a more or less explicit relinquishing of autonomous contro] to that which is neither properly mine nor some specific other’s. This yielding of autonomy does not imply what is usually meant by “heteronomy.” Nor is it merely a yielding to the claims of x as the subject matter or referent of p. Rather it is a yielding of autonomy for the sake of an interpersonal relationship which is more profound than that which can be established under the sway of autonomy. What elicits discourse at this level

is acknowledged, by the character of the discourse itself, to be a relationship among selves for which properly autonomous performances by the several selves involved might well be necessary conditions but

72

SILENCE

could

not

be sufficient

conditions.

I suggest

that

an

antecedent

re-

quirement for entering into codiscourse, with the attendant yielding

of autonomy, is that which in another contex would be called emotional or psychological maturity or, in still another context, political maturity.?!

It is of course

possible,

in actual

existence,

for a single self to

engage in codiscourse. In such cases, what he utters is not primordially “his” but is what he comes to be able to utter as a member

of a com-

munity of some sort. He says no more and no less than “we” could and would say. He performs the music, engages in the ritual, etc., in such a way that what he does could, without modification, belong to

codiscourse. What

is crucial here is that, without the at least hori-

zonally envisaged and intended coperformers, uttering what he does

in the way he does utter it would make no sense. Within the level of codiscourse derivative cuts can occur, cuts in some ways comparable to those found at the level of bipolar discourse. These derivative cuts, which open the way for the several participants in codiscourse to utter different components of the total discourse, do not reinstitute bipolarity. Rather their sense is to em-

phasize the specificity of the we-ness of the coperformance intrinsic interdependence

both of each participant and of each

and the utter-

ance in the codiscourse. In short, these derivative cuts establish roles

for the several participants. The cut or silence which interrupts the “and so forth” of the level of bipolar discourse and opens the way for the level of codiscourse is the last cut which falls completely within the scope of the sphere of discourse or predication. The three levels of interpersonal involve-

ment

in discourse,

namely,

soliloquy,

bipolar

discourse,

and

codis-

course, together with the cuts between these levels, namely, interpersonalizing silence and deindividualizing silence, jointly exhaust what is to be found within the sphere of the signitive. But the sense of this third level of discourse and the cut which opens the way for it needs further exploration. What is articulated at least implicitly in codiscourse is precisely the commonality of the principal referent, that “whole” to which the discourse in its several components refers, and the in principle commonality of all thematic determinations effected on this whole. From this standpoint, then, both the level of soliloquous discourse and that of bipolar discourse

An Intentional Analysis of Silence

73

are oriented for the completion of their sense to the level of codiscourse. Discourse at the third level is the flowering of that which occurs at the other two levels. What this means is that all living in the domain of discourse calls for participation in all three levels,

though there is, of course, a shuttling within the sphere of discourse from one level to another. Each level coimplicates the others, but every particular utterance occurs at one specific level. The cut which opens the way for the level of codiscourse has at least one important feature which distinguishes it from the other cuts within the domain of discourse. The other cuts all had the effect of

progressively making the discourse more explicitly the performance of

a progressively

other cuts render more

explicitly

well-defined

and

individualized

the act of discourse

polarized

between

self. That

a performance

is, the

progressively

autonomous participants.

The

cut

opening the way for codiscourse changes the direction of this movement. The previous movement toward discrete individuality is now changed to one toward interpersonal coalescence. Curiously, though, if one raises the question of the deliberateness of the cuts or silences within the domain of discourse, he finds that the cut toward codiscourse and interpersonal coalescence is no less deliberate on the part of the several participants than is any of the other cuts within this domain. The individual who performs this cut and moves to the level of codiscourse does not thereby truncate or cancel any of his capacity for discourse. Rather, he experiences a deepening of that capacity. But great care must be exercised in speaking of deliberateness in conjunction with any dimension of the domain of discourse. I will say a bit more about this matter in the final section of this chapter. The cut which opens the way for codiscourse, deindividualizing silence, does not correspond to any of the aspects of silence identified in Chapter One. It opens the way for a shift of the ground which proximately authorizes the signitive intention involved in any utterance whatsoever. It is the counterpart of the aspect of personalizing silence detected between the level of prepersonal or soliloquous discourse and the level of bipolar discourse. Some Intermediate Results The discriminations within the general domain of discourse made in

74

SILENCE

the previous paragraphs clarify or confirm some considerations concerning discourse and silence which are found in Chapters One and Two. First, the aspect of intervening silence and several of the features of the aspect of fore-and-after silence can now be seen to de-

pend for their sense upon the more fundamental constituted sense of

the three levels of basic cuts between

interpersonal involvement in discourse and the these levels. All intervening silences and many

fore-and-after silences are performed in the service of an already in-

augurated stream of discourse occurring at one of the three specific levels of interpersonal involvement. The recognition of this dependency dispels the obscurity which lingered over the discussion of inter-

vening

silence,

fore-and-after

silence,

and

the

connection

between

them in Chapter One. Second, nothing uncovered thus far in the intentional analysis of silence necessarily requires a modification of the claim in Chapter One

that silence can appear as malign as well as benign. Discourse at any

level of interpersonal involvement as well as the cuts between or within these levels can be experienced either as painful, arduous, or hateful, or as enhancing, facilitating, or lovable. This claim concerning affective polyvalence will remain intact even at the conclusion of the intentional analysis. It is an issue which must be addressed by the ontological interpretation of silence. Third, the three levels of interpersonal involvement in discourse and the cuts between them are found both in interlocutor-centered

discourse and in topic-centered discourse. The shuttling between levels

and the shuttling between the interlocutor-centered and the topic-

centered regions are distinct shuttlings which may but need not be coordinated. Likewise, the connection between tradition and these several

levels belongs to.

holds

good

regardless

of

which

region

the

discourse

There is, however, a kind of apex at which topic-centered and interlocutor-centered discourse effectively fuse. An affectively benign example of this is a case in which lovers share each other’s work in

developing some particular world of discourse. Perhaps

the Curies

were a case of this sort. An affectively malign example of this is fratridical warfare. In the former case, a kind of hypermeaningfulness or superdetermination

accrues

to

all of the

discourse

involved.

In

the

latter case, a madness leaves the onlooker or overhearer dumbfounded. These extremes, too, call for ontological clarification.

An Intentional Analysis of Silence IV.

AT

THE

CLOSE

OF

ae

DISCOURSE

Finally, the genetic intentional analysis of silence must deal with the close of discourse.

The

entire

domain

of discourse,

with

its several

levels, is in one sense inexhaustible. Discourse can in principle go on interminably. This is the “and so forth” character of the motivated domain of discourse itself. But the domain of discourse is widely ex-

perienced as either insufficient or incomplete, as unable to cope definitively

with

God,

or

with

immediate

perceptual

experience,

or

with what it is to be a self, or with love, etc. Some instances of such

experiences were described in Chapter One in connection with deep silence. Sometimes

discourse is experienced

as too removed

from per-

ceptual experience, sometimes as too wedded to it. What is important here is that there is also a widespread experience of the pointlessness of trying to remove the experienced insufficiency or incompleteness of the domain of discourse taken as a whole by living within its “and so forth,’’2? Such an experience can be given a number of interpretations. But the experience of discourse’s lack of total adequacy is itself distinctly evident and motivates a final cut which interrupts the “and so forth” of the entire domain of motivated discourse. This final cut, terminal silence, closes the domain of discourse. It differs from the other cuts which have been identified in that it does not open the way for mak-

ing anything determinate, either about the topic or about the author or audience, expressible. While interrupting the entire set of performances belonging to the domain of discourse, terminal silence is itself

nonetheless tied to that domain inasmuch as it is motivated by the experienced limits of what can be accomplished in discourse. The deep silence described earlier has the structure of terminal silence. But terminal silence is also linked to an aspect of after-silence. After-silence involves the savoring or digesting of some discourse.

This digesting, which

adds nothing determinate to the discourse qua

discourse, is the cut in the stream of discourse which allows a specific

string of utterances to achieve its existential weight. In fact, this digesting not only makes possible but requires that the preceding string of utterances acquire an existential value. As a digesting, after-silence is linked to and gets its ultimate sense from terminal silence because this digesting is tantamount to acknowledging the pointlessness of expanding the string of utterances which it follows.

76

SILENCE Further,

this final cut, which

is a terminal

surd

beyond

all deter-

minate, motivated discourse, is linked with the cut which opens the way for the entire domain of predicative experience or discourse. That opening cut, originary silence, establishes the gap between per-

ceptual and pictorial intentional performances on the one hand and

signitive performances on the other. Terminal silence confirms the uncancellability of that gap now that the gap has been established.

Terminal

silence does not, of itself, obstruct further discourse

at

any level. It is as compatible with subsequent discourse as originary silence

is compatible

with

subsequent

perceptual

experience.

But

in

closing off the domain of motivated discourse, terminal silence reveals at one and the same time both that the scope and power

are limited

and

that discourse

is a well-defined,

of discourse

irreducible

Thus, while terminal silence does not eliminate subsequent it “changes the sign” of all discourse.

With

the appearance

respective

senses

of

of terminal silence, another

interpersonalizing

and

realm.

discourse,

element

of the

deindividualizing

silence

comes to light. Each of these can now be seen not only as opening the way

for an expansion of the domain

of discourse

but also as ac-

knowledging the insufficiency of the previously constituted level or levels of discourse. Parenthetically, it is worth noting that since both of these non-terminal silences do bear the sense of closing off some

previously constituted level of discourse, either of them can be mis-

taken for genuine terminal silence. Such a mistake, which would preclude moves to either the third or to both the second and third levels

of interpersonal involvement in discourse, either is a consequence of immaturity

or is pathological.

The experience of terminal silence is the experience of a postprediCative,

postexpressive

terminal

preted in various ways. For

surd.

example,

It can

be,

and

has

been,

inter-

there are skeptical interpreta-

tions as well as mystical ones. But this surd must be interpreted somehow. It confirms the radical incommensurability of the two domains of intentional performances, the domain of the signitive and the domain of the perceptual and pictorial performances. Some account of the relation between these domains and of the sense of the incommensurability between them is therefore clearly required. I will propose an interpretation in Chapter Six. But here it should be noticed

that the interpretation one gives to terminal silence and the uncancell-

An Intentional Analysis of Silence

a7

able gap between the two domains of intentional performances which this silence manifests, whatever that interpretation is, will rebound upon and modify the sense of each and every utterance he employs or hears. On the basis of this intentional analysis of silence and its conjoined discourse, one can recognize the principal features of the temporal structure of the phenomenon of silence taken as a whole. This analysis clearly shows that the temporal structure of silence comes to

light only in conjunction with the temporal structure of both the different types of discourse, as discussed in Chapter Two, and the multiple levels and shapes of interpersonal involvement in the signitive domain. Without the conjunction of discourse and silence, discourse would collapse into mere untemporalized language and silence would collapse into mere muteness or non-signitive vision.

The multiple ways in which silence appears in conjunction with discourse

allows

the

identification

of three

irreducible

moments

or

parts in the temporal structure of silence. First, silence in all of its aspects originates or opens the way for something. It is a point of departure for the entire domain of discourse. But silence does not merely open the way for this domain as a whole. Silence, by its second moment, spreads out the domain by making possible the shifts from shape to shape and from level to level within the domain of discourse. Its

second moment, in a variety of ways, preserves the movement within discourse which was inaugurated by virtue of silence’s first moment. Finally, by virtue of its third moment, silence not merely closes off discourse but also turns discourse in its complexity back upon its point of departure. That is, silence, precisely in its closing off of discourse, establishes the unity of the domain of discourse taken as a whole. In so doing, it likewise situates it in the context of the entire range of human experience. Discourse arises within the broad range of experience by virtue of silence, expands in its several types and shapes by virtue of silence, and culminates as a unitary domain by virtue of

silence. In its unfolding, in turn, discourse makes it possible for silence to appear as senseful. With the identification of terminal silence and the recognition of the temporal structure of silence, the intentional analysis of the genesis of silence as a positive, senseful phenomenon is complete.”* The fundamental characteristics of the phenomenon of silence as a whole can

78

SILENCE

now be formulated. In preparation for that formulation, it is useful to summarize here the prominent features of silence which this analysis has revealed: (1) Silence in all of its aspects is a motivated cut which interrupts some already constituted stream of variegated, determinate experience.

(2) Silence of itself does not necessarily intend some already determinate discourse as that which is specifically required to fulfill it. (3)

Each different way in which silence appears opens the way for a dis-

tinctive modification in the way in which our surroundings are experienced. That is, the surroundings are successively experienced as “anon-

ymously” articulable, as articulable by me, as articulable by me and

others, as articulable by us, and as articulable but only incompletely. (4)

The

complex domain of discourse is both bounded by and strati-

fied by aspects of silence. (5) Some but not all of the aspects of silence are oriented toward expanding the range of possible determinate discourse. That is, some but not all of the distinct ways in which silence

appears are performed in the service of discourse. And (6) even though silence is a cut interrupting a stream of determinate experience and as such is not necessarily a performance directly intending some

particular determination, there is nonetheless a discernible genesis of

the sense of silence. The full sense of silence, even though silence is not a strict correlate of discourse, can be constituted only in conjunction with attention to the multiple motivatedly possible strata of the domain of discourse.

Any defensible formulation of the sense of silence, and any satisfactory ontological interpretation of that sense, must respect these fea-

tures. V.

ESSENTIAL

FEATURES

PHENOMENON

OF

OF

THE

SILENCE

Any formulation of the sense of silence obviously occurs within the domain of discourse, a domain

inaugurated,

elaborated, and circum-

scribed by silence. Given the limited scope and power of the domain of discourse, no formulation of the sense of silence can be regarded as exhaustive. But the same limitation infects all discourse, including discourse about discourse. 24 The conundrum posed by this fact does not of itself proscribe discourse. Such a proscription would have to be the consequence of a specific interpretation of the relation between the

An Intentional Analysis of Silence domain

of signitive

performances

79

and that of intuitive performances.

That interpretation, itself unutterable, is not devoid of all plausibility. It is that skeptical interpretation which

is so radical

that it does not

even announce itself. But prior to adopting it, one is entitled to engage in discourse, even discourse about silence, so long as he does so with this conundrum in mind. The intentional analysis of the phenomenon of silence presented in

preceding sections of this chapter basically confirms, with some augmentation,

the

characteristics

of

silence

which

were

identified

in

Chapter One and under whose aegis the descriptions in Chapter Two took place. It is convenient here to review the results of Chapter One

and to make explicit the augmentation that accrues to those results by virtue of the intentional analysis. The description in Chapter One

yielded

the following

provisional

formulation of the fundamental characteristics of silence: (1) Silence is an active human performance. But (2) it cannot be an act of unmitigated autonomy. (3) Silence involves a yielding following upon the awareness of finitude and awe. The

yielding involved in silence is

peculiar inasmuch as (4) it is a yielding which binds and joins. The intentional analysis confirms, first, that silence is an active performance. It further brings to light that silence is founded upon pre-

predicative experience and is itself foundational for both predicative experience and postpredicative experience. Second, the intentional analysis significantly clarifies what is involved in saying that silence cannot be an act of unmitigated auton-

omy. Originary silence is motivated by the intuitive, pre-predicative experience of living in surroundings with other selves. Personalizing, interpersonalizing, and deindividualizing silence all reveal that the concretely constituted sense of the experience of intersubjectivity is open

to modification. That is, the performance of these several cuts leads

to modifications of the recognized basis for discourse and so changes the sense of the implied authorship of a particular utterance. In other words, each of these cuts has the intrinsic sense of delimiting the scope and depth of any claim which can be made concerning the autonomy of the author or audience in discourse in any of its shapes. Conversely, performances of these cuts open the way for modifications in the sense of intersubjective discursive interaction. In so doing, they show that the ways of living with others are multiple. Terminal silence, by closing off the entire domain of discourse and affirming its

80

SILENCE

insufficiency or incompleteness, requires that some ontological inter-

pretation of the significance and existential weight of the several pos_Sible ways of living with others be offered. Thus, the intentional analysis reveals that

silence

presupposes

re-

cognized intersubjectivity, that silence shows a multiplicity of possibly constitutable senses of the experience of intersubjectivity in discourse, and, finally, that silence requires an ontological interpretation

of

the

significance

and

existential

weight

of

these

several

senses.

Silence, then, not only presupposes intersubjectivity but also is required for the concrete clarification of the sense of intersubjectivity. Third, through the intentional analysis, the sense of the claim that silence is a yielding which follows upon an awareness of finitude and awe can be made more precise. The yielding in question here is a

suspension

of the claim upon

from the motivated

subsequent

“and so forth”

performances

of previously

which

arise

constituted streams

of determinate intentional performances, whether signitive or perceptual or pictorial. This Suspension or interruption has something the character of discipline. It is motivated in two basic ways.

of

On the one hand, the Suspension is motivated by the recognition of the finitude of any set of particular performances intending determinate objects of any specific sort. On the other hand, the suspension is motivated by the recognition that whatever determinate stream of

performances I am in fact living in is not the only stream in which I

can live. The awareness of my Capacity to suspend or interrupt the

present stream in whichI am living for the sake of a not yet deter-

minate different stream, together with my awareness of the capacity of others to do likewise, is the awareness of awe in the face of the wide but limited range and scope of possible human In actual existence, the weight of each of these

performances. motivations can

vary. But neither can be fully absent from any appearance of silence. Parenthetically, I would suggest, without arguing that point here, that it is variations

in the

experienced

weight

of these

which partially account for the different emotions we the course of our active intentional

motivations

experience in

performances.

At any rate, the analysis of silence makes it clear that the yielding involved in silence is a motivated suspension or interruption of the “and so forth” of some determinate stream of intentional performances. This motivation is the awareness of finitude and awe which is

An Intentional Analysis of Silence encountered precisely while engaging in of performances. Fourth, the results of the intentional both to spell out in more detail what it yielding which binds and joins and to

silence and terminal silence, when

81

an already constituted stream analysis also make it possible means to say that silence is a amend this claim. Originary

taken together,

initiate, maintain,

and circumscribe the domain of discourse as a well-defined domain. As such, it is a domain in which its several levels and elements are themselves bound and joined together. Personalizing, interpersonalizing, and deindividualizing silence, each in its own way, bind a set of utterances to its author. Each likewise binds the author, through the utterances, to the audience in some specific manner. And terminal silence binds him who encounters it to interpret somehow the uncancellable gap between perception and discourse. But silence also severs and holds apart. The several levels of the domain of discourse are held apart by one or another of the aspects of silence. The gap between the streams of my perceptual and pictorial performances and that of my signitive performances is established and maintained by silence. Thus, instead of simply saying that silence is a yielding which binds and joins, one should say that silence is a cut, a suspension or interruption, which establishes and maintains the indissoluble tension or the

incessant oscillation

(1)

between

perceptual

and

pictorial

perform-

ances on the one hand and discursive performances on the other, among the motivatedly possible modes of living with others,

among the several levels and shapes of discourse itself, and

(2) (3)

(4) be-

tween one’s streams of perceptual and predicative experience on the one hand and his interpretation of the gap between them on the other. In addition to providing grounds for both clarifying and amending the earlier formulation of the fundamental characteristics of silence, the intentional analysis has brought to light two other traits which should be incorporated into a refined formulation of the sense of this

phenomenon.

First, though the

domain

of discourse is bounded

by

and stratified by silence, silence is not in all respects a strict correlate

of discourse. A fortiori, silence is not, in all of the ways in which it appears, exclusively founded upon discourse considered as a well-defined, determinate domain of experience. Second, the intentional performance of silence need not in all cases be directed toward a deter-

82

minate object as consideration of for and intrinsic silence is there an

SILENCE

that which is required for its fulfillment. In fact, a the implications of the analysis of the motivation sense of silence shows that only in impure cases of already determinate object which is intended. Some-

thing determinate is always the point of departure for the performance of silence. Thus silence is a founded performance. But in many

cases, and especially in those which mark major transitions, the performance of silence does not ask for fulfillment by some determinate object. This last trait of silence has a bearing upon how one is to understand the standard formulation of the intentionality thesis. All con-

sciousness, on this formulation, is consciousness of x. Performances of silence, though, do not focally intend an x which can properly be called a determinate object. I readily admit that there is in fact no pure nondeterminateness and I will argue in Chapter Six that there is no complete determinateness. But what matters here is that, on the

basis of the analysis of silence, one must recognize that the focal x referred to in the intentionality thesis does not always have the char-

acteristics which are ascribable to determinate objects precisely by __reason of their determinateness. On the basis of these six considerations established by the intentional analysis performed in this chapter, the intrinsic sense of the

phenomenon of silence can be summarized as follows:

(1) Silence is

a founded, active intentional performance which is required for the concrete clarification of the sense of intersubjectivity. In its pure oc-

currences, (2) it does not directly intend an already fully determinate object of any sort. Rather, motivated by finitude and awe, (3) silence interrupts an “and so forth”

of some

particular stream

of intentional

performances which intend determinate objects of some already specified sort. As such, (4) silence is not the correlative opposite of discourse, but rather establishes and maintains an oscillation or tension among the several levels of discourse and between the domain of _ discourse and the domains of nonpredicative experience. This summary does not claim to capture exhaustively the sense of silence. But what it does capture is no longer provisional. The intentional analysis has made it secure. The ground is now laid for investigating the ontological significance of the phenomenon of silence.

PART

II

The Ontological Significance of Silence

;

eran

=

ae

ea

[4 | Some Salvageable Mis-takings of Silence

THE INTENTIONAL analysis of the phenomenon of silence sketches the boundaries within which any acceptable ontological interpretation of

silence must fall. Further, in the course of that analysis, the several levels and shapes of interpersonal involvement

in discourse were

dis-

played. This display of course bears upon a proper ontological inter-

pretation of interpersonal relations. But it also, through the interpersonal character of discourse, bears upon the interpretation of silence. Since the present topic is silence, interpersonal relations and their interpretation will be considered only insofar as such a consideration is pertinent to the development of an appropriate interpretation of silence. The force of the results of the intentional analysis of silence becomes clearer when they are made to confront some of the strong

theses concerning discourse, silence, and interpersonal relations which can be drawn from the work of important recent thinkers. My purpose in examining these theses is not primarily to make a contribution to the scholarship devoted to particular philosophers. Rather, it is to

assess some initially plausible claims about discourse, silence, and interpersonal relations. Specifically, I will discuss theses which, without excessive distortion, can be extracted from the works of Hegel, Husserl, and Sartre. I will argue that the intentional analysis of silence provides grounds

for rejecting specific features of these theses, but that each of these theses contains important salvageable elements which will be of value

in developing a properly nuanced interpretation of silence.

86

SILENCE

I

HEGELIAN

CLAIMS

COMPLETE

CONCERNING

EXPRESSION

Alexandre Kojéve, in his lectures on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, spells out what is involved in Hegel’s claim to have achieved Science or absolute knowledge. To achieve absolute knowledge is to comprehend both the totality of the World as it is and has come to be

at the end of the real process of historical evolution and also oneself as living in this definitive world. Hegel both comprehends himself through understanding the totality of the historical process and comprehends this totality through understanding himself. His consciousness is thus just as universal and total as is the historical process which consciousness reveals through itself. This “fully self-conscious consciousness is absolute knowledge, which, by being developed in discourse, will form the content of . . . Science, of that Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences that contains the sum of all possible knowledge.”?

Kojéve continues: Man is not only a being that thinks—i.e., reveals Being by Logos, by Speech formed of words that have a meaning. He reveals in addition —also by Speech—the being that reveals Being . . . the revealing being that he opposes to the revealed being by giving it the name... I or self? For Hegel, then, Reality

= Revealed Reality =

Truth = Logos.

All truth can and should be expressed by words. The truth is the real revealed by knowledge, and this knowledge is rational and conceptual. As such it is expressible by reasonable discourse. In Hegel’s own words, “what is called the unutterable is nothing else than the untrue, the irrational, what is merely meant [but is not actually expressed ].”*

Not only the truth of things but also the truth of deeds can be fully expressed. The deed, like the thing, is something determined and universal. It is a theft, or a brave deed, or an act of mercy. And “what it is can be said of it.”* Or again: “If one had the Notion, then one

would also have the right word.”® In short, for Hegel the unsayable, bare particular is destined to disappear. The particular is unsayable or unknowable precisely because it itself is ontologically evanescent.® The saying in which the real is articulated is not,.for Hegel, all of a

piece. In the Phenomenology’s

masterful chapter on religion, Hegel

describes the progression beginning with the speech of the Oracle,

Some Salvageable Mis-takings

87

rising through that of the cultic hymn, the Bacchic frenzy, the athletic festivals, the epic, and the tragedy, and culminating in comedy. Comedy itself gives way to revealed religion. And revealed religion in turn yields to Science or absolute knowledge. Thus, the several sorts of discourse are hierarchically ordered. The complete expression of reality takes place in philosophical discourse, the discourse of absolute knowledge. Though Hegel does not make silence itself thematic in the Phenom-

enology, clearly he does not there consider it to be a positive phenomenon.’ Silence is, quite simply, a deficiency to be overcome. In its own right, it has no ontological significance. For him, silence elucidates nothing about reality. The Hegelian position on speech and silence is developed with modifications by Stanley Rosen. A contemporary close student of both Hegel and Plato, Rosen recognizes that Hegel, and Marx too, makes the scope of speech total. This total speech guarantees the full syn-

thesis of certitude and knowledge into absolute knowledge or Science. But, in fact, as Rosen admits, there is no actual total speech. “We must

therefore discover a kind of speech which, in the absence of a complete speech, nevertheless serves to distinguish philosophy from sophistry.”

Complete speech, Rosen says, is tantamount to silence. Only the gods have complete speech. But, since complete speech amounts to silence and silence is the condition of beasts, gods who do not engage in incomplete speech are virtually indistinguishable from beasts. Rosen concludes:

There

is no complete speech . . . but only speech about complete

speech, or speech which articulates, renders intelligible, and is accompanied by desire. Again, this does not mean that desire is the same as

speech, but only that it is rational, ie, capable of

explication by

speech.? Human existence then, according to Rosen, is a harmony of desire, which draws us to things, and speech, which expresses our partial de-

tachment from

things. Speech, by articulating desire, makes explicit

our detachment from things. Desire, on the other hand, gives substance to language by drawing us to the things from which we are distanced and thus combats an inclination to solipsism. Speech and desire, then, are correlative.

88

SILENCE

As human desire cannot be complete, so its correlate, human speech, can never be complete. But this incompleteness need not lead to soph-

istry. Man can speak about the goal of wisdom, that is, of complete or perfect speech. This goal, Rosen says, is accessible even though it is unaccomplishable.’? “Speech that is genuinely about completeness, ... speech... which functions in a healthy or sane way to articulate

desire, guided by the ideal of perfection, . . . is philosophy.”" Philosophy, therefore, is speech in the light of the formally or ideally visible model

of complete

speech,

in the light of wisdom.

It is the su-

preme sort of human speech, even if it remains essentially partial. Human speech is rational, then, only if it both preserves continuity between will or desire and itself and at the same time preserves the gap between itself and complete speech. The incomplete speech depends for its own intelligibility upon the ideal of complete speech which it itself makes visible both as an accessible ideal and yet as one which is unaccomplishable.! By contrast, according to Rosen, silence as such makes no positive contribution to intelligibility. We may feel at times that we need silence to overcome the pain of incessant chatter. Rosen says that the relief which silence brings us at these times symbolizes the ultimate silence in which completed speech would culminate. But such silence, he says, is a spurious remedy. “Silence is not the explanation man desires, but the negation of explanation. With respect to intelligibility,

silence is subordinate to speech, since speech points out silence, points to silence within itself. Without speech, silence would be invisible, it would be nothing.’ The intentional analysis given in Chapter Three provides the basis for assessing the accuracy of these claims made by Hegel and, follow-

ing him in part, by Rosen. The

twofold

key Hegelian

course, Science for Hegel

claim—that

and philosophy

there is some

for Rosen,

supreme

dis-

and that this

supreme discourse stands in Opposition to a silence which discourse must overcome if it is to achieve its own fullness—is in no way confirmed by the intentional analysis of silence. On the contrary, that analysis unearths evidence against this claim. On the one hand, the complexity of the phenomenon of silence, together with the multiple levels and shapes of discourse, reveals that,

contrary to Hegel, no particular shape or level of discourse can be said to express the totality of that which

is expressible. Each shape of dis-

Some Salvageable Mis-takings

89

course expresses something which in principle cannot be expressed in another shape. What cannot be uttered in one shape of discourse motivates the move to another shape. And no shape fails to motivate moves to other shapes. This same complexity and multiplicity shows that just as no particular shape of discourse can articulate the totality of that which is articulable, so, contrary to Rosen, no particular shape unequivocally makes the totality more accessible than do the other shapes. No particular shape fully sublates the expressive power of any other shape. In sum, the intentional analysis of silence does display multiple shapes and levels of discourse and a certain founding-founded relation among the several levels and shapes. But the analysis also shows an interdependence among these levels and shapes that precludes any particular shape from possessing either the autonomy or the scope requisite for being given unequivocal primacy. For, to paraphrase Merleau-Ponty, whatever power of articulation one gains in one direction by moving to some specific level or shape of discourse, one loses in another direc-

tion. On the other hand, the intentional analysis of silence makes clear that each level and shape of discourse acquires and retains its identity only by virtue of the specific sorts of silence with which it is conjoined. This is as true of philosophical discourse as of every other sort of discourse. Rather than overcoming a silence which is fundamentally hostile to it, each particular sort of discourse depends for its existence as a distinctive sort upon silence. Each empirical set of utterances actually gains in intelligibility precisely insofar as it respects the determinateness of the shape of discourse to which it belongs. And this determinateness comes about at least in part by virtue of silence. Silence, then, far from intrinsically threatening to destroy or to obstruct discourse, actually is a necessary component in extending the capacity of discourse to bring reality to utterance. Because Rosen’s attack on silence is rather typical of the tendency among many philosophers to deprecate silence as something irrational which is to be overcome by the rationality of speech, his argument is worth examining in a little more detail. Rosen recognizes that human speech is rational only if it preserves continuity between itself and something else. But he mistakenly identifies this something else as de-

sire. Silence, though, supposedly contributes nothing to the rationality of speech. It is simply subordinate to speech. Without

speech, Rosen

go

SILENCE

says, silence is nothing. What Rosen overlooks is the fact that without

speech there is no human desire qua human either. Unarticulated desire is no less invisible, as human desire, than is silence without speech. On Rosen’s argument, then, ordinate to speech. It could to the rationality of speech. human desire or of silence tional analysis suggests that

desire, like silence, would have to be subnot be that which positively contributes But there is no reason to speak either of without discourse. Nothing in the intensilence can be independent of discourse.

Quite the contrary. Just as Rosen will admit that something other than speech, namely, desire, contributes positively to the rationality of speech, so he has given no reason for denying that silence also posi-

tively contributes to the rationality of discourse.” The sort of denigration of silence represented by Rosen’s attack appears to rest upon the illegitimate acceptance of the notion of complete speech as an accessible even if unaccomplishable goal. Rosen’s

own talk about complete speech reveals, through its inconsistency, the difficulties involved in this notion. He says: (1) Complete speech is tantamount to silence; (2) complete speech is that accessible goal which

secures human,

that is, incomplete, speech from sophistry; and

(3) silence is subordinate to speech. Obviously tions are not mutually

these three proposi-

consistent.

Nonetheless, the lure of a definitively satisfying, even if unaccomplishable,

goal toward

which

our speech

can move

is unquestionably

attractive. This appealing, satisfying terminus ad quem logically requires a fully impoverished, unsatisfying terminus a quo whence our

speech proceeds. Silence has customarily served as that which fulfills this logical requirement. But unfortunately for Rosen, his position suffers from two major defects. First, as he suggests when he says that complete speech is tantamount to silence, complete speech is not speech. Either the phrase “complete speech” is a metaphor or it appears to be countersensical. Second, even if the phrase “complete speech” makes sense, the phenomena do not support the claim that it refers to something accessible. Without that support the denigration of silence is gratuitous.! Nonetheless, consideration of what led up to these claims about silence and complete speech, both in Hegel’s own work and in Rosen’s variation on it, lends confirmation to substantial parts of the account of the connections between discourse and silence given in the inten-

tional analysis. In the Phenomenology, as I mentioned, Hegel describes

Some Salvageable M is-takings

gl

different sorts of discourse, for example, cult, epic, tragedy, comedy. Different things can be brought to utterance in different sorts of dis-

course. In epic discourse, for example, the world of the gods and the divinized or universalized heroes of the nation are brought to articulation. But the minstrel who speaks the epic is not brought into what is said. This limitation restricts what can be said in this mode and

actually leads to contradictions. But by the same token, though Hegel does not make this explicit, this limitation, by being determinate, also makes it possible to articulate that which is articulated. What can be uttered in epic is not identical with what can be uttered in any other mode of discourse. Further, what Hegel takes to be the deficiencies of some mode of discourse are located precisely within the discourse itself. They are not forced upon the discourse by something distinct from discourse, for example, silence. According to Hegel himself, a man who experiences these “deficiencies” in discourse of a particular sort can lapse

back into an “inferior” sort of discourse, for example, from epic discourse to cultic discourse, and then rise again to this still deficient epic discourse.’® This cycle can be repeated indefinitely. In short, on Hegel’s own account, movement back and forth from

one kind of discourse to another is possible. This holds good for all kinds of discourse short of Science. Thus, except for Science, no kind of discourse

can complete

itself within

itself. Hegel’s

account,

despite its obvious differences, is not toto coelo opposed

to my

then,

ac-

count of the “and so forth” which characterizes discourse belonging to any particular shape or level. To go beyond the limitation of one shape, or more accurately, to bring to utterance that which cannot be articulated at one level or shape of discourse, one must cut, or silence, the “and so forth” belonging to that shape. Further, on my account the shapes of discourse are not ultimately hierarchical. Therefore, no kind of discourse, here specifically Hegelian Science, is exempt from a silencing. And a return to an “earlier” level or shape is not neces-

sarily a lapse, as Hegel would have it. Thus, if one deletes Hegel’s untenable claim that complete speech is a possibility, along with the hierarchy of kinds of discourse implied

by this claim, the Hegelian account meshes rather nicely with the results of the intentional analysis of silence. That is, a “deficiency” in what is utterable in some particular shape of discourse is a necessary condition for the emergence of another level or shape. But equaliy

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necessary for the emergence of this other level or shape is a cut in the “and so forth” of the first shape. Without both of these conditions, there would be no motivated possibility of the emergence of a new sort of discourse. In its salvaged form, Hegel’s recognition of different kinds of discourse and the relative insufficiency of each kind

supports, even if only obliquely and partially, two fundamental findings which emerge from the intentional analysis of silence. First, no unequivocal ontological priority can be given to either discourse or

silence. Second, neither discourse nor silence is self-standing as an intelligible phenomenon. Something substantial can also be salvaged from Rosen’s account. Rosen himself clearly recognizes that human discourse is not self-

standing as an intelligible phenomenon. To maintain its own sense, it must remain in tension with “something else.” Rosen rightly sees (1) that this “something

else” is not some

passive conscious

performance

like perceiving, but rather must be an active performance, this active

performance

aims

at something

which

is not

(2) that necessarily

a determinate object, and (3) that this “something else” involves risk for that with which it is in tension, namely, discourse. Though Rosen is mistaken in identifying this “something else” as desire, he corrobor-

ates my account of the function of silence, of that which is in tension with discourse. More than that, he places proper emphasis on the risk which this “something else” introduces into what I, following

Husserl, call the signitive domain.

In doing so, he helps to place in

proper relief the riskiness of silence, a feature of silence which to be insufficiently taken into consideration.

Il. Human

HUSSERL discourse

AND

is also

HUMAN

misrepresented,

tends

DISCOURSE though

from

a different

angle, by a thesis which can be extracted from Husserl’s thought concerning language and speech. But the examination of this thesis, like the foregoing examination, helps to clarify the requirements which an acceptable ontological interpretation of silence must satisfy.

The thesis I wish to consider can be put as follows: All expression of meaning, all speech or discourse, is essentially complete in soliloquy. A corollary of this thesis is that all utterances are simply exteriorizations, by way of indications, of already complete expressed meanings. This thesis rests upon key Husserlian considerations already devel-

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oped in Logical Investigations. First, Husserl distinguishes between y indication and expression. Something is properly an indication only; .

if and where it in fact serves to point out something other than itself) ~~ to some thinking being other than the speaker.’’ The structure of in-

dicating, then, is: A calls x to B’s attention by way of p (the indication), where A ~ B and p ”x. All indication is therefore necessarily bound up with communication. By contrast, expression has no intrinsic connection with communication. An expression is quite simply “a descriptive aspect of the experienced unity of sign and thing signified.”!® Subjectively, an expression consists of a physical phenomenon,

namely, one or more phonemes, and an act which confers meaning and possibly intuitive fullness on the phoneme or phonemes.'? Objectively, what is given in expression is the expression itself, its meaning, and its objective correlate.” Husserl further distinguishes between essentially occasional expressions, namely, expressions whose meaning can become clear only

through the actual circumstances in which they are uttered, and objective expressions, namely, expressions whose meaning is firmly fixed simply by what he calls its manifest pattern. Examples of occasional expressions are personal pronouns, demonstratives, and words like

“later,” “yesterday,” and “above.” Examples of objective expressions are

expressions

in

abstract

science

or

mathematics.”'

In

principle,

though not in practice, Husserl says, all essentially occasional expressions can be replaced by objective expressions.” The second consideration upon which the thesis

in question

here

rests is the claim that in solitary speech or soliloquy “the meaning of T’ is essentially realized in the immediate idea of one’s own personality.”?? What Husserl apparently means is that in solitary life the meaning which the expression “I” has for me is immediately apprehended. I grasp the essential features of “I” in their ideal unity. The occasionality of the word “I” arises only in the context of interpersonal speech, where this word does not have the fixed status of an expression like “quadratic residue” or “triangle.” For Husserl, then, the essence of meaning is in no way affected by

the concrete

meaning-conferring

experience.

Rather, the essence

of

meaning is seen “in its ‘content,’ the single self-identical intentional unity set over against the dispersed multiplicity of actual or possible experiences of speakers and thinkers.” These meaning-intentions, to-

gether with their verbal expressions, are fundamentally independent

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of the psychological content involved in the empirical manifestations of the meaning-intentions which occur in actual speaking or writing.” From these two claims it is but a short step to the thesis that all articulation of meaning, all speech or discourse, is essentially com-

plete in soliloquy. That is, in principle neither meaning nor the expression of meaning gains or loses anything, as meaning,

by reason of

the condition of either the author or audience involved in the empirical occasion of its utterance. In fact, in James Edie’s words, “Husserl speaks most

of the time as if transcendental

consciousness

were

.

above and beyond any particular language, the absolutely sovereign ‘observer’ and ‘constitutor’ of all objects.”?6 Obviously, this Husserlian thesis is akin to the Hegelian

complete

speech thesis. In the Husserlian version, there is both a well-constituted realm of ideal meanings and a stable realm of objective expressions which is at least in principle capable of containing every possible expression of meaning. Or in other terms, every possible meaning can

be given objective expression. What can be articulated, including the articulation of the occasion of its articulation, can in no way depend for its content upon the occasion of its utterance.?? On this view, the motivation to engage in interpersonal discourse in its several shapes would in no way have anything to do with fundamental limitations concerning the range of predicative activity available in soliloquy. What can be expressed soliloquously is coextensive

with what can be expressed at all. In no way, then, does the motivation to engage in indication involve an attempt to extend the scope of the realm of expressible meaning. Concrete indications, that is, interpersonal speech or writing, can only be motivated by contingent considerations. For example, since it happens to be the fact that B is

ignorant of objectively expressible x, A will utter objective expression p to indicate x to B. On the thesis under discussion, these contingent considerations, namely, B’s ignorance, A’s uttering of p, and the components of discourse which point to this occasion of discourse, namely, what Husserl calls the essentially occasional expressions, can neither add to nor substract from the realms of objective expression and meaning because they are all replaceable, in principle, by actual or possible members of those objective realms. All the objections to the Hegelian complete-speech propriate modifications,

thesis, with ap-

apply to the Husserlian version of this thesis

as well. There is no need to repeat them here. But it is nonetheless

Some Salvageable Mis-takings

95

useful to examine in some detail the claim that everything expressible is expressible in principle in soliioquy. This claim is unacceptable for several reasons. First, the notion of soliloquy at stake here does not take into account that the speaker is a member, albeit a unique one, of his own audience. This gap, resident in the human speaker, allows for the phenomena of someone saying more than he himself understands and of someone forgetting what he said at one moment with the consequence that his text utterance does not mesh with his earlier one. Neither of these phenomena are compatible with the notion of soliloquy in us here. The soliloquous “I” required by the Husserlian thesis could have no such gap. But every human author experiences his discourse as so gapped. Complete speech, then, cannot be concrete human discourse. A second, and similar, reason for not accepting the Husserlian

claims is found in the criticism which Jacques Derrida makes of Husserl’s radical dissociation of expression from indication. Derrida argues that this radical dissociation is required not by directly experienced phenomena but rather by Husserl’s insistence upon the ultimate primacy of the self-presence of consciousness to itself in the immediate, punctiliar present.?* But as Derrida goes on to show, Husserl’s own analysis of internal time consciousness and intersubjectivity calls this primacy of self-presence in the present into serious question.”® There is no phenomenological justification for granting this primacy to the

present. Rather, what Husserl’s analyses reveal is that all perception, meaning, and expression of meaning are intrinsically temporalized. Derrida proceeds to show that expression and indication are in-

dissolubly linked. All speech, whether

in soliloquy or dialogue,

in-

volves auto-affection and temporalization.® The self-presence of consciousness to itself in the present is itself derived from, rather than originative of, temporalization. Thus, the concept of the monadic, soliloquous “I” is “undetermined by its own origin, by the very condition of its self-presence, that is, by time.’”*! But without such a concept of the monadic “TI,” the notion of complete speech in the Husserlian sense is empty. Evidence brought forth by Merleau-Ponty provides a third reason for rejecting this Husserlian thesis. Merleau-Ponty points out that there is an experienced difference between understanding the speech

of others and solving a problem by discovering an unknown quantity

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through its relationship with known ones. This difference reveals that our own thoughts can be enriched by the speech of others. And this enrichment is precisely an enrichment of expressible meaning.* Closer examination shows that this interpersonal speech is not merely the passing of well-formed thought through an alien medium, namely, speech, from one person to another. Rather, at least in what Merleau-Ponty calls authentic speech, and in what I in Chapter Two called fresh discourse as opposed to traditional sayings, there is for both the speaker and the hearer a thought in speech which could not come to be for either of them without the actual discourse. In Mer-

leau-Ponty’s words: In the case of prose

or poetry, the power

of the spoken

word

is less

obvious [than is the power of a way of making music or painting], because we have the illusion of already possessing within ourselves, in

the shape of the common property meaning of words, what is required for the understanding of any text whatsoever. . . . But, in fact, it is

less the case that the sense of a literary work is provided by the common property meaning of words, than that it contributes to changing that accepted meaning. There is thus, either in the man who listens and reads, or in the one who speaks or writes, a thought in speech the existence of which is unsuspected by intellectualism,?*

Even if Merleau-Ponty underestimates the power ot the sedimented meaning of words, he is correct in noting that those meanings are changed by actual speech and writing. There is no reason for claiming that all these changes in meaning can be replaced with ideal expressions. Thus the claim that everything expressible is in principle expressible in soliloquy runs aground.** These three closely related objections to the Husserlian thesis in turn lend support to the findings of the intentional analysis of silence.

First, the gap discernible within the human speaker meshes both with the discrimination of several shapes within the soliloquous level of interpersonal involvement in discourse and with the detected difference between soliloquy on the one hand and monologic interpersonal discourse on the other.

Second, Derrida’s argument that all speech, whether soliloquous or dialogical, involves the auto-affection and temporalization of the speaker buttresses claims made in Chapter Three about the temporality of silence. There it was shown that discourse without silence would be merely atemporal language and silence without discourse

Some Salvageable Mis-takings

97

would collapse into either empty muteness or nonsignitive vision. But genuine discourse and silence, in their inextricable interconnection, are

ingredient in the living of the multiple modes of interpersonal involvement of which people are capable. And as was seen in Chapter Two, to inhabit too few of the types of discourse is to lead a stunted life. It is to be insufficiently temporalized and self-affected.

Third, the differences between interpersonal speech and soliloquous discursive thought distinction among discourse presented rounds the passage

to which Merleau-Ponty calls attention support the the several levels of interpersonal involvement in in Chapter Three. In fact, the material which surquoted above shows that Merleau-Ponty in effect

has recognized several of the shapes of discourse described in the course of the intentional analysis of silence.** And these distinctions, Husserl notwithstanding, bear not only upon the act of meaning but upon the meant content as well.**

Nonetheless, even though the Husserlian theses concerning complete speech

and

acceptable,

the

scope

the general

of

soliloquous

thrust of the

expression

Husserlian

turn

out

position

to be

un-

does

help

to specify the sort of ontological interpretation of silence which is required. The Husserlian position emphasizes that actual discourse, whether speech, writing, gesture, or of any other sort, inasmuch as it is indication, cannot contain within itself its own full authentication even as discourse. Nor can the authentication be provided simply by adding further discourse of the same sort to that which has already been uttered. The full authentication of discourse as discourse, then, must involve something other than discourse. That is, the full sense of any concrete discourse, even apart from the question of referential adequacy, depends upon something other than the discourse taken alone. It must satisfy the requirements of the shape and level to which it belongs.

Now this something else cannot, in the final analysis, be something fully within the power of the speaker or interlocutors. If it were, then discourse could only reveal the interlocutors. said to reveal anything over which they did not

It could not be have control. A

pure conventionalism, of course, might make such a claim, but there is no experiential foundation for it. In fact, that a pure conventionalist theory of discourse can be coherently formulated is dubious.

But if (1) discourse needs something apart from itself for its full authentication, (2) this something is not exhaustively within the power

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of the interlocutors, and, as Derrida has noted,

(3) there is no hard

cleavage between discourse and objective expression of meaning,

human

discourse cannot be considered as basically

then

a tool, separable

from and at the disposal of the interlocutors.*? And

if discourse

and

silence mutually involve one another, then neither is silence simply a tool available to the interlocutor at will. In fact, the basic thrust of the Husserlian position is that objective expression of meaning has speakers in its sway rather than vice versa. If discourse is not separable from the expression of meaning and if discourse is not a tool,

then

it is not

too

much

to say

that

discourse,

and

its conjoined

silence, has man in its sway rather than vice versa. If this is the case, then the ontological interpretation of silence must account for how it is that that which is an active intentional performance and its “object” can be that which holds sway over the performer. The discussion of the Hegelian and Husserlian versions of the complete speech thesis makes at least one further contribution to this study. If human speech or discourse is essentially incomplete, then

one

must

ask what

is the ontological

significance

of this essential

incompleteness. One must likewise ask how the ontological interpreta-

tion of silence should deal with the fact that the speech with which silence is conjoined is incomplete speech. If speech cannot complete itself and if there is no silence without speech, then just as there is no complete speech so there is no reason to think that there is any such thing as complete silence either.

Ill

TWO

THESES

DISCOURSE BEING

FROM AND

CONCERNING

EXTRAPOLATED SARTRE’S NOTHINGNESS

The Hegelian and Husserlian themes which I have considered minimize the importance of interpersonal involvement in discourse by subordinating it to some sort of complete speech. In the Husserlian version, the importance of the actual performances of the interlocutors for the coming to be of meaning is, in fact, minimized to the vanishing point. Discourse and the place of interlocution is also disparaged

in two

theses which

can, with

different

degrees

of legitimacy,

be

Some Salvageable Mis-takings

99

extrapolated from Sartre’s Being and Nothingness.® The standpoint of these theses differs from that of the Husserlian thesis but the disparagement is just as thorough. In essence, from the “Sartrean” standpoint hearing, precisely as hearing, makes no distinctive, irreplaceable contribution to the coming to be of meaning. The first “Sartrean” thesis to be considered is straightforwardly Cartesian. Sartre writes:

There is only intuitive knowledge. Deduction and discursive argument, incorrectly called examples of knowing, are only instruments which lead to intuition. When intuition is reached, methods utilized to attain it are effaced before it; in cases where it is not attained, reason and

argument remain as indicating signs which point toward an intuition beyond reach; finally if it had been attained but is not a present mode of my consciousness, the precepts which I use remain as the results of

operations formerly effected.®® Sartre goes on to say that whereas

Husserl would

“the presence of the thing (Sache)

define intuition as

‘in person’ to consciousness,” he

himself has shown that intuition should be defined as “the presence of consciousness to the thing.”*° From these passages the following “Sartrean” thesis can be extra-

polated: The proper culmination of discourse is its own abolition in intuition. Intuition, unworded reflective vision, is said to be essentially independent of discursive argument and deduction. If that is the case, then it is essentially independent of any sort of discourse. Not all discourse is either deduction or discursive argument, but, in the usual understanding, these sorts of discourse are the prime cases in which discourse involves knowing. If they indeed do not involve knowing, then there would be no good reason—on the accepted view with which Sartre is here concerned—for taking any other sort of discourse as being pertinent to knowing. Thus, it follows that the “Sartrean” claim in question here amounts to saying that intuition is essentially independent of all discourse. Further, intuition serves as the criterion against which discourse is measured. Discourse is of value, on this thesis, just to the extent that it is conducive to an intuition which is not presently enjoyed.

Obviously, task which

this Cartesianesque

intuition

performs

complete speech performs for Hegel

and

much

the same

Husserl. Insofar

as this is the case, the arguments given above for rejecting complete

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speech theses count against this first “Sartrean” thesis.41 But Sartrean intuition is not a special form of speech. It is not speech at all. And

since it is not, a further objection to this thesis can be raised. Simply put, the objection is: What positive contribution can my discursive activity and its object make to the coming to be of the intuition of something if no traces of either that activity or its object can be proper constituents of that intuition? Discourse, in the Sartrean scheme, is spoken of both as an instrument and as a sign. Even if the differences between instruments and signs are ignored here, a thing can be recognized as an instrument or sign only if that for which it is an instrument or sign is already at least partially in mind.*? Thus for discourse to be a sign or instrument, and consequently to have any-

thing to do with knowledge, it must be recognized as that which can culminate in intuition. Intuition would have to be present at least in anticipation for discourse to signify it or to be recognized as promot-

ing its occurrence. Conversely, if intuition can be anticipated and if discourse can be recognized as a means or pointer leading to it, then one must be able to recognize the connection between them. It is not at all clear that

one can avoid infinite regresses if one tries to make sense of the recognition of this connection. Is this recognition an intuition? Or a deduc-

tion, or some other sort of discourse? But even on the assumption that one can make sense of this connection between the signified or the end and the sign or the means, serious problems for this thesis remain. The recognition of the connection between intuition and the discourse which is instrumental to achieving it or signifies it requires that the means or pointer not be fully effaced. In principle, the instrument or pointer can always be re-

activated. For if intuition can be

anticipated, and if discourse con-

tributes positively to its occurrence, then intuition will have to contain, as proper constituents of itself, traces of that discourse.4? Granted these traces may be ignored or considered inconsequential, but if discourse positively contributes to the coming to be of intuition, then traces of it must remain in intuition. If this is so, then at least some actual intuitions are not essentially independent of discourse. Discourse would have to be at least a positive necessary condition for some intuitions, a necessary condition which the intuition itself grasps. Suppose, though, that one insists upon the radical independence of

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intuition from discourse. Then the intentional objects of intuition might well be radically independent of those of discourse. If that were the case, then the “Sartrean”’ position would entail that the connection between these different sorts of performances and their corresponding objects is not merely contingent but also never be more than fortuitous. Instead then of a mind-body dualism, there would be a discursive consciousness—intuitive consciousness dualism. The per-

formances of each, to be sure, would be ultimately irrelevant to the performances of the other. But then saying that one, the discursive, pointed to or was a means to the intuitive would be simply wrong. A second, more dubiously “Sartrean,” thesis concerning discourse

can be extrapolated

from remarks of his in Being and Nothingness

concerning our relations with others. After saying that “conflict is the original meaning of being-for-others,’’* Sartre later argues: “Language » is not a phenomenon added on to being-for-others. It is originally being-for-others, that is, it is the fact that a subjectivity experiences itself as an object for the Other.”*° Now the project of the for-itself” is always to overcome its alienation, to achieve autonomy. Whether it ever definitely achieves this autonomy is beside the point. The constancy of the attempt gives sense to everything that a person does vis-a-vis the other. One might then conclude, as many commentators

on Being and Nothingness do, that this autonomy is always sought at the expense of the other.*®

On this basis, one can ground the shapes of interpersonal involvement fundamental shape of interpersonal which all other shapes, in the final

following claim concerning the in discourse: Monologue is the involvement in discourse from analysis, derive their meaning.

Monologue is still discourse or language. As such, in Sartrean terms it is still being-for-others. But in monologue the author has greater autonomy—and reflection is required for autonomy—than he has in

any other shape. On the strength of the first “Sartrean” thesis discussed above, one would have to say that monologue itself is destined to be effaced when intuition occurs. But so long as language or discourse in any shape makes sense, as being interpersonal, it does so insofar as it is either derived from or ordained to monologue. In effect, then, the motive for engaging in discourse of any sort is first to achieve monologic autonomy and from thence to achieve intuition. At this point, it is appropriate to return briefly to Sartre’s reform-

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ulation of the Husserlian definition of intuition. Intuition, he says, is the presence of consciousness to the thing. Consciousness is always

active and, in intuition,

actually reaches the thing directly.

In

dis-

course, too, the speaker as speaker is active. In monologue, he is most a speaker and least a hearer, least “passive.” Thus, whatever

shapes of discourse a person engages in, in this “Sartrean” scheme they all have an orientation to monologue as the primordial shape. This second “Sartrean” thesis might be taken to claim merely that, whatever the shape of discourse in which a person participates, he does so in such a way that he can maintain himself as one who can, properly speaking, be the author and not merely the audience of discourse. But then the thesis would be trivial. He who could only be a hearer and never a speaker could in fact never, properly speaking, be a hearer. Even to be a hearer one must be capable of being an author. On this interpretation, then, the second “Sartrean” thesis would amount to no more than the tautologous claim that all of my hearing is geared to my speaking.*” If, however, this thesis is taken, as it appropriately should, in a non-

trivial sense, then it makes a claim of capital importance about what transpires in interpersonal

level

and shape of human

discourse.

dialogical

It asserts, that, at bottom,

discourse

Owes its sense and point to its furtherance of monologue.

in nonmonological

discourse, then, finally makes

every

in the final analysis To

engage

sense only insofar

as it contributes to bringing the discourse as a whole more completely under by control, more completely into that which approximates monologue, than would be the case if the particular nonmonological

discourse under consideration were omitted. If this quest for maximal monologue is to make sense, then it would further have to be the case that whatever meaning can come to be articulated in any of the levels

or shapes of discourse can, in principle, be articulated in monologue. This second thesis, taken in a nontrivial sense, is unobjectionable from a logical standpoint. It is neither nonsensical nor countersensical. But it is a thesis about factual matters. And the available factual evidence provides considerably stronger grounds for rejecting the

thesis than for accepting it. First, people generally do not consider all the different shapes and levels of discourse in which they engage to be fundamentally ordained to the establishment or maintenance of monologue. Rather, the poverty of a life lived without participation in

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103

many shapes of discourse is widely recognized. And part of this recognition is that what enriches life is effective surpassing of the confines of the monological shape. To be sure, mistaken views can and sometimes are both widespread and persistent. But views which are widespread and persistent even when examined enjoy a presumption in their favor which should be set aside only in the face of extensive and unambiguous evidence in support of a competing claim. There is no such body of evidence available to support this “Sartrean” thesis. Second, the “Sartrean” thesis that conflict is the original meaning of being-for-others follows from Sartre’s claim that the primordial relation between the for-itself and the in-itself is negation. When this claim is coupled to Sartre’s definition of intuition as the presence of consciousness to the thing rather than as, in the Husserlian version, the presence of the thing “in person” to consciousness, then one can conclude that meaning can emerge to full fruition only to the degree that the for-itself is autonomous both vis-a-vis things and other foritselves. Experience shows, however, that there is no good reason to assign unqualified primacy to negation as the basic relation between consciousness and the world. Even if one rejects the claim that negation is simply a modification of affirmation, there is strong evidence for maintaining that affirmation is at least equiprimordial with negation. That is, experience shows that for a full intending of at least some objects both affirmation and negation are necessary. To intend the world as a totality, both affirmation and negation are required.®® If this is the case, then there is no basis for saying that conflict is the

original meaning of being-for-others, that monologue is the fundamental shape of interpersonal involvement in meaning, or that meaning can emerge to full fruition only to the degree that the individual person establishes his autonomy vis-a-vis both things and other persons.

Once again, however, the examination of theses which finally turn out to be unacceptable yields positive benefits for developing an acceptable ontological interpretation of silence. Several substantial, closely related contributions can be extracted from these “Sartrean” claims. First, these theses, together with the Sartrean definition of intuition, emphasize the human initiative which is involved in discourse as well

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as in intuition. On these theses, discourse is pertinent to the comingto-be of new meaning. Even if, as the theses would have it, the contribution of discourse is only instrumental, it is nonetheless a positive contribution. Discourse is required to broaden the scope of the meaningful. And if the intentional analysis presented in Chapter Three is correct, then silence, too, is required for the expansion of the scope

of the meaningful,

because

there

is

no

discourse

without

silence.

Thus, silence in its own right can be seen to make a positive contribution to the scope of the meaningful.

But, if I am correct in holding that the experiential evidence shows that there is no reason to assign preeminence to monologue, then there is reason for holding that each of the multiple levels and shapes of interpersonal involvement in discourse has its own distinctive and irreducible place in the domain of discourse. If this is the case, then in the light of the intentional analysis of silence one can see that the several ways in which silence maintains an oscillation and tension among these levels and shapes likewise make distinctive and irreducible contributions to the scope of the meaningful which can appear in the

domain of discourse. Thus, each of the multiple ways in which silence appears is not merely instrumental to the coming to presence of meaning but is rather an irreplaceable way in which some meaning can come to be at all. Further, each of these shapes of discourse and ways in which silence occurs is a manifestation of human initiative. This initiative does not merely bring about a new relation of the person to meaning. It brings about new meaning itself. The examination of these “Sartrean” theses yields a second positive benefit for the present investigation. It shows that no human achievement is so complete that it is either self-contained or self-sustaining. Sartre points out that knowledge or intuition always refers beyond itself back to the knower as an unintuitable concretely existing human being. And so, even though there is a truth of knowledge, which

knowledge puts one in the presence of the absolute, this truth is still strictly human.®° To be present to the absolute, Sartre says, is not to be one with the absolute. Further, in the passage cited above, Sartre says that an intuition which has been attained in the past but which is not a present mode of consciousness leaves behind precepts which are the results of operations formerly effected and which I presently use. Intuitions, then, come to be, refer beyond themselves, and pass away.

Some Salvageable Mis-takings If intuition is neither self-contained

105

nor self-sustaining,

and

if my

criticism of the first “Sartrean” thesis is sound, then discourse, too, is neither self-contained nor self-sustaining. Both discourse and knowledge reveal that their occurrence always takes place in conjunction

with something other than itself. Both are in tension with something which manifests that neither of them is a “once and for all” achievement. Further, even if intuition or knowledge were the superior achievement, an achievement to whose occurrence discourse was merely instrumental, knowledge is revealed as no less irrecusably temporal than discourse is. All the more is this the case if, as my argument against the first thesis maintained, no independence or unequivocal primacy is to be assigned to intuition or knowledge over discourse. But my criticisms of these theses notwithstanding, both of them themselves entail that each of the determinate performances which, to-

gether with their specific respective determinate objects, enter into the consitution

of the

predicative

domain

is intrinsically

temporal

and

lacking in self-sufficiency. This consequence meshes nicely with important

features

meshes

well

establishes between

of the intentional

with

and

the

maintains

intuitive

and

analysis

characterization an

indissoluble

pictorial

of silence. Specifically,

of

silence

tension

performances

on

as

a

cut

or oscillation the

one

it

which

hand

both and

signitive performances on the other, and also among the several levels and shapes of discourse. As they stand, these “Sartrean” theses entail that

all

predicative

in multiple ways even

performances

beyond

for their very

those objects

meaning.

and thus the full panoply

having

This

determinate

objects

refer

not solely for their truth but

referring

of meaning

is ineluctably

temporal

is not present once and for all

but rather is emergent. These theses further entail that the multiplicity of levels and shapes of discourse which

enter into the constitution of

the full scope of meaning is in the final analysis irreducible.

One last point should be made before I summarize the achievements of this chapter. From

the Husserlian position, one

discovers that dis-

course has something of the character of a response or reply. That is, both selves

utterance for

their

and

its content

authentication.

learns that this responsiveness vience. Human

appeal

to

From

the

cannot

be

something construed

discourse does issue in mew

discourse is likewise

true

of silence,

‘“Sartrean”

beyond position,

one

as simple subser-

meaning. What

of that which

them-

is true of

establishes

and

106

SILENCE

maintains the gap between the domain of discourse and the flanking domains of pre-predicative and postpredicative experience.

IV.

CONTRIBUTIONS

ONTOLOGICAL OF

TO

AN

INTERPRETATION SILENCE

The examination in this chapter of theses drawn from Hegelian, Husserlian, and Sartrean sources yields the following results as first

steps towards an acceptable ontological interpretation of silence. (1) Every performance, whether of discourse or of silence, belonging to the signitive domain is temporal, incomplete, and lacking in radical autonomy of meaning. In short, no complete speech or complete silence is a human performance. Complete speech and complete

silence are not only unachieveable but are also inaccessible to men. (2) There is no good reason for assigning ontological priority to discourse over silence. Each makes an irreducible contribution to the sense of the other and to that of the entire domain of signitive performances.

(3) Actually occurring signitive performances are all in some measure indicative,

in the Husserlian

dicative, that they contain

within

sense.

refer beyond

themselves

To

the extent

that

they

are

domain,

they

cannot

full authentication

even

as dis-

the signitive

their own

in-

course. (4) That which can authenticate discourse is not exhaustively within the power of the interlocutor. Thus, neither discourse nor silence can be properly construed as a pure tool or conventional sign.

(5) Since there is no sharp cleavage between discourse and silence, on the one hand, and that which gives them their authentication, on the other, and since all actual signitive performances are in some measure indicative, there is reason to say that men are under the sway of the signitive and that which authenticates the signitive rather than that men possess, control, or manipulate the signitive domain.

(6) But even so, human initiative in discourse and silence is required to broaden the scope of the meaningful. This initiative does not merely bring about a new relation between the interlocutors and meaning. It

brings about new meaning itself. (7) the signitive

domain.

Discourse,

the

Risk belongs to everything in shapes

of discourse,

and

silence

are all, as active performances, intrinsically risky. I assume

that

an

examination

of the

signitive

domain

sheds

light

Some Salvageable Mis-takings

107

on being itself. That is, insofar as being is intelligible to man, its distinctive features are discoverable through a study of the elements which constitute the signitive domain, a domain through which man mediates his encounter with being. If this assumption is granted, then these seven results make several notable contributions to the specification of what can count as an acceptable ontological interpretation of the phenomenon of silence. First, in the manifestation of meaning, man is both an initiator and a respondent. Neither of these dimensions can be subsumed under the other. That is, neither his initiative nor his response is unprepared for by the other. Apparently, then, the meaning of being itself cannot be made manifest except through both initiative and responsiveness on the part of man. If this is the case, and if discourse and silence are not correlative opposites but are inextricably interwined, then each of them enters into the constitution of both initiative and responsiveness. That is, silence, as well as discourse, is ingredient in both the initiative and the responsiveness which is required for man to manifest the

meaning of being. Second, men and that which authenticates their signitive performances are bound together by the signitive domain. That is, there can

be no fully human encounter with being except through the mediation provided by the signitive realm. This signitive domain, of course, is neither fully other than me nor fully me or mine. By the same token, the signitive domain does not merely either mediate me to myself or bind me to itself. It binds me to something beyond both me and itself,

namely, to being. But no dimension of either me or being in principle transcends that to which

elements

of the signitive

domain

can refer.

If every dimension of both me and being is a manifestable dimension, then every dimension can be articulated in the signitive domain, even though no dimension can be exhaustively manifested. Now since silence enters into the constitution of every shape of the signitive domain, it enters into the bond between man and being. If silence is complex, then so is this bond. Third, all signitive performances necessarily involve risk. Part of the

riskiness

of signitive

performances,

of course,

has to do

with

the

issue of truth or falsity in their ordinary senses. But much more is at stake here. If new meaning comes to be through some signitive performances, then the unavoidable riskiness involved in everything

108

novel is at play. If new

SILENCE

meaning

is abstained

from,

then the risk of

ossification is run. Performances of silence, too, belong to the signitive domain. They are no less risky than are performances of discourse. Again, the risk can be either that of the novel or that of ossification. The riskiness involved in signitive performances, if considered together with the fact that the signitive domain is involved in all encounters between man and being, shows that both being and man are such that no encounter between them can be without risk. Each in its own way

is at the mercy of the other.®! Silence, as well as discourse, brings to light the riskiness of their encounters, encounters which are, to be sure, unavoidable. Finally, the overall effect of these seven results and their contributions to the specification of an appropriate ontological interpretation

of silence is to emphasize the thoroughly temporal character of man, being, and the signitive domain which mediates their encounters. Initiative, responsiveness, encounterings, and riskiness all involve temporality. This temporality is neither a mere form nor all of a piece. It itself is complex. Thoroughgoing temporality does not rule out the omnitemporal. But the omnitemporal, as Husserl saw, is not the atemporal. However, the ontological significance of the phenomenon of silence

is to be interpreted, any acceptable interpretation must that being is in all respects temporal.

make

clear

With these clarifications in hand, I can now turn to the works of recent thinkers who have explicitly recognized silence as a positive complex phenomenon which deserves to be given an ontological in-

terpretation.

[5| Some Appreciative Attendings to Silence

Nor a Few philosophers have recognized and explicitly dealt with silence as a positive complex phenomenon. For example, some philoso-

phers have

followed

the via negativa

in their talk about

especially

exalted matters. And some of the skeptics, particularly those who emphasize the fallibility of discourse, have stressed that a certain reserve, or modesty, or reticence is required in discourse if that discourse is to be faithful to our experience, if the discourse, that is, is to be “truthful.” Further, Oriental philosophies have a long tradition of attention to silence. Both in Indian and in Chinese thought, the positive character of silence has been a prominent theme. Although I will not attempt to deal in any detail with most of these thinkers, because to do so would both make this work unwieldy and overtax my competence, I will, on the assumption that Oriental thought is still not widely considered in the West, briefly take note of some themes concerning silence which have had a prominent position in major Oriental traditions. However, this chapter will be devoted principally to the works of some recent Western philosophers, specifically, Kierkegaard, Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, and Max Picard, who have brought to light dimensions of silence which must figure in an acceptable ontological interpretation of this phenomenon. It is these dimensions which this chapter must make explicit.!

I. SILENCE

IN EASTERN

THOUGHT

Two positions concerning silence which are found in Eastern thought are particularly pertinent to the formulation of an adequate ontological interpretation of silence. These positions, though they are not mutually consistent in all respects, point to a dimension of silence

110

that has not been

SILENCE

explicitly

dealt with

thus far, namely,

silence as

implicated in an entire way of life, including action as well as thought and discourse. Alex Wayman has called attention to two traditions in India concerning the relation between truth or saying and silence. One tradition gives preeminence to truth, the other to silence. Both of these traditions are found within both Buddhism and Hinduism.? What is of importance for present purposes, however, is not the disagreement between these traditions but some of the generally accepted elements found in both. First, a muni is a person vowed to silence. But he is also “the capable one,” the independent person, the one who achieves enlightenment without depending upon a teacher. He is the one whose acts of body, speech, and mind are muted. Indeed, the Sanskrit word “SHANTAM,” means more than the English “silence.” It also means peace, quiet, restfulness, etc., and has connotations of considerable solemnity. In short, silence pervades the person of its practitioner and provides him with the basis for both security and freedom in all dimensions of his

life.3 Further, at least within Buddhism, several forms of the Buddha’s own silence are distinguished: his ascetic or purifying silence, the silence after his enlightenment in which he withheld his doctrine from the people at large, and the selective silence he sometimes observed concerning questions about the ultimates. And Buddhas were said to help certain advanced disciples with a kind of silent power.‘ Silence, then, is not only ingredient in all the dimensions of an enlightened person’s individual life but also lies at the foundation of his capacity to lead others, to exercise influence within the community. Quite similar insights into the place of silence are found in both Taoism and Confusianism. There, speech and silence are correlative concepts. Without silence there is no speech and without at least the possibility of speech there is no silence. One can say that

in the metaphysical terminology of the 1 Ching ... , speech is the yang of silence, and silence the yin of speech. But ‘one-yin-one-yang is called Tao.’ The alternation of speech and silence is thus an instantia-

tion of the cosmic law of J, the primordial process of Creativity which is the ultimate reality of the universe.5 Speech that would be truthful must be authentic speech, the cautious speech born of integrity and sincerity of heart. Sincere speech is

Some Appreciative Attendings

111

tactical. It requires the use of the right word at the right time to the right person about the right topic for the right motive. Authentic

speech is speech properly procured from silence or, in other words, speech which observes the principle of limitation pence speech from silence. Discourse, thought, and action are ultimately inseparable in Chinese philosophy.® The connection between the distinctions between speech and silence on the one hand and between speech and action on the other is indissoluble. “Indeed, the two distinctions are almost identical. For the embodiment of silence is action. Speech stems from the silence of action and returns to the silence of action. . . . the Truth of Tao is not just to be thought and said, but, above all, to be done and enacted,” The apex of authentic speech is absolutely spontaneous discourse. Here speech and silence are united. What is fundamentally said and heard is not human words but rather the infinite silence which is the voice and word of Tao. In this spontaneous discourse, authentic speech is one with authentic silence. This discourse is the most efficacious of human achievements, for here man is at one with the all-creative Tao.® Rather than dwelling upon the explicit mystical dimension of these themes drawn from Eastern thought, the focus here is upon the connection to which they point between silence and action. Action springs from desire, and the highest action from the highest desire, whether this be conceived as the noblest desire or as the transcendence of desire.° In any case, some form of correlation between speech on the one hand and action and desire on the other hand is widely recognized.’® What the Eastern traditions add is the connection between silence and

action or desire. Silence, in these traditions, is not merely intelligible. It is also efficacious. Within these traditions, the efficacy of silence is often described in a way that bears striking similarities to the efficacy Heidegger ascribes to authentic dwelling and building.‘ But one need not limit his considerations only to benign efficacy. If silence is efficacious, then it is efficacious in all of its manifestations, some of which may be malign. Nonetheless, Eastern thought does show that an adequate ontological interpretation of the phenomenon of silence must take up the question of its connection with action as well as with discourse. This brief

excursus into Eastern thought yields two substantial, closely related insights

into

this question.

First,

there

is no

fundamental

antithesis

oY

f112/

SILENCE

L among silence, discourse, and action. Second, there is no fundamental antithesis between intelligibility or knowing and efficacy or doing. These insights, if taken alone, would not be sufficient for developing an acceptable ontological interpretation of silence. But they do corroborate in important ways the reflections on silence of Kierkegaard, Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, and Picard. It is to these latter thinkers that I now turn.

Il.

SILENCE

AND

KNIGHT

KIERKEGAARD’S OF

FAITH

The task which Kierkegaard, as John of Silence, sets himself in Fear

and Trembling is to reflect on just what is involved in acknowledging Abraham as the father of faith. This requires John to meditate on the story of Abraham and Isaac. To get the meditation underway, John cannot just launch into the topic. He must attune himself to hear which he seeks to understand.!2 The attuning here consists of imagined scenes, each of which fails to reach the biblical account wants to hear. But at the same time, these four attempts are not

that four John useless. Somehow they are necessary initial stabs. Their usefulness, however, would evaporate if any of them were to be taken as satisfactory

simply because it satisfied requirements which John himself established. They remain useful only insofar as they are subject to the requirements of the biblical text. Only as so subjected can they play a role

in John’s effort to hear what the Abraham story has to say. This phenomenon of tuning or attuning points toward two related aspects of the connection between discourse and silence. First, without the discursive initiative of men, without their risk-laden proposings, nothing could be heard or understood aright. Simply to await passively an overwhelming revelation in which all is given without risk is to wait in vain. But second, to propose, to insist upon making one’s discursive initiative decisive, is to destroy any chance that his initiative will succeed in understanding aright that which is presented for understanding. All useful tuning initiative is a response which cannot with impunity be more than preparatory. It is prompted by something which claims one’s attention, a tune to be properly played. Man’s reply is an effort to accommodate, not the tune to himself, but himself to the tune.

Some Appreciative Attendings

113

But not all discourse is preparatory. There is attuned discourse. Yet even here, the discourse remains a response. It can never be complete, nor even definitive in some limited specified respect. Kierkegaard makes this clear in his discussion of the silence of the “well-attuned” man, the knight of faith.

Kierkegaard

says that whereas

ethics requires

discourse,

requires

revelation, the knight of faith cannot make himself intelligible to anyone, not even to himself. The knight of faith “knows that it is refreshing to become intelligible to oneself in the universal so that he understands it and so that every individual who understands him understands through him in turn the universal, and both rejoice in the security of the universal.”!* But this knight also knows that one knight of faith can never help another to become such a knight. If one is to become a knight of faith, he must abandon both guidance from other men and interest in guiding them. As Kierkegaard says: “In these regions, partnership is unthinkable.”!* Even so, the knight of faith, for example, Abraham, is efficacious in his silence as .a witness. The silence involved here is not an unambiguous silence. Since a man cannot know that he is a knight of faith and that his distance from the articulateness of the universal, the ethical, is defensible, silence is not without both its conceptual and its emotional ambiguity. It is always experienced as risky. Secrecy and silence are really what make a man great because they are the characteristics of inwardness. But this greatness may be either demoniacal or divine. When one would surpass the tragic hero, who stands at the apex of ethical life, then one encounters the paradox that silence is both the divine and the demoniacal. “Silence is the snare of the demon, and the more one keeps

silent, the more terrifying the demon becomes; but silence is also the mutual understanding between the Deity and the individual.”® And yet, Abraham, the figure par excellence of man related to the divine, the father of faith, does have a last word. He does not keep totally silent. Abraham could not explain to himself, to Isaac, or to anyone else why he was going to kill Isaac. It is precisely his knighthood in faith which requires silence of him. To try to give an account of what he planned to do would have been to fall back to a level below that of the tragic hero, would have been to yield to temptation. And yet, he does utter a last word. In response to Isaac’s question, Abraham

says: “God will provide Himself the lamb for the burnt offering, my

114

SILENCE

Son.” Here, Kierkegaard says, Abraham’s reply is in the form of irony. “First and foremost, he [Abraham] does not say anything. . . . it is always irony when I say something and do not say anything. .. . he is speaking no untruth, but neither is he saying anything, for he speaks a foreign language.”!7 Kierkegaard’s discussion of the Abraham story points to an element of the connection between silence and discourse which goes beyond his own explicit claims. What happens when Abraham breaks into words, even though he does not, at least according to Kierkegaard, say anything? First, the silence is illuminated as a silence which, for the speaker, is indeed terminal. What is said, in effect, does not span the silence but rather is refracted by it. The saying, in its poverty, clarifies the silence whence it issues. What distinguishes this case from others in which discourse clarifies silence is that here the clarification of silence is achieved precisely by the nondeterminateness of the discourse instead of by its determinateness. That is, in the present case, it is the discourse which is maximally nondeterminate, and the silence which gains some specification, namely, its character of being terminal.

Second, the discourse is not, Kierkegaard not withstanding, radically empty. Rather, it is strange. Its strangeness lies at least in part in the fact that what is said has no antecedents whence it follows and no consequences following from it. The saying stands alone. No “and so forth” is associated with discourse of this sort. The kind of silence which is at play here prohibits discourse issuing from it from having antecedents or consequences belonging to its same level. This silence, a terminal silence, shows the strangeness of the saying even to its author. In this respect silence clarifies its own character while at the same time keeping what is said maximally nondeterminate. Third, whatever clarification it gains through the strange discourse issuing from it, terminal silence cannot be made fully transparent. Whatever is said, neither the author nor the audience can be sure whether this silence is divine or demonical. That ambiguity is be-

yond

resolution. What

is said, by its own

nondeterminacy,

reveals

this irrecusable ambiguity. Take two biblical sayings: Abraham’s “God will provide Himself the lamb for the burnt offering, my son,” and Jesus’ “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Is the silence whence these issue a silence of despair, hope, presumption, desparation, madness, or something else? The strangeness of these sayings clarifies

Some Appreciative Attendings the silence whence determinate.

they

come

but

cannot

render

115 that

silence

fully

These three points show that the connection between discourse and silence is not always to be thought of either as the connection between discourse as the determinate element and silence as the nondeterminate element or as the connection between discourse as revealing and silence as concealing. Some silences reveal, others conceal. Some silences stand to discourse as the nondeterminate to the determinate, others as the determinate to the nondeterminate. If both dimensions of all our signitive performances, namely, discourse and silence, sometimes appear as determinate and sometimes as nondeterminate, then what does this show about the signified to which the signitive performances are ultimately oriented? This issue is one which an acceptable ontological interpretation of silence must address.

Further,

the

distinction

between

attuned

discourse

and

attuning

discourse which Kierkegaard employs here raises questions about the several levels and shapes of discourse which were distinguished in the intentional analysis of silence. Is attunement progressive as one moves from shape to shape? Does this discourse become attuned at some

particular point in this progression? If so, then some worthwhile conclusions

about

education

as attuning could be derived.'® Though a detailed consideration of this question falls outside the scope of this work, I will return briefly to this point in the next chapter.

What comes to light through this reflection on Fear and Trembling is the irreducible polyvalency and ambiguity both of discourse and silence and of the intrinsic connection between them. The scope and character of this ambiguity can be made more explicit through a consideration of Merleau-Ponty’s reflection on speech and its relation to silence.

Ill.

MERLEAU-PONTY’S OF

ELUCIDATION

SILENCE

In the course of his subtle, detailed, and precise reflections on speech and language, Merleau-Ponty has revealed an acute awareness of the pervasive and crucial involvement of silence in discourse. I will not attempt here to give a full account of the importance of his rich description of the connections between silence and discourse. But the

116

SILENCE

present task of developing an appropriate ontological interpretation of the phenomenon of silence is substantially furthered by following several of the leads which his works furnish. Merleau-Ponty says: We

should consider speech before it has been pronounced,

against the

ground of the silence which precedes it, which never ceases to accompany it, and without which it would say nothing. Moreover, we should be sensitive to the thread of silence from which the tissue of speech is woven.19 In a footnote, Merleau-Ponty adds: “One does not know what one is saying, one knows after one has said it.”?° This constant conjunction of speech and silence manifests important features of the dialogical situation and of the world which is signified in discourse.

In the experience of dialogue, the participants reach each other’s meanings.

Here

there

is no

fundamental,

essential

rivalry

for

pre-

eminence. Rather, each recognizes his own activity in hearing just as much as in speaking. Both speaking and hearing are understood, in dialogue, to be a common effort to bring to light something that makes sense. In fact, as Merleau-Ponty says, “to the extent that I understand, I no longer know who is speaking and who is listening.””?! Further, the participants in dialogue experience this common effort as one which they have not, strictly speaking, initiated. Dialogue, insofar as it is carried on in an already established language and refers to a world which is older than the present dialogue, is recognized as a continuation of

an effort that has long been under way.” Much the same can be said for reading and writing. Both of these presuppose the experience of spoken dialogue. And again, in principle, there is no struggle for supremacy by either the reader or the author. Their enterprise is a common one. The activity of the reader requires the activity of the writer and vice versa. The entire enterprise of either speaking or writing is senseless without an audience. The enterprise of reading and listening is likewise senseless without an author, taken precisely as an author.” But more than some special feature of dialogue is intertwining of the participants in dialogue is, on elaboration of the perceptual intertwining which us that not only do we see and touch but that we

tangible for others. And

at stake here. The the one hand, an reveals to each of are also visible and

on the other hand, dialogue is intertwined

Some Appreciative Attendings

117

with the thought of each participant. Their thoughts are not, of course, their stable property, a finished product to which they allude by means of speech. Rather, the thought of each makes possible and is made possible by dialogue and by the perceptual domain with which dialogue is continuous.” Discourse, thought, and perception, then, are not autonomous domains. They mutually implicate one another. Our access to any of them involves all of them. Each of these is, to be sure, distinct from the others. But the possibility of the transition from one to the other arises from what Merleau-Ponty calls the phenomenon of reversibility, the phenomenon of my being so inserted into the world that I am both seer and seen, hearer of my own and others’ speech, learner of my own and others’ thoughts. This same phenomenon of reversibility intertwines these three dimensions one with the others. In Merleau-Ponty’s words:

Already our existence as seers . . . and especially our existence as sonorous beings for others and for ourselves contain everything required for there to be speech from the one to the other, speech about the world. And, in a sense, to understand a phrase is nothing else than to fully welcome it in its sonorous being, or, as we put it so well, to hear what it says (1 ’entendre), The meaning is not on the phrase like the butter on the bread. . . . And conversely the whole landscape is overrun with words as with an invasion, it is henceforth but a variant

of speech before our eyes.?5 The intentional analysis of silence showed how performances of silence were needed to spread out discourse, to make possible new levels and shapes of discourse. If Merleau-Ponty is correct in his claim that discourse, perception, and thought are inextricably intertwined, then it is pertinent to ask whether both perception and thought are also spread out by some performances similar to silence. The initial useful suggestion which can be made is that the several ways in which silence appears in conjunction with discourse is analogous, on the one hand, with the multiple ways in which perception can be focused and, on the other hand, with the several modes of thinking in which a person can engage. In perception, one can concentrate on touch, or on sight, or on combinations of senses, etc. In thought, one can muse, plan, construct theories, calculate, etc.

The first suggestion points toward a second, namely, the suggestion that silence is a manifestation

of human

freedom

as are its ana-

118

SILENCE

logues in perception and thought. That is, however world-bound I am, I am not simply subjected to the world. Rather, the world is in a kind

of dialogue with me. For this dialogue to proceed I must both speak and listen. The silence ingredient in both speaking and listening is necessary for the preservation of my role as active participant in this dialogue.” Similarly, for lively perception there must be shifts of focus which requires perceptual “silencings” or “cuttings,” and for lively thought I must vary what I think about and how I relate the elements of thought. A “cutting” is required for these variations to occur. These two suggestions can be amplified if they are conjoined to Merleau-Ponty’s frequent claim that both perception and speech are action.”’ Though it is, I think, an exaggeration to say that speech and perception are action, lively action, like lively speech, perception, and

thought, requires cuts as well as achievings. If this is so, then the fact that the signitive domain is constituted by silence as well as discourse is not a “defect.” Every domain of distinctively human performances is analogously constituted of a “silent” element and a “discursive” or achieving element. Now perception, signification, thought, and action, together with their fundamental interconnections, are essential characteristics which constitute man. Man is that totality whose essential moments are per-

ception, signification, thought, and action. It is from this totality that the very being of man is to be interpreted. Man is not all of a piece. He is that being who is simultaneously both free and ineluctably world bound. His very being is to be not the world nor a piece thereof. Rather it is to be a response to the world. Man himself, then, is constituted both by a cut and by a determinate positive element. This twofold constitution is at the root of his essential ambiguity. He is, as all of his perception, signification, thought, and action show, a determinate, finite “opening upon—response to” the world.

The character of this response can be made more explicit by developing

a second

lead furnished

by

Merleau-Ponty.

He

says:

The living relation between speaking subjects is masked because one always adopts, as the model tive.

One

does

so because

of speech, the statement or the indicaone

there remain only stammering how the tacit, unformulated,

believes

that,

apart

from

statements,

and foolishness. Thus, one overlooks and nonthematized

enters into science,

contributing to the determination of science’s meaning, and as such provide [sic] tomorrow’s science with its field of investigation.”®

Some Appreciative Attendings

119

In The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty goes on to say that the interrogative is not derived from the indicative and the positive. It is neither a form of negation nor of affirmation. Rather, the interrogative is a fundamental manner of aiming at something which cannot be surpassed by any statement or “answer.” Perhaps, he says, this interrogative, this “question-knowing,” is “the proper mode of our relationship with Being, as though it were the mute or reticent interlocutor of our questions.”® If so, then Being is already silently at play in all of our particular affirmations, negations, and even in particular questions which prepare for specific answers. Philosophy’s task, he says, is to disclose this nonposited Being, for “philosophy is the reconversion of silence and speech into one another.*® Therefore, originary and fundamental silence is not the contrary of language.*' Rather than being that which thwarts language, silence is that which opens the way for language’s potency. Speech, at least philosophical speech, must hear speech and silence together, for speech is born from silence and seeks its conclusion in silence. This is the case because there is, in principle, an exchange between experience and language. Neither is closed within itself.** It is worth pausing here to consider just what is involved in interrogation. First, interrogation presupposes that previous discourse is, in at least some respects, unfinished. Second, interrogation in its routine, more obvious occurrences, involves the positing of some distinguishable entities or elements. This is what is recognized in the truism that the question predelineates the answer. Third, and less obviously, the interrogation is itself a response to something which has been encountered as not fully transparent to the interrogator. Thus, not only the answer but the question itself has the character of a response. Now the very notion of response implies that the poles of this relation, namely Being and man, are close to one another but do not fully coincide. In fact, the response manifests the poles as both distinct and as in proximity to one another. Fourth, if discourse is to remain response, it can never claim completeness for itself. Silence, then, both at the origin and at the termination of specific discourse is required for discourse to manifest itself as a response. And only as response to that which is already there does discourse make sense. Silence, then, is required for the intelligibility both of what is said in discourse and of discourse itself as discourse. Fifth, interrogation as response involves initiative on the part of the interrogator but also his dependence

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upon or belonging to that to which he responds. Sixth, some interrogation, that which is considered especially important because it initiates new discourse, amounts to an interruption of the “and so forth” of some previously prevailing stream of discourse. These features of what Merleau-Ponty calls philosophical interroga-

tion are features which my intentional analysis has shown belong to silence. The fundamental interrogation, that which lies beyond

fic questions, affirmations, and

denials, is itself constituted

speci-

by both

speech and silence. The thrust of Merleau-Ponty’s thought, then, issues in the view that man as a totality is to be understood as that being who responds to the world interrogatorily. Whether he is engaged in perception, thought, speech, or action, he is, at bottom, interrogating the world. And interrogation embraces both silence and speech. At this point, let me propose an amendment to Merleau-Ponty’s account of fundamental interrogation. Though it is an amendment which his position can readily accommodate, it is nontrivial. I suggest that interrogation, in those of its manifestations which inaugurate new discourse, is essentially bound up with what can be called the exclamatory.* The exclamatory springs from being confronted with

the surprising, the intruding. The exclamatory qua exclamatory does not posit or achieve. It acknowledges. It is that which the ancients called wonder. The exclamatory, like interrogation, involves both silence and speech. But the speech here is primitive, newborn, whereas in questioning, speech has matured. In the exclamatory, man’s awe and finitude in the face of the world makes its first appearance. He does not yet initiate an inquiry. Rather, he hears a call, a call which makes response meaningful. This hearing exclamation is already responsive but does not yet make its own response. I do not claim that the exclamatory is more fundamental than the interrogatory. Rather, it appears that the philosophical interrogative, the fundamental interrogative, which Merleau-Ponty says is perhaps

the proper

and

fundamental

mode

of our

relationship

with Being,

is itself exclamatory. The amendment I propose makes even clearer just how fully all of the features of the phenomenon of silence uncovered in its intentional analysis, especially those of finitude and awe, show up in what MerleauPonty calls fundamental interrogation. The ontological implication of

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this amendment is that man’s interrogation of the world responds to promptings issuing from the world. Now if man is not to be fundamentally absurd—and what nonhypothetical evidence could establish his absurdity?—then the world must be such that man, the finite opening, is an appropriate opening upon it. That is, man’s response to the world must be, at bottom, a response which the world itself, by its call to man, legitimizes. The promptings issuing from the world to which man responds in exclamatory interrogation must be promptings which make the world accessible. This accessibility, of course, does not mean that man reaches an exhaustive truth. But it does mean that, when he perceives, signifies, thinks, or acts, he is not engaged in fundamental and irrecusable folly. A third set of considerations introduced by Merleau-Ponty’s discussions of speech and silence brings to light some of the characteristics which the world must have if man’s exclamatory—interrogative response is to be appropriate and senseful. If reflection, and the discourse which gives expression to reflection, is not to terminate in falsity, reflection must follow the path by which the world has disclosed itself to us in perception. Instead of surveying the world, reflection must immerse itself in the world. Reflection, if it is to issue in truth, must question the world, it must enter into the forest of references that our interrogation arouses in it, it must make it say, finally, what in its silence it means to say... 34 The world itself calls for reflection and discourse. It gives itself as that which

is to be brought

to articulation.

But

its call is not for us to

achieve coincidence with it. We respond to its call, and arouse references in it, only by interrogating it. For interrogation to continue to occur, complete articulation or perfect expression

cannot

have been achieved.

not mean, though, that continued on

our

part.

interrogation is a sign of weakness

It rather

is the

itself.

Merleau-Ponty

world

shows

would

not become

As

appropriate

present and

This state of affairs does response

says,

the

to

the

things

we

the

perceive

evident to us unless they were inex-

haustible, unless they were never given completely. have the taste of permanency

way

which we

They

perceive in them

would

not

unless they

were experienced as being available for inspection throughout

an un-

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SILENCE

ending

span of time.®> What Merleau-Ponty painter holds good for every perceiver: He is a man at work the same questioning

explicitly

who each morning finds in the shape and the same call to which he never

says

of

the

of things stops re-

sponding. His work is never completed; it is always in progress.%

The world, then, and its things are never simply present. They both present and absent. In Merleau-Ponty’s words:

are

Nothing, no side of a thing, shows itself except by actively hiding the others, denouncing them in the act of concealing them. To see is as a

matter of principle to see farther than one sees, to reach a latent existence. The invisible is the outline and the depth of the visible. The

visible does not admit of pure positivity any more than the invisible does.37 In both of these dimensions,

things call for interrogation.

presence

This

and absence, the world

interrogation

and its

is, in principle, in-

terminable because the call is interminable, There is no simple relativism here however. The call can be a call to say the same as that which has been said before. But the saying is truthful only if it responds to the present call and says what the present call means to say. Interrogation, as I have said, is jointly constituted by discourse and silence. Since this is so, and since the world is such that it calls for exclamatory interrogation as the foundational mode of human responsiveness to that call, and if the being of the world is available to man

for truthful articulation, then the being of the world must be such

that both constitutent features of interrogation, namely, discourse and silence, are required for accessibility to the world’s being. The world itself must exist in the interrogative mode, that is, as an open field for inquiry.%* Merleau-Ponty goes on in his ontology to make the intersection of man and world more explicit. According to his ontology, both the being of man and the being of the world are constituted by both positivity and negativity. Each of these, as the reverse of the other, encroaches on the other. Similarly, man and world encroach upon each other. The negative is not the denial of the positive, but rather its depth. In both the being of man and in that of the world, there a paradoxical identity in difference, an identity, in his terms, of the

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visible and the invisible. Being simultaneously, in man, in the world, and in their intersection, reveals and conceals.®? Merleau-Ponty, of course, couches his formulation of ontology in terms of the flesh and perception. But since man himself is constituted by both a positive and a negative element, then distinctively human performances will all similarly manifest these two elements. The signitive domain, too, is constituted by both positivity and negativity.

Thus far, the consideration of Merleau-Ponty’s thought has brought to the fore several elements of capital importance for developing an appropriate ontological interpretation of the phenomenon of silence. First, the active performance of silence, by virtue of the interconnec-

tions obtaining among the fundamental human domains of perceptual, /, signitive, and actional performances, brings to light important features of man’s kind of being. All of his human performances are, from the’ outset, social in character. All of his performances are both free and

world bound. Second, Merleau-Ponty’s reflections upon interrogation open the way for appreciating just what is meant by the claim that the being of the world itself can only appear to man as both present and absent, as a field for inquiry. The world itself, like man, is not all of a piece. These characteristics of both the being of man and the being of the world he encounters point toward an ontology which maintains that Being itself is not all of a piece but rather is that whose only appropriate description must be in terms of poles in tension. But Merleau-Ponty’s thought does not yield merely the formal description of man and world as poles in tension. He proposes a concrete interpretation of their intertwining. He says, as I mentioned above, that speech is woven from the thread of silence, that silence, as the

fundamental interrogative, is the ground of speech which precedes speech and from which speech stands forth. Something comparable

holds for perception and thought. I see a tree against the ground of the visible.

I think

a connection

between

Napoleon

and

Julius

Caesar

against the ground of the intelligible. Man then is, prior to his determinate constitutive performances, primordially an opening onto the world. This world onto which he opens is and remains no determinate thing, not even a determinate field. It is a horizon. All signification aims “at a universe of brute being and of coexistence, toward which

we were already thrown when we spoke and thought.”*! This universe in principle cannot be either objectified

or reflectively approximated

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SILENCE

through ideal references because it is a latent or dissimulated

horizon.

If silence, as the fundamental interrogative, is the ground of speech which precedes speech as well as accompanies it, and if the world as horizon is the ground which precedes as well as accompanies the appearance of objects, then neither discourse and silence nor thing and

horizon are, at bottom, simply formally coeval poles in tension. Rather, silence and world are, respectively, the insurpassable foundations for discourse and other types of human performances and for objects of human performances. Silence is that on which all discourse depends for its very being as discourse. World is that upon which every thing and event depends for its very being as object. Merleau-Ponty says:

The irrelative is not nature in itself, nor the system of absolute consciousness’ apprehensions, nor man

either, but that . . . jointing and

framing of Being which is being realized through man. One is entitled then to conclude that the intertwining of foundational silence and world is this irrelative to which all else is relative. The fact that neither silence nor world could appear as what they are except through the emergence of discourse and objects is, to be sure, not be to forgotten. But this fact in no way detracts from their irrelative status. A man’s senses, his body, his capacity to speak and understand speech are all dimensions to which he can refer the world, are all measures for the world. But they are not ways for him to make the world immanent in himself or to bring the world into adequation with himself. Rather, in his fundamental openness to the world, man is one sole continuous question. As men, we are

a perpetual enterprise of taking our bearings on the constellations of the world, and of taking the bearings of the things on our dimensions. . .. Every question, even that of simple cognition, is part of the cen-

tral question that is ourselves, of that appeal for totality to which no objective being answers.*? In short, on Merleau-Ponty’s account, man as interrogator and world

as horizon jointly constitute the background whence specific performances and objects arise. Both man and world are constituted by dimensions of both positivity and negativity. But just how is the world related to man?

Merleau-Ponty

gives no

Some Appreciative Attendings

125

clear account. For the most part, Merleau-Ponty takes man to be at least coeval with the world, if not indeed to have a certain primacy over the world. The few occasions on which he speaks of the being of the world as primary are left undeveloped.** Further, though quite

clearly man

as conscious is fundamentally

distinct from

the world,

Merleau-Ponty provides no account of the ontological foundation man’s distinctiveness.

for

The amendment which I proposed to Merleau-Ponty’s claim concerning the basic mode of man’s relationship to the world, namely, that it is not merely the interrogative, but rather is the exclamatory interrogative, provides a clue to a more satisfactory account of how man is distinct from the world and of how he is most basically related to it. If the exclamatory dimension of man’s relation to the world endures through time and is not absurd, then that fact is better accounted for by interpreting the world as an at least partially determinate theme rather than as a thoroughly nondeterminate horizon. Such an interpretation, indeed, is more consonant with a number of Merleau-Ponty’s own descriptions of phenomena than is his own interpretation. The exclamatory dimension, by virtue of the elements of surprise and freshness which it entails, likewise points in the direction of interpreting the world as enjoying a certain primacy over man. Man must acknowledge the world in order to effect anything in it. If this acknowledgment is, by virtue of newness, elicited repeatedly, then this fact, too, suggests that the world is not fully nondeterminate. I will return to this issue in Chapter Six. But now let me summarize the positive contributions which Merleau-Ponty’s thought makes toward the formulation of an adequate ontological interpretation of silence. First, Merleau-Ponty’s account of speech and silence in the main corroborates the results obtained through the intentional analysis of silence. Both silence and speech are recognized by him as complex, positive phenomena. Speech and its intertwined silence are from the outset social. Monologue has no preeminence and silence is not primordially a retreat into privacy. In fact, in man’s bearing toward other men and the world, silence has a certain primacy over discourse. Second, the complex connection between silence and discourse is not a feature peculiar to the signitive domain. All domains of human performances, those of perception, thought, and action, as well as that of the signitive, are constituted by both a cutting and an achieving.

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SILENCE

The intercalation of distinct elements in the signitive domain is not a defect peculiar to that domain. Rather, it is a manifestation of the human condition itself. Third, and finally, neither man nor the world is all of a piece. Nor is their intersection. An acceptable ontological interpretation of man and the world must account for this multidimensional complexity. Though Merleau-Ponty gives only a vague answer to the basic question of the ontological foundation of the distinction between man and world, he occasionally hints that the world enjoys a certain preeminence over man. His reflections on man as that openness whose fundamental encounter with the world, as perception shows, lets the world be instead of positing it,*® are reminiscent of significant parts of Heidegger’s thought. It is natural now to look to Heidegger for further considerations which a comprehensive ontological interpretation of silence would have to accommodate.

IV. In this section

HEIDEGGER I make

no

foolish

AND pretense

SILENCE of having

distilled

the

essence of Heidegger’s extraordinarily rich reflections on discourse and silence. Rather, I wish simply to set forth some of the prominent lines of his thought and bring them into play in my own endeavor to formulate a satisfactory ontological interpretation of the phenomenon of

silence.*® Heidegger’s long reflection on language and discourse culminates in the claim that language includes within itself a nonhuman activity, a

Saying (Sage), which must be carefully distinguished from human speaking. This claim rests on two premises. First, Being, unconcealedness (aletheia), world grant the coming of whatever is present in its presence. Second, language is involved in this granting or giving. This Saying does not belong to the human domain. But it calls, makes demands, and gathers itself into the “word,” which “word” likewise is not a human word. Dasein belongs to Saying. It listens to Saying and Saying’s “word” and responds by bringing what it hears into human words.** Saying itself, according to Heidegger, can be described in terms of a stream. Everything which addresses itself to Dasein is embedded in this stream. The addressing itself makes no sound. It is silent, but nonetheless its silence can be heard as a form of Saying. This stream of

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silence springs from Lethe. This means, in Werner Marx’s word, “that the stream has its source (Quelle) in that which has not yet been said and that which must remain unsaid: the ‘unsaid.’ ”4® Thus, human discourse is a response to a Saying which addresses itself to Dasein, which

Saying itself is rooted

in a primordial

unsaid.

Anticipations of the conclusions in which Heidegger’s reflections on language culminate are to be found already in Being and Time. Before I give further consideration to these conclusions, to take note of some key parts of that work.

it is important

In his analysis of conscience in Being and Time, Heidegger

finds

that conscience is fundamentally a call. This call has the character of an appeal. It calls Dasein to its own deepest potentiality for being its unique self.*® This call does not assert anything. It has nothing to tell. Nor does it set into motion an inner “soliloquy” or debate in which causes get pleaded. Rather, conscience, which is a mode of discourse, discourses solely and constantly in the mode of keeping silent. In this way it ... forces the Dasein which has been appealed to and summoned, into the reticence of itself.5° The content of the call can be given different interpretations and is apparently indefinite. Likewise, the call can be misheard and drawn into “idle talk,” into routine, thoughtless chatter. But the direction of the call is unequivocal. It calls Dasein back from the noisiness of idle talk into the reticence which belongs to Dasein’s potentiality for authentic existence. Dasein, by reason of that distinctiveness which precludes its reduction to simply being one of a series of interchangeable worldly entities, is itself the caller from whom the call of conscience comes. This call, when authentically heard, is a wanting to have a conscience. Dasein, in wanting to have a conscience, wordlessly calls itself back into its own stillness. It is not, at bottom, called by conscience to some specific utterance or course of conduct. Dasein is called to become still. “Only in reticence, therefore, is this silent discourse understood appropriately in wanting to have a conscience. It takes the words away from the common-sense idle talk.’*! The call of conscience does not, however, call Dasein away from

the world. To the contrary, Dasein, in its disclosure to itself as wanting to have a conscience, is disclosed in its entirety as Being-in-the-World.

Thus the World, too, is disclosed in the very disclosure brought about

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SILENCE

by the call of conscience. And with the disclosure of the world, the entities within the world come to light. But Dasein’s way of Being, in all of its modes, discloses the world with its constituent entities. The distinctive feature of the disclosure effected in wanting to have a conscience is what Heidegger calls resoluteness. Resoluteness is, in its essence, “always the resoluteness of some factical Dasein at a particular time. . . . Resoluteness ‘exists’ only as a resolution which understandingly projects itself.”>* Resoluteness is not, then, a virtue which Dasein can cultivate in independence or isolation from the world. Resoluteness, rather, both manifests and faithfully responds to the concrete possibilities which are available to Dasein. Thus, the call of conscience does not call Dasein to some empty or abstract ideal of existence. Rather it calls Dasein forth into what Heidegger calls a Situation, a concrete state of affairs which a specific Dasein can indeed seize upon in the unique way made possible by its own potentiality-for-Being. Dasein, then, in its resolute response to the call of conscience is already taking action. Heidegger calls the resolute-

ness of Dasein the authenticity of care. Care, that fundamental,

all-

inclusive solicitude of Dasein for everything that is in any way whatsoever as well as for Being itself, is the fundamental action which “must already be presupposed as a whole when we distinguish between theoretical and practical behaviour.’

Later in Being and Time, Heidegger shows that resoluteness is possible for Dasein only by reason of Dasein’s having the character of temporality. Only because Dasein’s kind of Being is precisely to be spread out, not to be all at once, can Dasein be resolute and care. Temporality is the fundamental meaning of authentic care. And the finitude of temporality is, Heidegger concludes, “the hidden basis of Dasein’s historicality.’’**

Even though the doctrine of Being and Time and the findings of the initial descriptions and the intentional analysis of silence cannot be simply conflated, they do harmonize in several significant ways. First, the call of conscience does not utter anything determinate. Rather, it interrupts the chatter of the “they” and the “they-self.” As such, it involves a leap, a risky venture. Second, the call can, on the one hand, be mis-heard. On the other hand, it can be given different interpretations. In that sense, the call is complex. Third, the call is none-

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129

theless unequivocal as regards the direction it takes. It calls Dasein back to its own potentiality-for-Being. In effect, the call works to personalize and so to make more authentic what one actually utters.

In these respects, the call of conscience resembles aspects of silence. Silence, like the call of conscience, is not, at bottom, a way of expressing something determinate. Yet some of the ways in which silence appears do play a role in personalizing and individuating discourse. Silence, too, is unequivocal inasmuch as, however it shows itself, it shows itself as a positive performance which cuts, riskily leaps from, or interrupts the “and so forth” of a previously prevalent stream of performances. The caller of the call of conscience is Dasein itself. And Dasein’s appropriate response to this call, namely, wanting to have a conscience, is manifested as reticence. This reticence, far from shutting Dasein up within itself, is the primordial way in which Dasein discloses itself. It is in reticent resoluteness that Dasein is authentically and primordially individuated.* Similarly, silence is not simply undergone. It is a positive performance by virtue of which man shifts from confinement within an “and so forth” of some sort and, in opening up new fields of meaning, at the same time clarifies himself and his potentialities for himself. Whenever Dasein is disclosed, then so too is Dasein’s world disclosed along with the things in the world. The call of conscience responded to in reticence is essential to this disclosure. The disclosure of both Dasein and the world and the unity in which Dasein and world are embraced is inextricably bound up with the historicality, the finite temporality of Dasein. Similarly, as its description and analysis have shown, silence, too, not only sheds light upon man but also plays

an essential role in his exploration

of the world.

That

is, without

performances of silence, neither man nor the world can appear. Or if they can appear, they can do so only in a highly impoverished

version. Finally, like the call of conscience which calls Dasein to resoluteness in quite definite, concrete Situations, silence also, in all of its manifestations, is inextricably involved with temporality and finitude. Cuts in the “and so forth” are necessarily oriented to being timely. But performances under the sway of the requirement of timeliness are always risky. In their ineluctable riskiness, performances of silence at

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bottom announce man’s distinctiveness from the world with which he is always involved. These performances reveal man’s condition of being, in Heideggerian terms, a thrown project, of being uncanny. In Being and Time, then, the interrelation of silence, authentic discourse as response, and temporality appears in the course of laying bare what is involved in the call of conscience. Specifically, silence both is a cut in an “and so forth” and points unequivocally toward authentic resoluteness. This silence or reticence is the fundamental response of Dasein to the call which claims it back from the they-self. Out of this fundamental reticent response all authentic speech is born. The authentic resoluteness toward which silence points and in which Dasein’s response to the call of conscience consists is a resoluteness for grasping the Situation in a timely manner. This timely grasping is possible only because Dasein itself is radically historical, that is, both finite and temporal. In Being and Time, then, the attuning and timing to which Kierkegaard called attention are given an elaboration more in keeping with their importance.

Not everything in Being and Time’s treatment of the call of conscience, though, is in complete harmony with the descriptions and analysis presented earlier in this book. The reticence involved in wanting to have a conscience is indeed the counterpart of what I have called terminal silence. Not only is it a silence which cannot be surpassed, but it is also that silence which reverberates back across the entire domain of discourse and modifies the sense of what is said in any

level or shape thereof. But it is not evident that at the time of Being and Time Heideggar had yet recognized an originary reticence or silence as that which inaugurates the entire signitive domain. The call of conscience, rather, itself issues forth to recall Dasein from its lostness

in the chatter of the they-self. The call, as re-call, cures and restores rather than amplifies. It calls Dasein back from inauthentic discourse to

authentic discourse. Silence, then, in Being and Time, fundamentally has to do with a mode of discourse rather than discourse itself. It has to do with establishing authentic discourse and overcoming inauthentic discourse. This position is not fully consonant with the account of silence which I have proposed.

But Being and Time is not Heidegger’s last word on discourse and silence. As I pointed out at the beginning of this section, Heidegger went on to situate his early insights concerning discourse and silence into a more comprehensive setting.

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In this later setting, authentic or creative discourse, and the silence which is necessarily ingredient therein, does not primordially arise from Dasein itself.°* Rather, it arises as a response to a primordial Saying. This Saying, Heidegger maintains, has its source in that which must remain unsaid. Saying itself is a showing. It is that showing which allows both that which is present to appear and that which is absent to fade from appearance. Saying is the showing forth of what Heidegger calls

Ereignis, the Event of Appropriation. This Appropriation “yields the opening of the clearing in which present beings can persist and from which absent beings can depart while keeping their persistence in the withdrawal.”*? Appropriation likewise grants men their capacity to speak. It frees men to encounter and answer Saying. In Heidegger’s words:

When mortals are made appropriate for Saying, human nature is released into that needfulness out of which man is used for bringing soundless Saying to the sound of language. Appropriation, needing and using man’s appropriations, allows Saying to reach speech.®8 The Saying which calls men to speak is no constraining force. On the contrary, this call is precisely that which establishes the scope of freedom in which men can dwell as free.5® Nonetheless, man and his speech are fundamentally bound to that which Being allots to him. Thus, the proper response to Saying is not in the first instance an assertive investigation. Rather, it is a hearkening and a listening. It is a pious questioning which is obedient and submissive to that which the call of Being gives man to think about. The human discourse which arises from this thinking is fruitful only if it leads its participants into the unspoken. But being bound to what Being grants does not turn man into something passive. Even though the later Heidegger speaks of man as essentially attuned in a befitting manner to that which Being grants, as basically obedient to Being, and as submitted to the Event of Appropriation, he nonetheless recognizes that man is a necessary, creative coplayer in the coming to pass of the world. Without man’s creative play there would be neither world nor thing. The world, of course, is not created by man, is not his product. But without man there would be no meaningful sense or significations. In the later Heidegger, then, silence is that in which all discourse not

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SILENCE

only terminates but also originates. Man first hears the Saying and then responds

to what

it calls on him

to speak.

Human

performances

of

silence, at least as coconstitutive moments, establish and maintain the entire signitive domain. Man’s silence is the basis of his speech. This silence is not elicited from him as coplayer from within himself, as

Being and Time would

have it. Rather, it is elicited by the call of

Being, by the soundless Saying of the Event of Appropriation. In and through his thoughtful response to this Saying, man finds that this Saying itself springs forth from that which must remain unsaid. In the face of the unsaid, man must cease to speak. He must remain silent. Though he has not said it in so many words, Heidegger has now made it clear that not only man’s speech but also his performances of silence are needed to allow to appear that which Being grants to him.

In his later works, then, Heidegger’s silence

has

extended

to

its originating

appreciation of the place of as well

as to its terminating

function. And he has achieved this extension without losing sight of the cut or leap involved in silence. The cut makes it possible for the world and its things, for man himself, and for the relation between man and the world to become manifest. Nonetheless, there is a not inconsequential incompleteness in Heidegger’s thought, even in his last published thought, concerning discourse and silence as revelatory of Being. As Werner Marx has pointed out, what Heidegger says about the sense of Being and man’s encounter with it holds good only for “creative” men and their works, for poets

and philosophers, especially in his later works, which clearly ignore

everyday men.® Given this restriction of Heidegger’s attention simply to the works and “things” of creative men, to their creative discourse and silences, Marx is correct in saying that

the question arises as to how to regard the essence of all the other “things”

with which

man

now

and in the future

dwells

“under the

heavens and upon the earth.” Then we have the grave problem of relating these “creative” and “uncreative” regions to each other.® The account of silence which I have proposed has not been confined to only creative discourse and creative silence. It has ranged over the

entire domain of the signitive. As a consequence, what has been uncovered there does not require the awkward effort of trying to bridge a gap between already described and apparently discrete regions. In fact, the intentional analysis of silence, if conjoined with Heidegger’s

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133

insights, shows that Being needs each of the shapes and levels of discourse as well as all the sorts of silence in order to appear in its fullness. But whatever the limitations of the scope of Heidegger’s thought concerning discourse and silence, his work gives decisive direction to the way in which an acceptable ontological interpretation of silence must proceed. Human performances of silence and speech are what they are precisely because they are responsive to Being which stands in need of them in order to appear at all. Being, then, can only appear as

that which stands in need of man, who

himself would make no sense

unless he were responding to that which called him to speak. Thus, discourse and silence show both man and Being to be finite and temporal. The temporality-finitude of man and Being does not amount to a sheer discreteness of their moments. Rather, man and Being are epochal, marked by both continuities and discontinuities. Discourse and silence are risky because, however determinate man and Being may be, they cannot be fully determinate. Saying does not present a script for man to read. But neither does it give him a blank page to inscribe however he pleases. These Heideggerian insights can be extended, through the description and analysis of silence, to the entire domain of signification. When so extended, they can play a major role in unifying many of the other elements, drawn from other thinkers, which this study has shown must enter into a satisfactory interpretation of the significance of the phenomenon of silence. In this extension, however, it will become clear that Heidegger’s own contribution, as well as those other contributions which it helps to unify, is best thought of in terms and ways which have their roots in the history of Western thought concerning man and Being. But before the ontological interpretation of silence is undertaken, it is important to give substance to the somewhat formal description and analysis I have presented of the ways in which silence appears. Max

Picard’s The

World

of Silence furnishes an abundance

of evidence

for what might be called the material manifestations of silence.

V.

PICARD

AND

THE

WORLD

OF

SILENCE

In his extremely rich book The World of Silence, Max Picard uses the word “silence” in several different ways. Sometimes it refers to

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human performances, sometimes to conditions for such performances, sometimes to features of the experienced world, manifestation in the human world of the power Or again, Picard at times takes silence to be a the very being of man or some other entity. At silence to be an achievement, a fulfilling of one’s

and sometimes to a of the otherworldly. feature belonging to other times, he takes capacities, a perfect-

ing of one’s being. But this is not the place to sort out or criticize Picard’s diverse uses

of the word “silence.” Rather, I want to pay attention to his splendid insights into the multiple ways in which silence concretely appears within the span of human performances and experiences. In general, Picard’s work corroborates my account of the multiple ways in which silence appears.®> He describes, albeit in other terms, a fore-silence, an after-silence, and an intervening silence. He notices both originary and terminal silences. But beyond merely lending corroboration to these distinctions, he fleshes them out in concrete areas of experience.

In language which is reminiscent of Heidegger, Picard says that it is silence which

looks at man

rather than man

who

looks at silence.

“Man does not put silence to the test; silence puts man to the test.’ Silence, he continues, time. Rather, it is time notes, is useless in the its very “uselessness,” he writes,

neither increases nor develops in the course of which increases or grows in silence. Silence, he sense that it cannot be exploited. And yet, by silence can perform a healing function. Silence,

interferes with the regular flow of the purposeful. It strengthens the untouchable, it lessens the damage inflicted by exploitation. It makes things whole again, by taking them back from the world of dissipation into the world of wholeness. It gives things something of its own holy uselessness, for that is what silence is: holy uselessness.6” Silence, then, is that cut, that interruption of an “and so forth,” which binds and joins. This healing binding and joining shows up in the acts of forgiving and forgetting. Language, Picard says, sinks back into silence. The clearest and most perfect interplay of silence and word

in poetry.

“Great poetry,”

Picard

says, “is a mosaic

occurs

inlaid into si-

lence.”®* Not only is the poetic word intimately related to the silence whence it comes, but through its own spirit the poetic word itself

Some Appreciative Attendings effects world ignore which

135

silence. Words which participate in this profound way of silence manifest something quite different from words silence. It is this intimate connection between word and marks the poetry of Holderlin, Goethe, Shakespeare,

in the which silence Laoste,

and Sophocles. In their works, Picard says, the word not only brings the things out of the silence; it also produces

the silence in which they can disappear again. The earth is not burdened by the things: the word brings them to the silence in which they float away.® When language sinks back into silence, it is forgotten. But forgetting is not annihilation. Rather, “forgetting prepares the way for forgiveness.””° Through forgiving, people detach themselves from at least some of the dimensions of that which has become determinate in discourse, together with the “and so forth” which the determinate engenders. In so doing, they exercise their freedom in such a way

that a genuine we-community is both made possible and is sustained.” Forgiving reaches its apex in that forgetting which does not simply befall man but which he undertakes to achieve. Again in language

which reminds one of Heidegger, Picard says, “It is as though behind silence

were

the

absolute

word

to

which,

through

silence,

human

language moves. It is as though the human word were sustained by the absolute word. . . . Silence is like a remembrance of that word.” In forgiving and forgetting the human word, then, man returns to contact with the enabling absolute word from which all human words ultimately spring and to which they refer. Forgiving and forgetting repudiate the pseudodefinitiveness of the human word. Silence contributes to the foundation of human community in another way. It does so by virtue of its connection with both humor and death. On the one hand, in silence the contradictions and nonsense which I find both within myself and confronting me lose their either-or character. It is silence which allows me to accept with grace, with humor even, the ineluctable incompleteness of my life and the

ultimate unfulfillability of my dreams.”* On the other hand, forgiving and forgetting, and the silence which makes them possible, likewise point the way toward death, death taken as a positive achievement, death as an entrusting to others’ care that to which one has devoted himself. Death in this positive sense is a forgiving of the survivor for

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SILENCE

surviving and a yielding to him of one’s own discourse in such a way that the survivor is freely accepted as the one who will respond to

it beyond our chance to rebut him.”

Conversely, we the survivors are responsible to the dead. We make ourselves worthy of our trust by listening in silence to them. Only through the silence in his own life can a man hear the words of the dead. In this silent listening, “the dead carry the silence into the world of man, the world of the word. They give it some of the power that is in silence.”’75 Thus, the entire domain of human discourse is suspended between an originary silence whence discourse arises and a terminal silence, death, into which it departs. From its originary silence, discourse receives it originality, simplicity, and innocence. From death it receives its fragility, its incapacity to correspond perfectly to its referent, in short, its finitude.7® A man’s first word is marked by death as truly as by freshness. A man’s last word is marked by freshness as truly as by death.

Silence, then, is a requisite for binding and joining ourselves both to our contemporaries and to our ancestors and descendents. But this binding is a yielding to their freedom. As such, it involves a risk. And even if the risk is accepted, the emotional and intellectual ambivalence of the experience of silence is not thereby converted into sheer benignity. In silence, as Kierkegaard had already pointed out, “there is present not only the power of healing and friendship but also the power of darkness and terror.”’? Death is bitter as well as sweet. And even though it is less obvious, birth too is both bitter and sweet, whether it is our own or another’s. For in neither case can we successfully deny it and its claim. Silence, then, can not only link men to one another. It can also menace discourse and threaten man with an isolation from which the only egress is violence. If silence overwhelms discourse, then it is demonic. But discourse, if it is that discourse which responds to the absolute word, exorcises the demonic dimension of silence. In Picard’s words: From the primeval forest of silence arose, through the spirit that is in

the word, the friendly ground of silence which feeds and carries the

word. . . . Through the word the silence ceases to be in demonic isolation and becomes the friendly sister of the world.78

Some Appreciative Attendings

137

But, of course, the exorcism can never be definitive. The temporality

of man, of discourse, and of silence itself, precludes such a possibility. This absolute word which must be hearkened to if the demonic in silence is to be exorcised to any degree at all does not, of course, stand forth in obvious self-presence. It is accessible only in prayer. Picard says: In prayer the word comes again of itself into silence. . . . It is taken up

by God, taken away from man... . Prayer can be never-ending, but the word of prayer always disappears into silence. Prayer is a pouring of the word

into silence. . . . Elsewhere,

outside prayer, the silence of

man is fulfilled and receives its meaning in speech. But in prayer it receives its meaning and fulfillment in the meeting with the silence of God.79 Prayer, for Picard, rests upon faith. With the sort of circumspection which philosophy requires, I would prefer to say that prayer rests upon hope. And the object of that hope is that there is that absolute word which commissions our discourse. Beyond that, Picard, and anyone as a man, may certainly go to God. But the philosopher, and here I follow Heidegger, speaks with more reserve. In any case, prayer and faith or hope spring forth as a leap from the encounter with that irrecusably polyvalent silence which stands at the beginning and end of all human discourse. In prayer and faith or hope, words come to their end. Of themselves, Picard says, they return to silence. Thus words can only spring forth as temporalized responses. They cannot definitively resolve silence’s polyvalency. But then it is of the very nature of prayer, faith, and hope to eschew any hint of definitive resolution, a resolution which would purport to be fully achieved. The leap to prayer and either faith or hope, of course, is not the only possible response to this encounter with silence. Silence can be,

in Promethean fashion, denounced and defied. It can be answered by despair. It can even be, in large measure, ignored. An ontological interpretation of the phenomenon must account these possibilities and must elucidate how it is that, insofar these responses is irreversible, whichever response is made

acceptable for all of as none of is always

infected with traces or foreshadows of the other, unmade, responses. Picard himself does not develop a careful analysis of the many ways in which silence appears. Nor does he distinguish silence from mute-

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SILENCE

ness by making it clear that silence is an active human performance. As a consequence, he is in no position to develop an adequate ontological interpretation of the phenomenon of silence. Nonetheless, his concrete insights and vivid descriptions of many aspects of silence bring substantial richness to reflection on this phenomenon. No satisfactory ontological interpretation can neglect them.

VI. SUMMARY As a tion of of this up not

proximate preparation for proposing silence, let me summarize what has chapter. Eastern thought shows that only with discourse but also with

an ontological interpretabeen gained in the course silence is intimately bound action and desire. Silence

itself is efficacious. In fact, according Taoism, at the apex of human

performances, authentic speech is one with authentic silence and, in their oneness, they are the most efficacious of human achievements. What the ontological interpretation must explore is this purported interpenetration of discourse, silence, action and desire. Meditation on Kierkegaard’s treatment of Abraham shows that it is unacceptable to regard discourse as always the determinate element set over against silence as the nondeterminate element. Sometimes silence is the determinate and discourse the nondeterminate. Or from another angle, neither discourse nor silence exclusively reveals. Both discourse and silence sometimes reveal and sometimes conceal. Merleau-Ponty points the way to several major aspects of the meaning of silence. First, by virtue of the interconnections obtaining among

the fundamental human domains of perceptual, signitive, and actional performances, performances of silence manifest important dimensions both of the social character of man’s being and of the complex unity which he as an individual lives out. Second, since man is as he is, then the world is such that it can only appear as that which is both present

and absent, as a field for inquiry. Thus, if both man and world show

this complexity of presence and absence, Being itself is to be described in terms of poles in tension and not in terms of undifferentiated simplicity. Being is such that man is an interrogatory opening on the world understood as horizon. Silence is at the foundation of this opening. In a quite similar way, Heidegger holds that authentic human discourse arises as a response to a primordial Saying. It is the call of this

Some Appreciative Attendings

139

Saying which establishes the scope of freedom in which free men can dwell. To respond to this Saying man must both hearken to it in silence and recognize what must remain unsaid. Saying itself, which

has its source in the unsaid, shows forth the Event of Appropriation by virtue of which man and Being belong together. Man can appear as man only in response to Saying. And both Being and beings can appear as such only by virtue of man’s response in speech.*° Both man and Being, then, are characterized, each in its own way, by a tempo-

rality, finitude, and freedom which are epochal. These characteristics are brought to light through the interplay of discourse and silence. Finally, Picard spells out in some detail the links between silence on the one hand and forgiving, forgetting, death, poetry, and prayer, on the other hand. In the process, he again points to the polyvalence of silence. He himself moves on to find in silence an opening for faith. This faith is not immediately justified by the encounter with silence. Rather it is the outcome of an ontological interpretation of that en-

counter. Silence, with its polyvalency, does not unequivocally dictate that it be interpretated in terms of faith. But it does require that some ontological interpretation of it be attempted. It is to that task that I now turn.

[6] The Ontological Significance of the Phenomenon of Silence

Tuus rar in this study I have described in considerable detail the ways in which silence appears and taken note of the thought of a number of philosophers concerning silence and its meaning. The key results of the description of silence emerged from the intentional analysis

of silence.

Those

results, it will be recalled,

are:

(1)

Silence

is a

founded, active performance which, in its pure occurrences, not directly intend an already fully determinate object of any

does sort.

Rather, (2) motivated by finitude and awe, silence interrupts or cuts an

already

instituted

stream

of

intentional

performances

which,

in

most cases, intend determinate objects.! Thus, (3) silence is not simply the correlative opposite of discourse. Rather, it establishes and maintains a tension not only among the several levels and shapes of discourse but also between the signitive domain as a whole and the other domains of experience. The results of the consideration of other thinkers’ reflections on silence are a set of clues pointing to features which an appropriate ontological interpretation of the significance of silence must take into account.

I.

THE

ONTOLOGICAL OF

SILENCE

AND

INTERPRETATION ITS

BASES

It is now necessary to propose a candidate for the appropriate ontological interpretation of silence. The fundamental question to be dealt with here is: What must Being be if silence as a positive phenomenon which appears in multiple ways is to be both possible and intelligible? Or, in other terms, what does the occurence of silence

The Ontological Significance of Silence

141

in its variegated ways of appearing reveal about Being and its structure? This fundamental question, in turn, involves two more proximate

questions:

(1) What is to be said of man’s way of Being which makes

it possible for him to engage in positive performances of silence? And

(2) what is to be said of the world’s way of Being such that it makes sense for man to perform silence? This way of formulating the ontological issue which is at stake here makes it clear that my interpretation will be based, not only on the results of the description of silence and of the consideration of other thinkers’ reflections on silence, but also on the assumption that it makes sense for man to engage in silence. And so the ontological issue is, not whether silence makes sense, but just what sense does it make. This assumption, though it is neither peculiar to me nor extravagant, needs at least a brief justification and clarification. With Heidegger, Marcel, Merleau-Ponty, and numerous other philosophers, I take it

that man and his performances are not fundamentally and radically baseless or absurd. They may be incomplete, wanting, or lacking in exhaustive satisfaction. But they are not simply chaotic or whimsical. Briefly, the only conceivable evidence for claiming that man or any of his types of performances is essentially absurd is the mere formal logical possibility that such is the case. No conceivable material evidence buttresses this logical possibility. In fact, the logical possibility of radical absurdity cannot be coherently articulated in any discourse which is acknowledged to be intersubjective. If man and his performances are not fundamentally absurd, then every type of performance in which he can engage must be appropriate for living in the sort of world he occupies. Errors and mistakes make it clear that not each and every individual performance is appropriate. But just as illusory or misleading appearances are special cases and can be recognized and explained only because they are deviations from normal appearances, so too defective per-

formances of any sort are deviations from normal performances of that sort.? No type of positive performance is, in principle, always awry. Now, silence, just as much as discourse, is a type of positive performance. It is not, fundamentally, simply a cessation of some other type of performance. Along with discourse, it is an irreducible way in which man expresses his life. As such, it has its own distinctive

sense.

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SILENCE

Man, in expressing his life, does not create ex nihilo the sense of his performances. Actual discourse, as Husserl saw, must be authenticated by something other than the discourse and its own inner consistency. This “something else” cannot be exhaustively the groundless confection of the interlocutors. If it were, then discourse would, contrary to the interlocutors’ experience and aim, reveal only the interlocutors

and nothing of the world in which they live; their discourse could

never achieve, or even aim at, authentication. Now what holds good for discourse holds good for all types of human performances, including silence. No type of expression of human life involves the exercise of sheer, unmitigated autonomy. In all of its modes, man’s expression is vis-a-vis a world which is at least in some fundamental respects irreducibly other.’ Yet the world is man’s world inasmuch as all the types of performances of which he is capable are appropriate to that world. That is, they all make sense. This holds good both for his Passive or spontaneous performances and for his active performances. Further, the way in which the several types of performances in which man can engage are related to one another is not senseless. The complex unity which a man is is itself, at least in principle, appropriate to the world he inhabits. There could be no conclusive or even highly persuasive evidence that man’s complex way of expressing his life is intrinsically senseless. Rather man is, in a sense yet to be more precisely specified, something of a microcosm. What is to be said about man, his world, and each of their ways of Being throws light upon Being itself. On the basis of this assumption and the evidence assembled in the foregoing chapters, I will propose what I take to be a warranted, appropriate ontological interpretation of the phenomenon of silence. I will first baldly state my ontological claim and then show how it meshes with the evidence whose possibility is to be accounted for.

My thesis is: Both man and world are syntheses of two irreducible, but non-self-standing, components which are not contraries of one another. Rather, these components are simply other than one another. Being is the interplay of the play of these two components in man on the one hand and the world on the other’ Nothing, neither man nor thing, can either be or be intelligible except proximately by virtue of the play of these components, and ultimately by virtue of the inter-

play of the several plays of these components. The components of this synthesis, this dyad, are appropriately named the “determinate” and

The Ontological Significance of Silence

143

the “nondeterminate.” This dyad, this synthesis, cannot, at least with the resources available to philosophy, be resolved into a perfect

finished Whole or One. It must be emphasized that, as I indicated in the preface, this thesis is not intended as the ultimate and all-inclusive articulation of the fundamental sense of Being. No single phenomenon, however pervasive and variegated it may be, could provide sufficient evidence to support so broad a claim. In fact, it is my own guess that if the phenomenon of love were thoroughly investigated and its results were linked to those concerning silence, then the interpretation proposed in my thesis would be both expanded and modified.> Nonetheless, as I will show, signitive performances play a privileged role in the manifestation of the sense of both man’s Being and that of the world. And among signitive performances, performances of silence enjoy a certain primacy. Therefore, an appropriate ontological interpretation of silence can be expected to make an irreplaceable contribution to the task of developing as thoroughly comprehensive an interpretation of the sense of Being as is possible. My

thesis obviously has some affinity with the Platonic doctrine of

the indeterminate dyad, the aoristos dyas. This dyad does not itself consist of two beings of some particular kind each of which can be univocally characterized and which mutually delimit each other. Rather, each component of the dyad is necessarily at play in any being which can be and be detected.® But unlike the Platonic position, my thesis does not claim that this dyad can be resolved into some finished Whole or One, even if the One is admitted to be necessarily beyond articulation. The synthesis I posit involves an irreducible tension. The Platonic position either implies or allows for the possibility of an exhaustive, all-comprehensive knowledge and a complete language. My thesis rules out any such extravagant possibilities. Instead, I understand Being as interplay. As play, Being has nothing—no criterion, norm, goal, etc..—beyond its own enduring. As play it involves otherness

within itself and as itself. As the play of distinctive ways of Being— man and world—it The defense of be accounted for for them. But it the thesis and the

is interplay. this thesis consists in considering and showing both that and how will become apparent that both phenomena to be accounted for

the phenomena to this thesis accounts the inner logic of preclude both the

claim that my thesis is either exhaustive or definitive and the possibility

oy (144)

SILENCE

that any evidence purporting to establish either my thesis or any other ontological thesis could be either exhaustive or definitive.

The defense of my thesis consists of two parts. First, I will deal with the relationship between that thesis and multiple ways in which silence appears and is conjoined with other human performances. Then, in Chapter Seven, I will show how my thesis accounts for the possibility of much of what has been said about silence by other thinkers.

Il.

THE

DETERMINATE

NONDETERMINATE SIGNITIVE

AND THE IN THE

DOMAIN

I begin the first part of my defense by considering the play of silence and discourse which constitutes the signitive domain. The signitive domain as a whole is one of the domains of active intentional performances in which man mediates his relationship to the world.’

Signitive performances, like all active performances, show that man and his world are at some distance from one another, are irreducible to one another. But as all active performances likewise show, man and world are also near enough to one another for play between them to occur. For the moment, I wish to focus upon signitive performances. The intentional analysis of silence shows that no occurrence of either silence or discourse is fundamentally discrete from some occurrence of the other. Each of them is ingredient in the mediation which the other effects. More to the present point, the analysis also shows that no concrete performance of either silence or discourse definitively escapes the need for further mediation. Each mediation involves both a stabilization and a nonstabilization.® Any sort of intentional performance, whether passive or active, can serve as that upon which the particular stabilization—nonstabilization involved in mediation is wrought.® Stabilization involves determinateness and nonstabilization involves nondeterminateness. Parenthetically, the fact that every mediation involves both stabilization and nonstabilization is part of the reason no ontological thesis and no evidence for an ontological thesis can be exhaustively or definitively formulated. Every formulation,

since it is belongs to the signitive domain, stands open to further mediation.

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145

At first glance, as I showed in Chapter Five, one is tempted to regard discourse as simply determinate and silence as simply nondeterminate. Closer inspection however, shows that matters are more complicated. To be sure, in many cases determinateness is preponderant in discourse and nondeterminateness is preponderant in silence. But in not a few cases, just the reverse is true. Thus, discourse and silence cannot

be said to embody, respectively, determinateness and nondeterminateness, Both originary and terminal silences serve to mark off, to make determinate, the signitive domain as signitive. Terminal silence rebounds across the signitive domain to give some interpretative cast to everything which has been articulated. The silences of the to-be-said as well as of both deep communion and bitter hatred exemplify the determinate element in silence. An especially graphic example of the determinateness involved in terminal silence which is coupled with indeterminate discourse is found, as already mentioned in Chapter Five’s

discussion of Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, in Abraham’s silence toward Isaac, Sarah, and Eleazar as well as Abraham’s words to Isaac that God would provide a sacrifice. Abraham’s silence fixed matters such that any words uttered thereafter would be shot through with nondeterminateness. Another sort of determinateness brought to the signitive domain through performances of silence is exemplified by those sorts of silences which are at play in the discrimination of different types of discourse. Silence, as was shown in Chapter Two, has an irreplaceable role in determining whether a piece of discourse is political, artistic, religious, technological, etc., or whether tradition holds sway in what is uttered. Finally, even the derivative silences color the sense of what is uttered by making determinate the possibilities of emphasis, pace, and style which enter into every discursive perform-

ance. On the other hand, concrete discourse is in important respects nondeterminate.t° Much of what is uttered after terminal silence has been experienced serves to preserve that silence rather than to bring something determinate to utterance. This is the case with nonritualized

prayer, with some of what is said to one another by people united in love or in hate, as well as with some of what is uttered by those in radical despair. Further, individual utterances, for example, words, tones, and to a lesser degree gestures, are always sufficiently nondeterminate with respect to other utterances that further distinctions can be made.

146

SILENCE

In fact, there is some reason to think that the more basic a word is, the greater its polysemy, its semantic nondeterminateness. Consider, for example, words like “do,” “make,” “see,” “have,” and their counterparts in other Western languages. Finally, if somewhat trivially, a word without context is, for all practical purposes, unintelligible. Thus, within the signitive domain, it is not possible either to separate the determinate from the nondeterminate or to collapse the one into the other. There are neither determinate pieces nor nondeterminate pieces. Rather, signitive performances perform their mediational function by the interplay of the dimensions of determinateness and nondeterminateness found in both silence and discourse. Two things should be noted here, however. First, though silence and discourse are always conjoined and make no sense apart from each

other, silence has a certain preeminence. As the intentional analysis of silence brought to light, it is silence, not discourse, which inaugurates and bounds the signitive domain. It is silence which prepares the way for discourse and allots it its room in which to appear. Second, nonstabilization does enjoy in much silence a certain preeminence which it does not have in most discourse. That is, it is silence which in a preeminent sense cuts or interrupts the “and so forths” of discourse and not vice versa. This partial ascendancy of silence over discourse is a matter to which I will return in the course of developing the

first part of the defense of my thesis. Ill.

THE

SIGNITIVE

DOMAINS

OF

ACTIVE

AND

THE

OTHER

PERFORMANCES

Let me turn now to considering the connection between the signitive domain, with its constituent silence, and the other domains of active intentional performances, the actional and the fabricational domains. Here again, the determinate and the nondeterminate are inextricably intercalated. Fabrication is a distinctive sort of way in which man mediates his encounter with the world. It is the transformation of something belonging to the world from one shape to another. The distinctive feature of fabrication is that, in it, a person embodies his own efforts in a product which can endure without the continuing effort of himself

or anyone else. Fabrication, then, involves changing the things of the world.

But

this

changing

is destined

to

come

to

an

end

with

the

The Ontological Significance of Silence

147

establishment of a more or less permanent object which is meant to perdure without further change. The fabricational process is properly described in terms of means and ends. Some things are transformed and take on a new

shape. Others are utilized as tools and retain their

shapes because they do not, properly speaking, become part of the new enduring object. To whatever extent man himself can be fabricated, to that extent he is himself a worldly object and is not the author of intentional performances. But, of course, to whatever extent a man is fabricated, to that extent he cannot mediate his relation to the world. For, in this respect, he is an element in the world itself and is to be understood like any other worldly thing. Action is another way in which man mediates his encounter with the world. Action, unlike fabrication, creates no product which can endure without continued human effort. There is, properly speaking, no distinction between means and ends within action. Action does transform, indirectly, one’s relationships with the world. But it does so through transforming one’s relationship to other people or to one-

self. That is, action involves either changing mented ways of maintain such a routine. In the worldly may be

one’s habitual or sedi-

mediating his encounter with the world or striving to change against its tendency to decay into habit or course of action or in its service something strictly transformed into a new perduring object. But even

if this transformation is itself the outcome of fabrication, these new objects are merely incidental to action. Consider two examples. First, if in the course of climbing a mountain, a person dislodges a stone which falls and kills a rabbit, the dead rabbit is not ingredient in the mountain climbing. Second, if in the course of exploring a river some huts are built, the huts are nonetheless not components of the exploring. Much action utilizes fabricated objects as implements. But the implements, unlike tools in fabrication, are not then applied to other worldly things in order to transform them. The implements, rather, simply allow the action to take place. On the other hand, some fabrication utilizes action. Artisans can utilize the patron’s action of staging a spectacle, for example, a parade, to make a new perduring object. Here again, the patron’s action

may be a necessary condition for the fabrication, but it is not a means. Action and fabrication, each in its own way, involve both determinateness and nondeterminateness. The general phenomenal form which

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SILENCE

determinateness and nondeterminateness take in action and fabrication is that of rest and motion. But here again neither rest nor motion can exclusively and unequivocally be tied to either determinateness or nondeterminateness. Both rest and motion, each in its own way, involve the play of determinateness and nondeterminateness. An action, for example, managing a business enterprise, involves both fresh decidings and pauses in decidings. Timing is of considerable consequence. The pauses both give time for previous decidings to take hold and open the way for changes in direction. Decidings change old directions and inaugurate new ones. Both deciding and pauses stabilize and nonstabilize. In these respects, pauses and decidings are to the actional domain as silence and discourse are to the signitive domain. A fabrication, for example, erecting a building, involves both a manipulation of materials—both tools and that to which tools are applied—and a yielding to the constraints imposed by those materials. Here again, timing is of major consequence. Concrete must be allowed to set. Reinforced concrete is not simply concrete juxtaposed to metal. Treated metal is not the same after the treatment as before. Both the yielding to constraints and the manipulating stabilize and nonstabilize. In these respects, yielding to the constraints of materials and manipulating materials are to the fabricational domain as pauses and decidings are to the actual domains and silence and discourse are to the signitive domain. But these three domains of active intentional performances cannot

be reduced to a single domain." Actional, fabricational, and signitive performances are three irreducibly distinctive ways in which man mediates his encounter with the world. In fact, the three are not on a par with one another. Signitive performances, unlike actional and fabricational performances, can mediate performances of their own

type. Each type of mediation can mediate the other two, but only

signitive performances can mediate other signitive performances. I can speak about speaking but I cannot engage in action about action or in fabrication about fabrication. In this important respect, the signitive domain is the most comprehensive of the domains of active human performances, The relations among these three domains can themselves be understood in terms of determinateness and nondeterminateness. At one level, actions and fabrications are obviously efficacious. Something

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149

happens. Things are not as they were before. But they are also relatively opaque. How does one action fit with another action? What is the connection between two fabrications? Perceptual similarities are by no means enough to satisfy these questions. As mediations, both actions and fabrications themselves still stand in need of further mediations. This mediation is supplied by signitive performances, On the other hand, signitive performances alone are experienced as insufficient fully to mediate man’s encounter with his world. People regularly experience that the time for talk has passed and now it is time to do or make something. Thus, each sort of active performance achieves something. But it also fails to achieve everything. Each both stabilizes and nonstabilizes. Each involves both determinateness and nondeterminateness. ° But I must be more specific here about the sort of primacy which

the signitive domain enjoys. Action and, to a lesser extent, fabrication tend to vanish. Action in its relative immediacy vanishes as soon as it no longer has any performers sustaining it. Fabrication in its relative immediacy vanishes when its product decays. But each of them can endure even beyond the lives of their authors or audiences if they are

mediated by signitive performances.

Some

fabrications, for example,

monuments, can contribute to the endurance of some actions. But even here some signitive performances are needed to mediate the connection between the action and its monument—if the sense of the monument is to be maintained beyond the era of those who participated in its erection as a monument. This need, by the way, explains uncertainty about whether some artifacts are monuments or not and why many monuments have inscriptions. Though action and fabrication both tend to vanish, they are nonetheless performed as mediations which are appropriate either to an era or to the general structure of man’s relation to his world, even if what is done or made is in effect a denunciation or defiance either of man or of the world. In this respect, each mediation implies that, by its appropriateness, it is worth preserving if anything is worth preserving. That is, the most denunciatory mediation may announce that no mediation makes sense. But implicit in that announcement is the claim that if any mediation at all should make sense it itself is the mediation which does so and thus is worth preserving. Even a performance which mocks all performances as absurd implies that it embodies a sense which can be recognized and preserved.

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Given the assumption that no type of man’s intentional performances

is always awry, an assumption which pervades this ontological interpretation, there is no need to worry about the announcement that no mediation whatsoever makes sense. But the important point here is that every mediation of whatever sort contains within itself the sense that it should somehow endure indefinitely. The only way actional and fabricational performances can endure beyond their own eras is through the further mediation provided by signitive performances. In fact, each signitive performance in its own way needs further signitive performances to allow it to continue to endure. This is ex-

emplified in the preservation, reading, and interpreting of texts and in the repeating of stories and tales. As

the domain

of that type

of mediation

which

can

prolong

the

efficacy of all types of mediation, the signitive domain enjoys a primacy over both the actional and the fabricational domains.!2 One way in which signitive performances are efficacious and preserve the efficacy of the other types of mediating performances is by expanding the ranks of the participants involved in the mediation. Another way in which they are efficacious is that they provide a way for linking mediating performances to one another. In fact, not only do signitive performances provide a way for linking mediating performances to one another, but individual mediating performances of all sorts carry the sense of calling for linkage with other mediating performances. This fact may not be obvious if one inspects only a single performance, for example, building a sand castle or committing a random act of violence. But if one considers a sufficiently broad sequence of mediational performances by either an individual or a group, he finds that each of them somehow refers to the others and thus is a component of an ensemble and not a mere discrete element of an aggregate. Even the perpetrators of apparently random acts of terror proffer explanations for the randomness of their acts. Until some mediating explanation is offered, such acts are totally opaque and without actual sense. Actional and fabricational performances, then, are disciplined performances. Part of the discipline is to make them amenable to being themselves mediated by signitive performances. If they are to be preserved with their own intended sense, then their structure must be such that they can be signitively mediated, for only signitive performances can preserve them. They must also be structured in such a way that they can be mediated by some appropri-

The Ontological Significance of Silence ate type

of discourse,

for example,

political

discourse,

151 artistic

dis-

course, or religious discourse. It is this need for appropriate structure, with the consequent possibility of the failure to effect it, which explains the possibility of the failure of some actions or fabrications to be signitively mediated, and thus preserved, in the way in which their authors intended. We call such actional and fabricational failures bizarre. They are indeed actions or fabrications. But they cannot be preserved in the sense intended by their authors. It can also happen that the appropriate structure is effected but that the author does not realize it. This possibility accounts for those cases in which an author articulates something more profound than he himself realized. The signitive domain, then, enjoys a certain primacy over the actional and the fabricational domains. And within the signitive domain, silence enjoys a certain primacy over discourse. This primacy of silence in turn holds with respect to every sort of active intentional performance. It is silence which clears the way for each type of mediation and which consequently restrains the “and so forth” involved in each type of mediation. In the interchange among these three domains of mediation, one again finds the play of stabilization and nonstabilization, of determinateness and nondeterminateness. Within the signitive domain, as has been noted, nonstabilization or nondeterminateness has a certain preeminence over determinateness in many occurrences of silence. This point can now be generalized. Silence holds a primacy among active intentional performances. It is silence which in a preeminent sense cuts or interrupts and thus regulates the “and so forths” of all other mediational performances. As I said earlier, this partial ascendency of silence will be dealt with toward the end of the first part of the defense of my thesis. The linking together of mediational performances which makes their preservation possible is not casual or arbitrary. Rather the stream of stabilizations and nonstabilizations which are effected by mediations of each type has something of a pattern or rhythm. Sometimes it is time to talk and other times it is time to do or to make. This fact is not evident if one focuses on only one or a few mediational performances. But it becomes clear if one takes in synoptically a somewhat large number of mediations. Silence, as the cut in the “and so forths,” is the dominant element in this patterning. And it is the possibility of patterns

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or rhythms of mediations which make both history and tradition possible.

IV.

THE

DETERMINATE

NONDETERMINATE HISTORY

AND

AND

THE

IN

TRADITION

The subject matter for biography, including autobiography, is the discerned pattern in an individual’s life. The minimal assumptions underlying biography are that the subject matter is a complex unity and that the subject matter, though unique, is intelligible. But each individual lives his life in conjunction with other persons whose lives also satisfy the conditions for biography. History rests upon the assumption that these lives intersect and affect one another in ways that are intelligible. Thus just as there is a rhythm to the stabilizations and and nonstabilizations of the flux of experience which individual active performances achieve, so is there a pattern or rhythm to the stabilizations and nonstabilizations effected by the specific interplay of the members of some concrete community. Happily, an attempt to characterize this interplay in detail is not necessary here. It is enough to note that each member of the interplay in question exercises some initiative. Each contributes active intentional performances to the community’s achievements. History, then, as a coherent account of man’s mediational performances—his sayings, doings, and makings—depends for its possibility upon some discernible rhythm of man’s stabilizations and nonstabilizations. The range of possible discernible rhythms of stabilizations and nonstabilizations establishes the foundation for the multiple ways of living with others and engaging in mediational performances with them. The patterns of stabilizations and nonstabilizations which are constituted by active intentional performances also make tradition possible. Here I use the term “history” to refer to that discursive account whose subject matter is the set of mediational performances—signitive, actional, and fabricational—of identifiable persons or groups of people which bring about something fresh or which expressly strive to maintain in force some previously established state of affairs. “Tradition,” on the other hand, refers to the sedimented residue of mediational performances, not basically attributable to a specific person or group of people,

The Ontological Significance of Silence

153

which provides the point of departure for performances which can become the subject matter of history. All history, to be history, signitively mediates every mediation. Tradition, by contrast, can contain mediations which are not themselves signitively mediated. That is, ways of doing and making can be elements in tradition even if they have never been the topics of signitive performances. For example, a culture can have a traditional cooking practice which the participants never

thought to talk about. Though

tradition conditions history, it does not fully determine it.

In fact, history in its own right conditions tradition. In Chapter Two, I pointed out that the distinction between tradition and present utter-

ance

could

be compared

to that between

langue

and

parole.

This

latter distinction likewise provides a clue for describing the play of stabilization—nonstabilization involved in living out the connection between traditional mediational performances and history-constituting performances."* First of all, a man is born into a tradition which assimilates him prior to his being able to engage in history-making performances. A person is always endowed with a heritage with which he must cope. He is always attached to the vestiges of the performances of others. In this sense, he is stabilized by that which is other than himself. Part

of this heritage is the langue, the language, into which he is born. Second, and conversely, his own endeavors, at least to some extent, leave their trace in tradition and thus modify it. He has no explicit, final control over either what is incorporated into tradition or how it is incorporated. Yet whatever he does which does get absorbed into tradition itself conditions what both he and others can subsequently achieve. Thus his own active performances, by supplying the subject matter of history, in some respects nonstabilize tradition. But in other respects, they themselves enter into the stabilization which tradition maintains. One way in which he does this is parole, speech. Thus, a man’s heritage is not without determinate content, but it is only a

heritage.

It is not all-determining.

On

the other

hand,

his history-

making performances do show both the nondeterminateness of that from which they come and the nondeterminateness concerning what

their precise consequences will be. Both history and tradition, then, reveal the play of determinateness and nondeterminateness. And the connection between them is their interplay. Yet here again there is something of a preponderance of the nonde-

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SILENCE

terminate. The silence which allows for the shuttling between the historic and the traditional interrupts the instituted “and so forths” involved alternately in history and in tradition. In so doing, silence indeed mediates. But it mediates with a call for additional and different mediational performances from those which have occurred up to that point. History and tradition both owe their possibility in large measure to memory, to Mnemosyne. Though Mnemosyne is somehow opposed to forgetfulness, to Lethe, no sharp cleavage can be made between them. Rather, they are complementary, permutable, and contiguous.* The ordinary distinction, then, between oblivion and retention of the past, a distinction which does involve an Opposition, is rooted in this more fundamental Lethe and Mnemosyne. Heidegger claims that the play of forgetting and recalling is itself rooted in a more fundamental sense of memory. At the deepest level, he says, memory is connected with devotion. Like devotion, memory means an attentive, steady abiding with something. This abiding is not limited to a dwelling with what is past. It extends equally to what is present and to what may come. The original nature of memory, then, in Heidegger’s words is the gathering of the constant intention of everything that the heart holds in present being. Intention here is understood in this sense: the

inclination with which the inmost meditation of the heart turns toward all that is in being—the inclination that is not within its own control and therefore also need not necessarily be first enacted as such.15 Memory in this sense, as Heidegger notes, involves thanking. And thanking requires both the reception of something one has not acquired by his own resources as well as some one, some source, whence this gift comes. Heidegger’s claim is supported by the classical view that the Muses, whose mother is Mnemosyne, are the sole source of truth. Not everything coming from the Muses is true, but whatever truth there is comes from them.!*° The poet is, then, the one who recalls and preserves with thanks what the Muses grant. History and tradition recall and preserve what is given to them. The play of stabilization or determinateness and nonstabilization or nondeterminateness in them is a manifestation of this more fundamental play of determinateness and nondeterminateness between man and his mediational performances on the one hand and that which he is given

The Ontological Significance of Silence

155)

to mediate. Among the mediational performances he engages in, I have argued that silence has a certain preeminence. That claim is given further support now by the recognition that man engages in his mediational activity only in response to a gift. In short, before he can speak—or do or make—he must listen. Listening in silence opens the way for discursive performances. But the listening itself is an active

intentional performance. As such it, in its own way, both nonstabilizes spontaneous experience and stabilizes, in its devotedness, its own acceptance of the gift as something to be preserved, as something with which to abide.

V.

THE

DETERMINATE

NONDETERMINATE SPONTANEOUS

AND

THE

IN

PERFORMANCES

The character of listening in silence becomes clearer if one broadens his focus now to encompass the relation between signitive, actional, and fabricational performances on the one hand and perceptual, imaginative, pictorial, and appetitive performances on the other. I will not discuss performances of these latter sorts in any detail. Recalling a few of their prominent features will be enough. Instead, my emphasis will be on the connection between these two general sorts of performances. In concrete lived experience, perception, imagination, and appetition are inseparable. Though they are irreducible to one another, they depend on one another. Perception proceeds by way of association." But association involves the bringing together of an associating, present, object and an associated, absent, object. Association, to proceed, involves imagination. Perception itself, then, “goes on in constant and labile comparison with imagination.”!® Without the play of perception and imagination, the object would not be able to be conceptually articulable as invariant throughout its presence and absence. It could not be named. Likewise, without the play of presence and absence, the object could not be either taken as or presented as picturable. Like naming, picturing involves an association of something present with something absent.?® Association, however, always actually occurs in conjunction with appetition, in conjunction with pleasure or pain taken broadly. Association is always emotionally charged, even if the intensity of the

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charge is, for practical purposes, negligible. Association occurs because the associated objects arouse affective interest. Without desire, there would be no association. The evidence is that we associate only selected possible candidates for association. This fact, of course, can be recognized only in reflecting upon a sequence of associations. In reflection we can discover that in each particular association some things available for association were in fact left unassociated. However, the term “desire,” including within its scope both emotion and interest, is too broad to be of much help here. Emotion and interest belong together but they are not the same. I will use “emotion” here to designate the passive aspect of man’s encounter with the Other, whatever that Other might be, and “interest” to designate the active aspect of this encounter. Desire includes both emotion and interest, neither of which regulates the other, though each of them impinges upon the other. Desire as a whole provokes man’s mediational performances.” Man cannot simply watch the world. He is summoned to deal with it. Desire as a whole shows that the encounter with the world can be mediated. Whatever is given is modifiable. If it were not, desire would be absurd. The aspect of interest emphasizes this dimension of the encounter. At the same time, desire shows that the encounter with the world can be given no definitive mediation, no mediation which would amount to a new and engulfing immediacy. Otherwise, desire could be exhausted. The aspect of emotion emphasizes this dimension of the encounter. However it is mediated, the world remains Other. The aspect of interest is especially instructive in the present context. It is a necessary condition for mediational performances of all sorts. It is that which impels one to engage in an appropriaton of the world. But interest alone is too diffuse to issue in efficacious mediation. Though interest prepares immediate experience for mediational performances, it is insufficient to account for mediation. For any concrete mediation to occur, interest must be shaped and focused. That which primordially joins with interest to make interest efficacious is silence. Here again, this is not evident if one examines only single instances of mediation. After all, interest might well lead me to pound a snake with a stick without engaging in any signitive performance whatsoever. But if clusters of mediations are considered together with their intrinsic sense of aiming at being abiding mediations,

The Ontological Significance of Silence

157

then it becomes clear that all mediation properly so called, mediation achieved by a self-aware person, requires the play of interest and silence. A string of mediations obviously may be initiated by either actional or fabricational performances. But such performances, as has been said, are oriented toward signitive performances for their own preservation and full intelligibility. The shuttling between types of

mediational performances is provided for and somehow regulated by silence.

Once

again, it is impossible

to regard

interest as exclusively

the

nondeterminate element, and silence as exclusively the determinate element or vice versa. Rather, mediation in both its determinateness and its nondeterminateness arises out of the play between them. Interest is nondeterminate inasmuch as it reveals a movement away from the natural processes of the world, with their “and so forths,” which tend to absorb man. It does so without specifying that in which this movement is to terminate. Interest is determinate inasmuch as it involves at least inchoately the specification of the man who aims at appropriating the world. On the other hand, silence here is nondeterminate inasmuch as it itself is not a determinate mediation. But it is determinate both as a positive mediational performance and as that which orders the shuttling from one sort of meditation to another. In the play between silence and interest, silence again enjoys a certain preeminence. It is silence which allows interest to achieve sufficient concentration so that it can become efficacious. Interest is never divorced from emotion. And so each play of silence and interest has its own emotional tone. Emotion is not the by-product of the play of silence and interest. Rather, it arises immediately from the sheer encounter of man with the world. But whenever there is the play of a moment of interest with silence, whenever interest issues in mediational performances, then the specific color of the moment of emotion which is conjoined with the moment of interest is the outcome of this particular play of interest and silence, My ontological claims concerning the play of the determinate and the nondeterminate can be shown to hold for intentional performances of perception, imagination, and memory as well. But, for present purposes, it is enough to have shown that these claims hold for both immediate performances, for example, desire, and mediate performances and that they hold for the point of intersection, the play of desire

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SILENCE

and silence, between immediate and mediate experience. I can then go on to consider the bearing of my pretation of man as a whole.

VI.

MAN

AS AND

THE THE

ontological claims upon

the inter-

PLAY

OF THE DETERMINATE NONDETERMINATE

None of man’s intentional performances, either passive or active, is all of a piece. Any one of them, at least when taken as a part of a complex sequence of performances, reveals the play of determinateness

and nondeterminateness. One is entitled, then, to say that man himself is not all of a piece. He himself is a play of determinateness or stabilization and nondeterminateness or nonstabilization. Perhaps this play is most clearly exemplified in the complex phenomenon of an artist’s style. Style involves both determinate techniques and devices which the artist has acquired from others and habits of his own. But it also involves an originality and uniqueness which stamp his work as his own, as new, as not merely an instantiation of a common pattern of behavior. The style does not exist apart from his works. But the sum of his works does not exhaust it. Man, then, is near himself. But nearness implies some distance. Thus man encounters himself. He is not rigidly self-identical. Without this

nearness, with its intrinsic distance, neither memory

nor imagination

could have the scope which they do have in man. His distance from himself is beyond definitive and exhaustive cancellation. Man, then, is that sort of being who necessarily effects stabilization in his encounter with himself. Ultimately, he effects this stabilization through performances belonging to the signitive domain. Through these performances he achieves definition of himself. But he is likewise the sort of being who necessarily effects nonstabilization in his encounter with himself. Nonstabilization, too, is ultimately effected in signitive performances. Through these performances his self-definition is kept partial and liquid. The ineluctable play of determinateness and nondeterminateness in man accounts for some of the basic characteristics which have regularly been ascribed to him, namely, his finitude, his freedom, and his temporality. Finitude is not something thrust upon man from the outside, something imposed upon him by external forces. Nor is it something which arises exclusively from biological factors. Rather, it is the re-

The Ontological Significance of Silence

159

quirement that in his encounter with himself he must stabilize himself somehow. The encounter must leave its mark. But he cannot make the

stabilization, the mark, definitive. Each encounter is only an encounter.

It is not a merger. No encounter can fully prevent other encounters or undercut the efficacy of other encounters.

Freedom, on the other hand, is simply the other side of finitude. The coexistence of freedom and finitude is not paradoxical.” Rather they are inseparable moments. The structure of the one is involved in the structure of the other, somewhat like the way in which pitch and timbre are related in song. The one is irreducible to the other but

neither can occur without the other. Freedom, again, is not first and foremost deliverance from external forces. Rather it is the distancing by virtue of which man nonstabilizes his actual and possible stabilizations of himself. These nonstabilizations are not mere cancellations of the previously effected stabilizations. But they do open the way

for modifying

the previous stabilizations by new

stabilizations. The

distancing implied in freedom remains the distance of the near. It is not the annihilation of all connections. No distancing can fully efface the efficacy of either previous encounters or previous distancings. Temporality, again, is not something which arises because of man’s relation to that which lies outside himself. Rather it is the synthesis of the play of finitude and freedom. On the one hand, it makes this play possible by eliminating any possibility that either freedom or finitude enjoy unrestricted sway. On the other hand, by synthesizing the multiple moments of this play it saves each of them from both sheer evanescence and ossification. Evanescence would rob these moments of their efficacy. Ossification would transmute them into an identity comparable only to the inertness of a corpse. Finitude, freedom, and temporality, then, are three aspects of the fundamental play of determinateness and nondeterminateness which constitutes man. Each aspect, in its own fashion, sheds light upon the kind of Being which man is. His kind of Being is to be en route. But

just how is one to understand this being en route? VII. THE THE

PREEMINENCE

IN MAN

OF

NONDETERMINATE

Thus far I have mentioned several times that silence has a certain preeminence over discourse. I have also noted that, though it is a

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mistake to assign silence exclusively to the nondeterminate in man, silence does have a way of emphasizing the presence of the nondeterminate. This latter consideration should be examined more closely. Many of the ways in which silence appears involve cuts which open the way for mediational performances of other sorts. In these cases, silence does emphasize the nondeterminate, whereas the ensuing other mediational performance emphasizes the determinate. But in the occurrences of terminal silence matters are more complicated. On the one hand, terminal silence by definition does not open the way for further determinate levels or shapes of discourse. Nor does it open the way for any sort of super action or super fabrication. Quite simply, it closes off the domain of determinate mediational performances. In doing so, it reveals the essential incompleteness both of every determinate mediation and of every string of such mediations. It emphasizes the irreducibility of nondeterminateness. On the other hand, terminal silence rebounds across the entire domain of mediation, giving a particular cast to each performance within that domain. Which cast it gives depends upon just how the experience of terminal silence is, in fact, interpreted. Terminal silence itself, then, can be given specificity by being interpreted. In fact, it must be interpreted somehow and so given some specificity. The interpretation can change and it need not be internally coherent. But it can be alluded to in discourse. Terminal

silence can be dismissed

as trivial.

It can be experienced

as justifying religious faith, or despair, or radical skepticism. It can be taken as evidence of man’s futility or of his apotheosis. I wish to argue that all of these interpretations of terminal silence, if unqualified, are philosophically exorbitant. But in any case, terminal silence, through the interpretation given to it, stabilizes, makes determinate, the string of other mediational performances in which a man subsequently engages. Through its interpretation, terminal silence orders and assigns weights to the members of this string. Terminal silence, then, governs in a quite determinate way, the entire domain of a person’s mediational performances.” How this terminal silence is in fact interpreted decides just what is meant when one says that man’s kind of Being is to be en route. Does the experience of terminal silence point to his being en route to a destination which in principle he cannot reach? If so, his life is to be understood as fundamentally futile and absurd. His mediational

The Ontological Significance of Silence

161

performances are doomed to collapse finally into nonsense. Does terminal silence indicate that man is en route to union with the Divine

or the Absolute? If so, his life is a preparatory exercise, a rehearsal for a more real existence. blossom into all-sense.

His mediational performances are destined to Or is some third, perhaps “more modest,” al-

ternative to be preferred? Philosophy cannot disprove either of the first two sorts of interpretation of terminal silence. One or the other might indeed be right. No man is demonstrably a fool for adopting either of them. But both of the first two lines of interpretation are philosophically exorbitant. That is, they outrun the available evidence. The available evidence shows that terminal silence itself must be maintained and nourished by subsequent discourse, by further and other mediating performances. Terminal silence, then, is not the experience of some higher and ultimate immediacy lying beyond mediation. It itself remains an element in the domain of mediation. Thus if perchance man is absurd, reflection on or experience of silence cannot provide him with conclusive grounds for recognizing himself as such. And if perchance man is destined to union with the All, again reflection on experience cannot provide him with conclusive grounds for recognizing this to be the case. Rather, what reflection on silence does show is something “more modest.” To be en route is not to have a clear cut destination which one might miss or attain. To be en route is to dwell in and tend the path itself. The only way to fail to be en route, a way which itself entails a recognition of being en route, is to insist upon having a destination. Such a destination would have to be a higher immediacy to which all mediation must bow. There may such a higher immediacy but silence provides man with no basis for insisting upon it. To insist upon a higher immediacy as that which alone can either justify mediation or explain mediation’s unjustifiability is to deprecate mediation in all its forms. Such deprecation is tantamount to nihilism.” Terminal silence does not rule out so drastic an interpretation. How-

ever, by its own need for sustenance through subsequent discourse, it suggests that to be en route is to be a of Being is precisely that of walking a is both to follow it and to break it. To be this kind of path-dweller is tensional synthesis of the determinate tensional synthesis appears throughout

path-dweller, one whose kind path. To path, to walk a path, to be one whose Being is a and the nondeterminate. This the range of man’s life. It ap-

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pears in the way in which his passive intentional performances and his active ones call for one another so that their own full sense can emerge. This synthesis appears within the premediational sphere of experience in the form of association which requires both perception and desire. It appears within the mediational sphere of experience both in the play of tradition and history and in the play among signitive, actional, and fabricational performances. Throughout his range of living performances, man shows himself to be a tensional synthesis of the determinate and the nondeterminate. Within the synthesis which man lives, however, and in no way suppressing the tension which reigns there, there is a certain preeminence of the new, of that which gives continued vitality to that which has

already come to be. When translated into the terms of the dyad, this means that there is in man a certain preeminence of the nondeterminate. This preeminence of the new phenomenally shows itself in the

preeminence of the mediational domain over the domain of immediacy,

of the signitive over the other types of mediation, and of silence over discourse. From another standpoint, the preeminence of the new in man shows itself in his effectuation of historicality, which term I use to encompass both history and tradition. Historicality in all of its manifestations shows itself as that which has cut or interrupted the settled flow of nature. In the achieving of this cut, silence plays a preeminent role. I conclude, then, as my thesis states, that man’s Being is to be understood as the play of the determinate and the nondeterminate. What is distinctive about this play in man’s kind of Being is the preeminence in it of the new, the nondeterminate. This preeminence is phenomenally manifested in the preeminence of silence among man’s intentional performances. But this preeminence is not to be understood as the eminence of that which is absolutely self-standing. Whatever preeminence can be detected is always a preeminence within the tensional synthesis of the determinate and the nondeterminate. The entire sense of this preeminence rests upon its belonging to that irreducible synthesis. My claim, then, is that if man’s kind of Being is understood as the play of the determinate and the nondeterminate with a certain preeminence devolving upon the nondeterminate, then a major step has been taken in accounting for the possibility of the manifold ways in which the phenomenon of silence appears and for the possibility of the sorts

The Ontological Significance of Silence of connections which have been described between sorts of intentional performances.

VIII

THE

PREEMINENCE OF

But

my

account

THE is not

IN

THE

163

silence and other

WORLD

DETERMINATE yet

complete.

What

is to be said

of the

world, that other synthesis of the determinate and the nondeterminate? My guiding clues here again are the positive complex phenomenon of silence and the assumption that man and his intentional performances are not fundamentally absurd.

If man, with the complex set of intentional performances in which he engages, is not to be absurd, then the world must be a field which in its own right requires that it be experienced as that which is to be dealt with through a variety of performances. The world must itself provide the basis for performances which bring differentiations within it to light. Man’s performances, whether taken singly or taken as elements of a complex pattern of performances, never have the sense of referring exclusively to themselves as performances.™ They always involve at least a horizonal reference to a world which is given as other than themselves. To say that the world is experienced as that which calls for different sorts of performances is not to say that the world is given with full-fledged determinations and differentiations already in place. Such a thoroughgoing realism may be the case, but the evidence in favor of it is hardly prepossessing. Nonetheless, the world is given as a field to which some responses are appropriate or correct and some are inappropriate or incorrect. The achievements of both spontaneous and active performances can be confirmed, cancelled, or corrected. And the authorization for confirming, cancelling, or correcting comes from the way the world is.2> The world may not authorize just one appropriate or correct way of being intended. But it does not authorize just any differentiations which man might chance to propose. Further, and of capital importance here, the encounter with the world as differentiable field is experienced as an encounter which can be mediated. The way the world is and is experienced makes active performances both possible and senseful. The world is experienced as a pliable world. Hybrid corn can be developed, DNA can be produced.

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SILENCE

To say that the world is pliable, however, is not to say that every attempted mediation is acceptable. Shoddily constructed buildings collapse. Carelessly drawn maps mislead. But there is no remotely compelling evidence for claiming that one and only one mediational performance is appropriate to each given occasion. The fact that the world is experienced both as pliable and as imposing constraints upon man’s plying of it shows that the world itself is not all of a piece. It is neither a simple, undifferentiated mass nor a finished, well-defined complex totality. This restricted pliability of the

world is its contingency. That is, the world never has to be differentiated in precisely the way in which it actually is differentiated. But how it is in fact differentiated is never sheerly arbitrary. The world is also given as that which is amenable to mediation by many persons. It can sustain these mediations even after the authors

of the mediations have died and even for a period of time during which there is no audience for them. For example, tombs of kings have been

lost for centuries, then rediscovered as tombs of kings. This sustaining power of the world is a necessary condition for both history and tradition. But the world does not effect a thoroughgoing unification of the mediations of different persons. It sustains a plurality of cultures and has allowed for the displacement of some mediations by others. Parsimony and deductive consistency do not obviously reign supreme. However hospitable the world may be to these multiple mediations, it sustains them in its own fashion. In melding mediations with one another, the world exercises its own efficacy. Hybrid corn and DNA, once they are produced, do not need man’s leave to have their own impact upon the world. The author of the mediation is not absolutely free to have the mediation he performs sustained just as and for so long as he wishes. The mediation, once performed, is no longer exclusively his. It escapes him into the world and it is in and through the world that the author, like any other member of the audience, must return to it. Thus the perdurance or decay of concrete mediations is not exclusively at the will of man. The efficacy of the world is also

at play. Witness, for example, the struggle of man with the world to preserve the buildings of the Acropolis. Finally, the world is such that it reveals itself to man only in the course of time. Or better, the revelation of the world is a temporally distended revelation. The world presents itself in such a way that theories of evolution and of cosmic genesis, maturation, and decline are

The Ontological Significance of Silence

165

elicited. It presents itself as not exhausted by previous mediations but also as that whose further mediation requires that earlier mediations be coped with. It suggests to different eras different mediational pos-

sibilities, but it always presents itself as already mediated. For example, how can sand be used in fabrication? Now it is known, though once it was not, that sand can be used for making glass. But who would claim to recite the range of sand’s fabricational usefulness and claim that the range is closed? Some mediations are addressed to features of the world which present themselves as enduring and perhaps even omnitemporal, for example, cosmological theories. Others are addressed to features of the world which present themselves as quite fleeting, for example, a conversation about a sunset while viewing it. The world is such that it elicits mediations of both sorts. Nothing about the mediational performances referring respectively to the enduring and the fleeting provides a basis for ascribing unequivocal preeminence to either of them. These features of the world show that it cannot be appropriately

thought of as that which

is simply

present.

It is, of course,

never

fully absent. But neither is it ever fully present. Its kind of Being is such that it can only appear to man as a play of presence and absence.”

Thus, the world appears as that which (1) calls for different sorts of performances, (2) legitimates some performances and rules out others, (3) is pliable within bounds, (4) sustains human mediations in its own fashion, (5) shows itself as temporally distended, and (6) can show itself only as a play of presence and absence. Such a world can be appropriately interpreted ontologically in terms of a play of

the determinate and the nondeterminate. Just as the irreducible play of the determinate and the nondeterminate accounts for the basic human characteristics of finitude and freedom, so the play of the determinate and the nondeterminate accounts for both the finitude and the openness of the world. As I mentioned above, the world is not all of a piece. It undergoes modifications. It is finite. For example, it ceased being hospitable to dinosaurs. These modifications are not merely accidental in the sense that some underlying, “more real” world remains unchanged. Dinosaurs were just as worldly as any other component of the world. The world is always stabilized somehow, which is why dinosaurs could be confident of begetting other dinosaurs. But the stability is never complete

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SILENCE

at any moment. From their inception, the movement toward the extinction of all dinosaurs was already underway. Yet the mark of one era’s sort of stabilization is borne by the sort of stabilizations achieved in other eras. Our world is at it is in part as a consequence of the era of dinosaurs.

The openness of the world, the counterpart of freedom in man, is simply the other side of the world’s finitude.27 Openness and finitude are not antithetical. To say that the world is finite is to say that the world is not, in the etymological sense, perfect. It is not finished or complete. Rather, whatever its specific shape and whatever form the “and so forth” development of this shape takes, it is susceptible to modification. Man’s plying of the world reveals this susceptibility. Man can pollute the world. He can also develop agriculture. But the world itself must be such that it invites modification. That feature of the world by which it invites modification is what I refer to as the openness of the world. The world, then, like man, can be appropriately interpreted as a play of the determinate and the nondeterminate. But whereas in the case of man there is a certain preeminence of the nondeterminate, in the case of the world there is a preeminence of the determinate. Within the tensional synthesis of the determinate and the nondeterminate which constitutes the world’s kind of Being, there is a preeminence of that which has already come to be and continues in being as a determinate process. It is this preeminence, for example, which makes causal accounts of worldly things and events so persuasive. Phenomenally, man can experience this preeminence in the fact that the world cannot be said to mediate itself or its own processes. The world pre. sents itself as that which is pliable by men but which plys its own “and so forth” in ways beyond man’s influence. From another stand-

point, the world in its changes, unlike man, does not effect historicality. Rather, it effects the continuation of determinate sequences which are susceptible to mediation. I conclude, then, as my thesis states, that the world’s kind of Being is to be interpreted ontologically as a play of the determinate and the nondeterminate. The distinctiveness of the world’s kind of Being lies in the preeminence which is enjoyed in this play by the determinate. Here, again as in the case of man, the entire sense of this preeminence rests upon its being an element in an irreducible tensional synthesis.

itt, (167)

The Ontological Significance of Silence

The importance of this conclusion becomes clear when it is linked to the assumption that every sort of human intentional performances is appropriate to the world. When these two considerations are taken together, then one can account both for the possibility of the manifold ways in which the phenomenon of silence appears and for the sorts of connections which have been described between silence and other sorts of intentional performances.

IX.

THE

PREEMINENCE IN

THE

PLAY

OF OF

THE

WORLD

BEING

How is the connection between the play which is man and the play which is the world to be understood? If I am justified in interpreting man as the synthesis in which the nondeterminate has preeminence and the world as the synthesis in which the determinate has preeminence, then man is not reducible to the world, is not simply a worldly thing. Nonetheless, I have claimed that both man and world are irreducible syntheses of the determinate and the nondeterminate. If that is so, then they are not radically alien to one another. There is room for their interplay. The upshot of these two features of both man and world is that the sense which each makes is distinctive and yet the sense of each is fundamentally dependent upon that of the other. The world is a world for humans. Humans are humans living a world. The world and man are geared to each other. The interplay between man and world can be given further specification. This interplay must last so long as either man or the world can make sense. But it is an interplay in which the determinate has preeminence. This preeminence, like the previous preminences I have

discussed, is a preeminence

which

holds only within

the interplay.

The world, on my interpretation, enjoys a preeminence over man. Though a world without man is no world, it is less misleading to say that man is for the world than it is to say that the world is for man. The evidence for my interpretation comes from reflection upon mediation. I have argued above that the connections among the signitive, actional, and fabricational domains, as well as the intentional analysis of silence which brings to light the multiple shapes and levels within the signitive domain, show that mediational performances have the fundamental characteristic of being explorations for further sense

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SILENCE

or meaning. They issue presence that which is of the interplay of the This interrogation is world to answer to man

ger and others have

from an interrogative endeavor to bring to either latent or absent, to develop the sense determinate and the nondeterminate. not, however, an insistent summoning of the as to its master. Interrogation can, as Heideg-

pointed

out, be conducted

in this provocative

fashion. But such an interrogation fails to understand itself. Interrogation is not an activity in which man who is first fully transparent to himself and self-sustaining then undertakes an investigation of that which is radically discrete from himself. Rather, interrogation is a process in which not only the sense of the world is displayed but also the sense of man the interrogator is unfolded. Silence is an essential component of this interrogatory endeavor.

Silence opens the way

for specific interrogations,

regulates the fre-

quency of occurrence of the several modes of interrogation, and brings concrete interrogations to a termination. Silence itself can be taken as fundamentally interrogative. In its several ways of appearing, it in effect asks: Can mediation achieve something? Can mediation achieve something more? What is the point of mediation? This same silence links the entire domain of mediational

perform-

ances—signitive, actional, and fabricational—back to desire. Desire has, as one of its essential constituents, interest. Interest is a prerequisite for interrogation. The place of interest in interrogation shows that man does not primordially stand over against the world as its inquisitor.

Rather, man awakens to himself as inhabiting a world which engages

his interest. He likewise awakens to the recognition that his inhabiting

is a coinhabiting with other persons whose interest the world also engages. Interest, however, belongs together with emotion as coconstituents of desire. The many faces of emotion, for example, fear, sorrow, placidity, and exultation, and the limited control which man has over these emotions reveal that the world which interests man is not a world which man can inhabit on whatever terms he himself sets. The world comes to man bearing both pleasures and pains, both fragrant scents and sickening stenches. The world is a world which both supports man’s life and ensures his death. It both allows man time to effect his mediations and withdraws that allowance without his leave. Emotion wells up in a man in all of his conscious experience and makes a mockery of any claim by man to fundamental autonomy.

The Ontological Significance of Silence

169

Emotion itself harks back to man’s spontaneous perception of the world. The world is encountered as variegated and as both already there and more durable than man. His emotion is not sheerly freefloating. It is experienced as having some anchorage in what displays itself before him as that with which he must cope if he is going to cope at all. The experiences of both desire, with its twofold constitution by emotion and interest, and perception are ingredient then in any interrogation. They furnish the topic for any possible interrogation. And they furnish a topic as that which already stands over against the interrogator. At the same time, man is never so definitively over-

whelmed by either emotion or perception, or the topics they furnish, that interrogation is made impossible. To the contrary, interrogation is

instigated and given its orientation by them. Thus, to account properly for man’s mediational performances one should say that they issue from an exclamatory interrogation, a wonder in the face of the awareness that man is at play with a world which at one and the same time both invites man’s interrogatory performances and nonetheless reserves to itself the authentication of particular interrogations and that which they elicit. In short, mediations arise from the wonder which springs from the way man and world meet. On this account, the relation between the perceptual and the signitive domains becomes clear. Neither is a discrete, self-sufficient domain. But neither is fully reducible to the other. The domain of perceptual performances is preponderantly under the sway of the determinateness of the world. The domain of signitive performances is preponderantly under the sway of the nondeterminateness of man. That the world is initially experienced as already there shows that wonder or exclamatory interrogation is fundamentally responsive. It is a reply. The world plies its way, its path, its own self, in such a way that it calls forth a reply, a re-plying of its way. Man, in re-plying —or mediating—the world’s path, plies the path of the world as his

own.28 To

ply the world’s

despoiling

the world

critics of the spread

path

as one’s own

of its path, of technology

though

does

not have

it may

have claimed,

the sense

of

be that, as some man

does

at times

so try to rob the world. Rather, for man to reply to the world, to ply the world’s path as his own, has the sense of acknowledging that the path of the world is worthy of care and devotion. It has the sense

170

SILENCE

of acknowledging that it is from the world’s path that the possibility of re-plying of any sort arises. It has the sense of acknowledging that it is the world which makes man possible. Thus the world, as plied path and path still being plied, is that which man’s own replying is destined to serve. Whether a particular man fulfills or fails to fulfill this destiny in his concrete mediational performances, service of the world’s path is the intelligible point of performing mediations of any sort. To be the being whose kind of Being is to reply to the world is the sense of what it means to say that man is en route. What I have said thus far is not yet enough to establish that, in any nontrivial sense, man’s reply must remain under the sway of the world. Thus far I have only given reasons for saying that exclamatory interrogation or wonder is at its inception under the sway of the world.

Man’s way of meeting the world is not, at its origin, autonomous. But can it become autonomous? My reason for rejecting this possibility is that the world itself is not all of a piece. It plies its path epochally. It

is temporal, finite, and open. If it were all of a piece, what it required

by way of legitimate reply could be taken as definitively settled. The world would not be an ongoing play of the determinate and the nondeterminate. It would be either simply determinate, a closed, well-defined system, or simply nondeterminate, an undifferentiated mass. If the world were either of these, and man were nonetheless a play of the determinate and the nondeterminate, then man in his reply to the presentations of the world would be autonomous. That is, at least one irreducible constituent of his kind of Being would be radically unlike any constituent of the world’s kind of Being. To admit this is to readmit all the conundrums of classical dualism. More specifically, it is to ascribe to man an autonomy by default. That is, his kind of Being and some dimension of his lived expression of that kind of Being would be autonomous, but would thereby be irrelevant

to the kind of Being which the world is. Man, then, would have to be acknowledged as being infected by a fundamental absurdity, a way of Being which in principle has nothing to do with the world’s ways of Being. But, in fact, the world, like man, shows itself as involving both the determinate and the nondeterminate. More specifically, it shows itself as both present and absent, as a temporalized kind of Being. Man, in his reply to the world must remain alert both to that which

The Ontological Significance of Silence

171

is new about the world and that of the old which survives, perhaps in modified fashion, the emergence of the new. I conclude, then, that man is neither in origin autonomous nor able

by some Cartesianesque discipline to make himself autonomous. Man’s mediational activity, then, his exclamatory interrogation, can never legitimately take on a life and momentum of its own, a life which would be able to dispense with reference back to the ways of the world to determine whether the specific streams of mediational performances are still authenticated. In short, the time for man to listen back to the world never definitively passes. This listening back is required not merely to check his answers but also to check his questions.?9 Completeness requires that I note here than man’s interrogation itself elicits from the world a reply in its own right. An experiment, for example, pries an answer from its samples. DNA research pries from the world a new kind of entity. A portrait painter pries an answer, his painting, from his subject. Without these specific interrogations, these specific aspects of or facts about the world would not have come to light. In a very important sense, then, the world replies to man’s queries. These replies of the world, in turn, prompt further interrogations. This dialectic, by the way, requires performances of silence if it is to be sustained in its full intelligibility and extension.

But, I claim,

this dialectic is not an arrangement

between

equal

partners, man and world. Nor is it under the aegis of man. Rather, the dialectic and its results remain under the sway of the world which first sets the terms and continues to provide both the topics and the context for the dialogue. The world enjoys a preeminence in this dialectic just as time combined with social forces enjoys a preeminence over a deliberate convention in de Saussure’s account of linguistic continuity and change.®? Man indeed makes replies which are distinctively his and which are efficacious beyond his own performance of them. But it is the world which sustains his replies and provides them with authentication both by furnishing the basis for linking them to the mediations of others and by sustaining the topics to which the mediations are addressed.

I conclude this part of the defense of my thesis by noting simply that the interplay which I have described between man’s kind of Being and

the

world’s

kind

of Being

accounts

for

both

spontaneous

and

172

SILENCE

active human performances and their respective objectives. This interplay, then, need not be taken as merely a dimension of Being. It can appropriately be taken as Being itself. The interplay of the plays of man and world is not a property of Being. It is Being itself. The phenomena discussed here provide no reason for claiming that behind, below, or above this interplay lies something other than the interplay. One might object, then, that my interpretation excludes the existence of God. I think that that is not the case. There is no experiential reason

for denying that God interplay.

presides over, and so is involved with, this

In fact, I suspect that the examination

of some

other phe-

nomena, for example, love, might furnish good reasons for believing or at least hoping that He is involved with this interplay. But my topic here is silence and its ontological interpretation. I find nothing about silence itself which justifies the formulation of claims concerning God’s existence or nature.

Should the investigation of some

other phenomena,

such as love,

provide a basis for claims about God, my interpretation of Being as interplay would not be undercut. No phenomenon is radically independent of the other phenomena. If my ontological interpretation of silence is well grounded, then the study of other phenomena may modify my interpretation but will not fundamentally undercut it. The interplay may be more complex than I have here described it, but it will nonetheless still be interplay.

X.

APPLICATION TO

THE

OF

THE

INTERPRETATION

PHENOMENON

The ontological interpretation presented in the thesis I am defending here accounts for the possibility of silence and its multiple ways of appearing. No lengthy discussion is needed to show that this is the case.

First, my interpretation accounts for how it is possible for silence to be mistaken for a merely negative phenomenon and for some derivative occurrences of silence, for example, intervening silences, to have such an obviousness. The world does reply to man’s queries. It does have a nondeterminate dimension which opens the way for man to introduce determinations. Silence can appear at this level as simply an

The Ontological Significance of Silence absence of determination or as derivative upon the more performances of discourse. But my interpretation shows standings of silence to be deficient because, in the final the nondeterminate which is preeminent in man and the which is preeminent in the world.

173 fundamental these underanalysis, it is determinate

Second, the emotional polyvalency of experiences of silence can be accounted for. If man and world are geared together but still remain in tension, and if the world is preeminent, then all of man’s mediational performances, and especially silence, which reigns over all other mediation, has a tentative character. No mediational performance can guarantee its own thoroughgoing appropriateness. Each mediational performance, silence included, is in effect handed over to the world for the world’s disposal. Since the world can preserve it, the efficacy of a mediation can be experienced with pleasing emotions of some sort or other. Since the world preserves the mediation in its own fashion rather than in the way the author might stipulate, the impotence of a mediation can be experienced with painful emotions.

My account provides a foundation for something of a discrimination among the emotional tones of silence. “Middle” tones, tones short of the extreme tones of radical despair or the bliss attributed to Pollyanna, are appropriate to the interpretation I propose. They are the “rationally defensible” emotions. Among the middle tones, there is no way to assign unqualified preeminence. The extreme tones, though

of course they can and do occur, are extravangant and aberrant. Third, my interpretation elucidates why it is that performances of originary and terminal silence have the importance which they enjoy among the multiple ways in which silence appears. In these two ways of appearing, silence most clearly manifests the preeminence of the nondeterminate in man. In ordinary silence, there is that distancing from absorption in what is immediately encountered as determinate. An opening is provided for those mediations which introduce man’s

own

determinations into the world.

Terminal

silence, on the other

hand, steps back from the stream of determinations which man introduces and makes it clear that man is not preeminently the deter-

miner, but rather is the one who terminateness mediations. Fourth, my

is

preeminent

even

wonders, the one in whom while

he

performs

ontological interpretation can account

nonde-

determining

for why

silence

174

SILENCE

has the characteristics which

were

revealed in its intentional

analysis.

(1) Silence was shown to be a founded performance. My ontological interpretation locates that foundation in the irreducible interplay of two plays—man and world—of the determinate and the nondeterminate. That is, because the world is as it is and because man is as he is, silence is a grounded phenomenal manifestation of the irreducible

tensions at play in the intersection of man and world.

(2) Pure oc-

curences of silence do not directly intend already fully determinate objects. This characteristic can be explained by the presence of the nondeterminate in the constitution of the world. That is, since the world is not simply determinate, there is a dimension of the world which can be referred to but which itself is not already determinate. The performances of silence itself may manifest either the determinate in man, for example, the silence of Abraham toward Isaac, Sarah, and

Eleazar, as described by Kierkegaard, or the nondeterminate, as in the Quaker hush. (3) Silence is motivated by finitude and awe. The irreducibility of the play of the determinate and the nondeterminate in man accounts for this twofold experience of finitude and awe. Man can make a difference in the world, but he cannot fully control what

difference he does make.

(4)

Silence interrupts the “and so forth”

of some particular determinate stream of intentional performances. Man’s nondeterminateness prevents any determinate stream of performances or sequences of such streams—as might be established, for

example, by tradition—from becoming definitive. (5) Silence is not the correlative opposite of discourse. My ontological interpretation accounts for this crucial characteristic of silence by its claim that the determinate and the nondeterminate, whether in man or in the world,

or in their interplay, are not correlative opposites but rather are coconstituents, each of which is necessary for the occurrence of the other. In their conjunction, they always occur in such a way that one or the other enjoys a preeminence. Fifth, the relation between silence and both action and fabrication

can be given some further clarification through my ontological interpretation. Both action and fabrication directly aim to bring about some new determination in the world. Action primarily aims to bring this determination about in the way in which people inhabit their world. Fabrication primarily aims to bring this determination about in the world which people are to inhabit. Silence primarily aims to ensure that no determinations, old or new, are taken as being, without

The Ontological Significance of Silence

C7

qualification, definitive. It aims to ensure that man recognize that in principle neither he nor his world is fully determinable. In silence, then, more than in either action or fabrication, the preeminence of the nondeterminate in man stands forth. In conclusion, the first part of the defense of my ontological thesis uses clues from the experience of silence to show how my thesis can account for man, the world, and the connection between them. It further shows that my ontological claims can account for why it is that silence appears as it does and how it is that silence differs from

fabrication and action as well as from discourse. In the next, and last, chapter I will offer the second part of the defense of my thesis. It will consist in showing the fruitfulness of my interpretation.

[7] Further Justification of the Proposed Ontological Interpretation of Silence

Ir Is CONCEIVABLE

that an ontological interpretation of a phenomenon not run afoul of anything uncovered in the description of the phenomenon and yet be trivial. Such an interpretation would not be wrong, but it would be sterile. This second part of the defense of the ontological interpretation of silence which I proposed in Chapter Six consists of showing that my interpretation is fruitful. Nonetheless, let me acknowledge once again that, however fruitful my interpretation

may

be, no ontological interpretation of silence can be definitively

established.

I

ACCOUNTING

FOR

SALVAGED

INSIGHTS

The fruitfulness of my ontological interpretation of silence is demonstrated, in part, by its ability to accommodate the substantial range of insights which other philosophers have had concerning silence and its ontological import, as noted in Chapters Four and Five. The assumption behind the search for clues to the important features of silence in the mis-takings of other philosophers is that whenever philosophers seriously address a substantial issue, then at least something of what they say about it deserves to be salvaged. This assumption is itself an application of the more general assumption that when a serious matter is seriously dealt with, then something of the intelligibility of that matter will come to light and should be saved. This in turn is an application of the general thesis that thought can

Further Justification of the Interpretation

197

never be fully isolated from being, can never be wrong in all respects. My thesis is fruitful because it can accommodate what is of value in the thought of many major philosophers about discourse and silence. The implications of Hegel’s account of discourse, if his untenable claim concerning the possibility of complete speech is deleted, contain two insights which an acceptable ontological interpretation of silence

should be able to accommodate. First, his account of discourse supports the thesis that no unequivocal priority can be legitimately given to any particular level or shape of discourse. No sort of discourse is self-standing. Rather, as Hegel’s position implies and Rosen explicitly recognizes, discourse of any sort can only maintain its own sense through being in tension with some other active human performance, which need not necessarily aim at some determinate object. And this something else necessarily involves risk for the discourse with which it is in tension. But this something else is not, as Rosen holds and Hegel implies, desire. Rather, it is silence. Second, even if there is no complete speech to authenticate particular occurrences of concrete discourse, concrete discourse still calls for some authentication coming from beyond itself. The requisite authentication is not sufficiently achieved merely by properly matching word

and object. The point of the matching itself must be authenticated. That is, the activity of matching word and object must be required somehow by some ontological characteristic of the world which man

inhabits. My

interpretation

of

the

ontological

significance

of

silence

can

accommodate both of these insights. Specifically, my interpretation is in accord with twofold recognition that discourse is not self-standing and that desire is relevant to discourse. Further, my interpretation provides an account of why these matters are as they are.

On

the

one

hand,

all mediational

performances

call for further

mediations, including mediations of themselves by other mediating performances. This holds good, of course, for all performances of both discourse and silence. Like silence, then, discourse cannot be selfstanding either in any of its particular shapes or as a distinct domain of human performances. The lack of self-standingness of any mediational performance, with its concomitant openness to further mediation, is readily accounted for by the play of the determinate and the nondeterminate in the mediator, man.

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SILENCE

Desire, on the other hand, is not irrelevant to mediations

of any

sort, discourse and silence included, for it reveals the world to the mediator as that which is amenable to mediation. It reveals that not

only man but the world, too, is a play of the determinate and the nondeterminate. The world is sufficiently determinate to elicit mediation and sufficiently nondeterminate to permit mediation. Desire further reveals that if mediational performances are not absurd, then these two plays of the determinate and the nondeterminate, that of man and that of the world, intersect somehow. My interpretation can also account for the need which both discourse and silence have for authentication from beyond themselves. On my interpretation, there can be no exhaustive authentication for any concrete discourse. But there can be genuine authentication. Discourse, and silence too, as manifestations of the play of the determinate and the nondeterminate in man, reveal another play, that of the world, which intersects the play that is man. This play of the world makes available authentication for all dimensions of man’s play, including his concrete discourse. Each moment of discourse aims toward the play of the world. It is that play of the world which either grants to or withholds from discourse an authentication both of itself and of its proximate object.

Reflection on a thesis extracted from Husserl’s Logical Investigations likewise has helped to clarify what an acceptable interpretation of silence must take into consideration. If discourse and silence are not merely tools available to the interlocutors at will, if the objective ex-

pression of meaning has speakers in its sway and not vice versa, and if discourse and silence are inseparable from any expression of meaning, then discourse and silence should be said to have men in their sway rather than vice versa. An ontological interpretation of silence must account for how it is that the performer is under the sway of his performance and its “object.” On my interpretation, within the play of the determinate and the nondeterminate which constitutes man, the nondeterminate enjoys a certain preeminence. This preeminence accounts for the partial ascendency of silence over discourse. But attention to mediation as such shows that mediation primordially remains under the sway of what is to be mediated. Mediation is fundamentally responsive. What is to be mediated is the play of the world, a play in which there is a preeminence of the determinate. The upshot of these several preemin-

Further Justification of the Interpretation

179

ences, none of which can cancel the other with which it is in tension, is that, within Being understood as the interplay of man and world, world enjoys an ineluctable preeminence. Man is fundamentally exclamatory interrogation of the world. If appropriate weight is given to the exclamatory dimension, then man and all of his mediations, including discourse, are under the sway of that which they mediate, namely, the already differentiated field of actual and possible meaning. Insofar as concrete discourse and silence, though they are human

performances, ure elicited by the world, their author is a respondent who lives, as man, precisely by replying to that which addresses him. Since both his discourse and his silence, his primordial mediations, are fundamentally called forth by the world, his own sense comes not from within some self-contained recess of himself. Rather his own sense comes from the mediations he is permitted to perform. In this respect, he is not the autonomous origination of his discourse and silence. He is himself, in his clarification of the meaning of his own existence, under the sway of discourse, silence, and their own requirements. The criticisms of the Hegelian and Husserlian versions of the complete speech thesis, as well as the recognition of their valuable insights into the sense of the connection between concrete discourse and that with which it is necessarily in tension, silence, bring to light at least one further requirement which an appropriate ontological

interpretation of silence must satisfy. Such an interpretation

must

account for why there cannot be a complete silence any more than there can be a complete speech. My interpretation readily satisfies this requirement. If the interplay of man and world is the interplay

of two plays, each of which is fully temporal, than no constituent of either play can come to definitive stasis. Each constituent always remains open to mediation, which mediation is always permeable to further mediation. Silence, as a phenomenal manifestation of the play that is man, cannot, therefore, come to stasis, cannot become complete silence. One consequence of the impossibility of both complete speech and complete silence should be spelled out here. Discourse and its conjoined silence cannot find perfect authentication. But they can find multiple sorts of authentication. Each of them can find authentication from the determinate constituents of both man and world. Thus, for

example, they can be authenticated by language, by langue. Langue

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SILENCE

can provide syntactic and semantic authentications. Taken in a somewhat broader sense, langue can provide, and this far from inconsequential, stylistic authentication. What is said is well said. Discourse can also find authentication from the proximate determinate objects with which it is concerned. The rose is indeed red and I say so. Through its recognized correspondence with its object, discourse is authenticated. The silence conjoined with this discourse finds a comparable authentication by the object. And through the “coherence” of multiple correspondences of this sort, concrete silence and discourse are further authenticated. But these are authentications in which determinations square with one another. Signitive performances, however, can also find authentication in the nondeterminate constituents of both man and world. Man’s mediations are authenticated in this way when he refrains from spurious determinations, when he acknowledges in silence the presence of nondeterminateness. His performances are also authenticated insofar as he does not leave the determinable undetermined, insofar as he

does not exaggerate the element of nondeterminateness. To be sure, these considerations concerning the authentications of discourse and silence are rather formal. They cannot be so saturated with content as to provide antecedent material norms for discourse and silence. But they are not empty. Their identification helps to

clarify just what is the scope of the authentication which all discourse and silence aims at. The claim that discourse and silence find authentication in the nondeterminate constituents of both man and world as well as in the determinate constituents meshes well with an important consequence of the two “Sartrean” these considered in Chapter Four. These theses entail that all predicative performances which have determinate objects refer in multiple ways beyond those objects not only for their truth but for their very meaning. One of the reasons this is the case is that the full panoply of meaning is never present once and for all. Rather, meaning emerges. Sartre emphasizes rightly that the emergence of meaning is a human achievement. Even though man is fundamentally responsive to the call of the world, this responsiveness cannot be construed as simple subservience. Active human mediation does issue in new meaning. This is true for both discourse and silence. An acceptable ontological

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184

interpretation of silence must account for human initiative and its efficacy. The irreducibility of efficacious human initiative is readily accounted for by the ontological interpretation I propose. On that interpretation, man is irreducible to the world. Man himself is a play in which the nondeterminate has a certain preeminence over the determinate. By virtue of that preeminence man is the distinctive source of the new as new. Man as mediator, in his plying the path of the world, brings to light both meanings and phenomena whose very possibility depends upon his initiative. The ontological interpretation of silence which I propose can, then, account for important insights gleaned from Hegelian, Husserlian, and Sartrean positions concerning discourse and its authentication. Inasmuch as none of these thinkers assigned a place of distinction to silence, the fact that an ontological interpretation which takes the phenomenon of silence as a fundamental datum can accommodate their insights provides nontrivial evidence that that interpretation is suitably comprehensive.

Il.

ACCOUNTING OF

FOR

APPRECIATIONS

SILENCE

The claim that my ontological interpretation of silence is comprehensive will be greatly strengthened if it can be shown that it accommodates the insights concerning silence and its meaning achieved by major thinkers who have assigned it a place of importance in their reflections. In major strands of Eastern thought silence has been understood not only as a positive phenomenon but also as one which is intrinsicially connected with action and desire as well as with discourse. My ontological interpretation does not justify the Taoist claim that at the apex of human performances authentic speech and authentic silence are one and, in this oneness, they are the most efficacious of human achievements. But my account does show that silence is intrinsically bound up not only with discourse but also with desire and action. Silence opens the way for mediational performances. Desire reveals the possibility of mediation. Action is a type of mediation which is indispensable for a full appreciation of the interplay of man and

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SILENCE

world. This complex set of relations is readily interpretable as a manifestation of the complex interplay of the determinateness and nondeterminateness which constitute both man and world. Both action and discourse, insofar as they are humanly confected determinations, seek to introduce stabilizations into some dimension of immediate experience. Desire reveals that this experience, however determinate it may be in its immediacy, is sufficiently nondeterminate that it permits mediation. Silence maintains the oscillation between what is effected immediately and what is effected mediately. All of these sorts of phenomena are efficacious, each in its own way. My interpretation, while accounting for the interpenetration of desire, discourse, action, and silence, has one major advantage over those Eastern views which identify some of these phenomena. On my interpretation, the distinctiveness of each of these sorts of phenomena is preserved. They belong together in a complex relation. They do not, however, merge. This result respects the Taoist insight into the belonging together of these phenomena. But it does not identify them. It thereby also respects the more prevalent view that, however similar discourse, action, desire, and silence may be to one another, each is an irreducibly distinct phenomenon.

Kierkegaard, in his reflection on Abraham,

showed

that both dis-

course and silence sometimes reveal and sometimes conceal. Neither of them can be taken as exclusively constituted either by determinateness or by nondeterminateness. He further points out that both discourse and silence can be assessed in terms of their attunement to the topic. The question of the possibility of a mediation being either in tune or out of tune is not primarily a question of truth or falsity but rather is one of sensibleness or silliness. My ontological interpretation of the significance of silence in terms of the interplay of two irreducible plays of the determinate and the nondeterminate accommodates these two Kierkegaardian insights. First, on my interpretation, no thing, event, or occurrence can be exclusively either determinate or nondeterminate. This holds good for discourse and silence just as much as it does for any other phenomenon. Second, the stress which my interpretation places upon the nondeterminate as a positive ontological constituent with the attendant riskiness involved in its play with the determinate reveals that more is involved in the appropriate interplay between man and the world than an accurate correspondence between some determinate word and

Further Justification of the Interpretation

183

some determinate object. All such correspondences must be further examined to discover whether they fittingly manifest or at least leave room for the nondeterminate element which is ingredient both in the specific human performance and in the specified object of that performance. That is, correspondences must be assessed in terms of the proper tuning of man with world. My substantial debt to both Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger for the ontological interpretation of silence which I propose is obvious. But I have not merely repeated either of their positions. Rather, I have developed lines of reflection instigated by them. To establish the defensibility of this development, I must show that my interpretation more clearly accounts for the phenomena without sacrificing any of their richness. Merleau-Ponty recognizes that the interplay of man and the world is the foundation for all possible experience. It is this fundamental interplay which makes possible the appearance of sensible things precisely as things calling for thought and speech.! Within this irreducible interplay, the two constituents, in his terms the negative or the invisible and the positive or the visible, are not correlative opposites. Rather, the invisible is the depth of the visible.? Within this interplay the world enjoys a certain preeminence over man. But Merleau-Ponty provides no clear ontological account either of the foundation of the distinction between man and world or of the relative preeminence of the world over man. My interpretation explicitly accounts for these distinctions. Man is distinct from the world because in man there is a preeminence of the

nondeterminate

over the determinate,

whereas

in the world

the de-

terminate has preeminence. The world enjoys a preeminence over man because the fundamental manifestation of the play which is man is mediation. The very structure of mediation requires that it proceed under the sway of that which it mediates. These clarifications of the relations between man and world which my interpretation provides in no way run afoul of any of Merleau-Ponty’s principal insights into the importance of silence. On the contrary, my interpretation can satisfactorily account for all of them. Here I wish to focus on Merleau-Ponty’s two intimately connected central insights into silence. First, he sees that silence reveals important features both of the social character of man’s kind of being and of the kind of being that the individual man is. Silence reveals how a man’s

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SILENCE

perceptual, discursive, and actional performances are unified. Second, he sees that silence and world are the unsurpassable foundation for specific human performances and their objects. Silence reveals the social character of man’s kind of being through its role in dialogue. Dialogue employs an already established language and refers to a world which is recognized as antedating the dialogue. This antecedent world is one which is also seen to embrace the traces and marks of previous human performances. Dialogue thus requires a listening as its starting point. Only through first listening can a man join his own performances to those of others and thereby bring the world, in Merleau-Ponty’s phrase, to say what it means to say. This listening is accomplished through silence. My interpretation accounts for this role of silence. Man is not pure nondeterminateness. By virtue of his determinateness, whatever he does shows that the world is involved from the outset. Similarly whatever he does is worldly. It makes its mark in the world. To accomplish anything, then, is to be involved with the world just as it is, with all of its residues from previous human performances. This involvement with the world is initiated in perception and is revealed, through the performance of silence, as an involvement in an interplay rather than as absorption into an identity. Silence can provide the distance requisite for involvement rather than absorption by reason of the nondeterminateness which is preeminent in it.

The same silence which reveals man’s social character also, as Merleau-Ponty sees, reveals how a man’s perceptual, discursive, and actional

performances are unified as his. That is, silence shows not only that man is intrinsically linked to other men but also how his own several performances, even though they are divisible into different types, are all unified and integrated as his. This insight can also be satisfactorily explained by my interpretation.

On my interpretation, the nondeterminate is preeminent in the play that is man. Silence is the human performance in which this preeminence is most clearly expressed to the author as well as to his audience. Silence holds sway over the whole range of a person’s performances, allotting to each of them its space to occur and linking it, by terminating it, to other performances of his. Silence plays this presiding role for itself and for other mediating performances, as well as for immediate performances such as perception. It can do so precisely because in it,

Further Justification of the Interpretation

185

more than in any other type of performance, the preeminence of the nondeterminate is expressed.* The second principal insight of Merleau-Ponty concerning the importance of silence is that silence, and the world, in their primordial

union, jointly constitute the unsurpassable foundation for specific human performances and their objects. The world as open field for inquiry is the inexhaustible horizon whence man as the interrogator who primordially listens to the world brings the things of the world to presence. The world, then, is always both present and absent. It is never completely present or completely absent. My ontological interpretation can show how silence and the world are the unsurpassable foundation for human performances and their objects. But, it must be admitted, it does so only by departing from Merleau-Ponty’s position. That departure, I believe, leads to greater clarity without requiring an impoverishment of Merleau-Ponty’s basic insight. In The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty speaks of the world as the nondeterminate horizon against which determinate things

and performances which

appear. But he also speaks of that invisible Logos

is foundational for and lies behind

clear whether

Merleau-Ponty

understand

every

Logos

expression.’

It is not

to be just as fully

nondeterminate as is the world taken as horizon. If he does so, then the distance between our positions is great. He would have it, on this view, that the nondeterminate is preeminent in the world as well as

in man. If he does not understand Logos to be so fully nondeterminate, then our positions are much closer. My

interpretation,

by

recognizing

the interplay

between

the

two

plays of man and world, clearly accounts for the unsurpassability of silence and the world. Each specific performance and its object is a particular manifestation of an interplay between plays in which there are Opposite preeminences. No phenomenal occurrence or set of occurrences can fully capture the interplay or exhaust the possible modulations of these two plays of the determinate and the nondeterminate. Thus the two plays and their interplay encompass all phenomena. They are unsurpassable. Silence is rightly said to be unsurpassable because it holds sway over the occurrence of all strictly human performances, that is, performances which are mediational or are directly linked to mediations. It is the manifestation of the irreducible nondeterminateness which is

186

SILENCE

ingredient in every phenomenon. But the world is unsurpassable because it legitimizes and regulates mediation. It does so by virtue of the preeminence in it of determinateness. It is not absolutely pliable. The world, then, is unsurpassable not because it, too, is preeminently nondeterminate, but because, precisely to the contrary, no phenomenon can be except by being in some measure determinate and connected with other determinate phenomena. My interpretation, by virtue of the interplay of the two plays of which it speaks, has no difficulty in accounting for both the determinateness and the nondeterminateness which are evident in every phenomenon. Each phenomenon has at its origin these two plays which have different relations among their constituents. By contrast, it is not at all clear that Merleau-Ponty’s account does not suffer from the defect of trying to explain how determinate phenomena can arise from sources which are fundamentally nondeterminate. In avoiding this problem, my interpretation does not, however, lead to the sacrifice of any dimension of Merleau-Ponty’s insight into the foundational role which silence plays in letting the things of the world appear. Nor does my account in any way becloud the recognition that the world is always both present and absent. It must be so to the kind of being man is. It must be present to man because both man and world are constituted by the play of the same elements, the determinate and the nondeterminate. It must also be absent because the determinate is preeminent in the world, but not in man. I conclude, then, that on my interpretation nothing of MerleauPonty’s central insights into the importance of the phenomenon of silence has been lost. But my interpretation is preferable to his because it more clearly accounts both for the difference between man and world and for how phenomena are brought to appear as what they are through the interplay of man and world. The single substantial difference which I see between my ontological interpretation of the significance of the phenomenon of silence and the later account of Heidegger is that, whereas my account is applicable to all human performances of discourse and silence, his deals only with the discourse and silence of creative men. He leaves the question of the relation between the creative and the uncreative dimensions of active human performances unanswered. On my account, silence and discourse have the same basic significance whether they are performed creatively or not. Any proposed distinction between the “creative’’ and

Further Justification of the Interpretation

187

the “noncreative” is to be subordinated to the fundamental sense of the entire signitive domain. My interpretation, then, has one advantage over Heidegger’s account. It is more comprehensive in its coverage. And this is no trivial advantage. This greater comprehension is not purchased at the price of any of Heidegger’s central insights into the significance of discourse and

silence. From

the time of Being and

Time

onward,

Heidegger

has

recognized that man and world are interwined and are disclosed together through man’s mediational performances, primordially his performances of discourse and silence. In this intertwining, there is a preeminence of the world. Man’s kind of Being is fundamentally that

of listening, of hearkening. In Being and Time man

hearkens to the

call of conscience and Situations. Later, man responds to the unspoken Saying of the unsaid. But the preeminence of the world does not deprive man’s performances of their efficacy. On the contrary, without man’s free play there would be neither things nor world. Man’s freedom, however, is not that by which man opposes himself to the world. Rather man’s freedom is itself established by the call of Saying to which he is to respond. Man exercises his freedom fruitfully only if his performances, especially those of discourse and silence, lead him to the unsaid which is at the source of Saying. The unsaid is the inexhaustible source of Saying and is a permanent determinate of it. Whereas man can bring Saying to human word, the unsaid can only be acknowledged in silence. The unsaid is at both the origin and the termination of any Saying. The silence in which the unsaid is acknowledged is at both the origin and the termination of any human words which bring Saying to speech. The Saying and its source to which man responds is not sheerly indeterminate. Already

in Being and

Time,

the call of conscience

to which

man

responds

calls man in an unequivocal direction even if its content was indefinite. In the later Heidegger, when the call is now seen to come epochally from Saying in the Event of Appropriation, it remains the case that, however indefinite the content of the call may be, the orientation it provides is unequivocal. It calls man to bring to word the Saying of

the epoch. Saying, then, and the epoch it grants to men reign over man’s responses and determine their appropriateness. My interpretation can accommodate all of these insights. On that interpretation Being is the ineluctable interplay of man and world. By reason of their constitution by the same elements, man and world

188

SILENCE

are in no respect radically alien to one another. But by reason of the preeminence of the determinate in one and the nondeterminate in the other, they can never fully coalesce. The world as preeminent over man and, in its own constitution, as preeminently determinate both calls man to respond according to what it grants and serves as authenticator for the determinations which man brings to light in his response. Man, for his part, maintains his distance from all the determinations introduced by his mediations as well as from full absorption in any epoch. He can do so because of the nondeterminateness which is preeminent in him. This preeminent nondeterminateness is what makes it possible for him to realize that the world he encounters is a world which appears epochally. The world reigns over man but neither as tyrant nor as inept dauphin. Heidegger in his meditations on discourse and silence has seen this. My ontological interpretation of the significance of silence accounts for how this can be the case. I will conclude this part of the defense of my ontological interpretation by showing how it is related to one key position which emerges in Max Picard’s reflections on silence. Since what I have said with reference to Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger covers a great deal of the territory dealt with by Picard, it is sufficient here to take up the one central consideration of his which has no straightforward counterpart in the views of either Merleau-Ponty or Heidegger concerning the importance of silence.

Picard speaks of a type of discourse, the discourse of faith, which responds to the absolute word, to God. This discourse is prayer. The experience of originary and terminal silence reveals a demonic element in silence, which Picard would exorcise through faith in God. Picard’s insight here is that the experience of silence is such that man can, by a leap, aim at resolving the experienced polyvalence of silence by deciding to take one of its dimensions as unequivocally primary. The resolution which Picard proposes and apparently makes in his own life, the resolution by faith, is not, however, the only possible

resolution. Others have resolved the experienced polyvalence in favor of a defiance of silence, a despair over silence, and

even an ignoring

of silence. But no one of these resolutions, even if accomplished, is definitively accomplished by anyone. That is, in the course of one’s life one could make several of these resolutions or make any of them several times. This is true even of the resolution into faith. Each of these types of resolution is both temporal and finite. An appropriate

Further Justification of the Interpretation

189

ontological interpretation of the phenomenon of silence should account both for the possibility of these resolutions and the limitations which each of these resolutions has. My interpretation readily satisfies this condition. Nothing about a play in principle excludes there being an end of the play, an end understood either as finish or goal or both. Nor is there anything about a play which in principle excludes the assessment of the play from within the play. This holds good both for the plays which are man and the world and for their interplay. Perhaps the interplay springs from God for God and is good for man. Perhaps it springs from God for God and trifles with man. Perhaps it is senseless except for the sense that man insists on fashioning by and for himself. The ineluctable preeminence of the world, of that which is other than man, in its interplay with man, when coupled with the irreducible nonde-

terminateness

in man,

provides

room

for proposals

conceiving

the

sense of the interplay as a totality of some specific sort. But claims about the end or the assessment of the play, about

the

play as a totality, can never be fully established during the play.

Therefore, more than one claim about either the end or the assessment is always possible and even plausible. Further, since the author of the claim is himself a participant in the finite, temporal interplay, there is always the possibility of his changing his claim or even proposing a new one. The preeminence of the nondeterminate in the play which is himself precludes his achieving any definitive determination, including the mediation whereby he makes claims about the totality of the interplay. What the assessment of Picard’s insight leads to is the recognition that, in principle, the phenomenon of silence and its appropriate ontological interpretation do not preclude as foolish any claims concerning origin, culmination, and definitive sense of the interplay between man and world. But neither do silence and its interpretation provide a conclusive basis for adjudicating between competing claims of this sort. Man can make claims, then, concerning which the evidence fur-

nished by the phenomenon

of silence and an appropriate ontological

interpretation of silence permits intelligible and not devoid of all that much provides support for interpretation can account in a

one to say only that such claims plausibility. But even to be able to my interpretation. It shows that nonreductionistic way for both possibility and the limitations of performances of faith, disbelief,

are say my the de-

spelen

fiance, despair, and resignation which advance claims concerning the definitive sense of both man and the world. Each of these performances has some motivation. None of them can obliterate the motivated possibility of the others. I have now shown that my ontological interpretation of the phenomenon of silence can accommodate, without loss, important insights of major philosophers concerning silence and its significance. Since it can hold together these diverse insights, my interpretation is fruitful. But, as I will proceed to show, it is fruitful in a second respect. It sheds light upon a number of issues in a broadly conceived philosophy of discourse.

Ill.

ACCOUNTING

FOR

TYPES

OF

DISCOURSE

In Chapter Two I described the two basic regions of discourse, interlocutor-centered and topic-centered discourse. I also distinguished several types of discourse belonging to each of these regions. Each type of discourse is conjoined with a distinctive sort of silence. Finally

these regions, as regions of new discourse, are distinct from tradition but are nonetheless linked to tradition by silence. My ontological interpretation of silence is fruitful

because

it can

account for (1) the uncancellable possibility of the difference between tradition and new discourse, (2) the difference between the two regions of discourse, and (3) the possibility of a multiplicity of types of discourse with their respective sorts of silence. My interpretation does not, however, account for the factual occurrence of any specific complex of types of discourse. For example, one could not show from my interpretation how it is that the specific complex of types of topiccentered discourse which I described in Chapter Two came about. But my interpretation can account for why an acceptable ontological interpretation of silence cannot provide such an explanation. On my interpretation, the irreducibility of the difference between tradition and new discourse is a function of the irreducible difference between world and man. From one standpoint, man’s mediations always are performed against an already established background. Ingredient in this background is the determinate residue of previous human mediations. This residue is part of the call to which man responds. From another standpoint, by virtue of the preeminence in man of

Further Justification of the Interpretation

191

the nondeterminate, his response to the world’s call is always somehow distinctively his, even when he merely repeats a previous response. By virtue of the nondeterminateness at play in both him and the world, his mediations necessarily issue from him as his new mediations. By virtue of the determinateness at play in both man and the world, these mediations necessarily escape his control and become worldly. By

virtue of the necessary play between and new other.

discourses are mutually

man

and the world, tradition

necessary for the occurrence

of the

My interpretation also accounts for the irreducibility of the two regions of discourse. That is, it shows why it is always appropriate to distinguish between interlocutor-centered and topic-centered discourse.® The interplay of man and world which is Being is such that man is irreducible to world. On the one hand, the region of discourse which gives emphasis to the irrecusable distinctiveness of man is that of interlocutor-centered discourse. In interlocutor-centered discourse, people can emphasize either the uniqueness of the discourse as precisely theirs or the detachment which they maintain from the discourse even while they are engaged in it. The former is preeminent in discourse among friends and enemies. The latter is preeminent in discourse among acquaintances. On the other hand, not only is the

world irreducible to man, but the world enjoys a preeminence over man.

In its preeminence

the world

he engages in topic-centered

calls man to respond to it. When

discourse, man

emphasizes

that his re-

sponse is a response to that which enjoys preeminence over him. Precisely because of this irreducible interplay between man and world, then, interlocutor-centered discourse and topic-centered discourse are irreducible to one another. My interpretation can also clarify the relation between tradition and each region of discourse. Tradition as sediment belongs to the world. It is a worldly component. But, as the sediment not of natural processes but of human mediations, it refers back to its authors. These authors, though perhaps now anonymous, are nonetheless seen to have been efficacious agents.’ New discourse, then, can emphasize the new author’s efficacy. That is, it can emphasize that his mediations can be effective for the mutual purposes of him and his immediate audience. This is interlocutor-centered discourse. Or new discourse can emphasize the world in which the efficacy of the mediation can be

192

SILENCE

preserved, preserved precisely because as a mediation it responds appropriately to that which enjoys preeminence over its author. This is topic-centered discourse. The possibility that each of these regions may embrace more than one type of discourse is, on my interpretation, an uncancellable possibility. But there is no demonstrable necessity that there be more

than one type in each region. For example, in Chapter Two described

several

presently

actual

types

of topic-centered

I have

discourse.

It is not necessary that there always be a multiplicity of such types of discourse. But it is necessary that there always be the possibility of such a multiplicity. On my ontological interpretation of the significance of silence, there are two Closely related reasons why this is the case. First, consider the region of topic-centered discourse. By reason of man’s nondeterminateness, no response or pattern of responses which constitutes this region of discourse can be exhaustive of the ways in which man can respond to that which calls him to make it an essential determinant of the legitimacy of the response. What he mediates can always be mediated otherwise. On the other hand, though he necessarily has the ability to mediate otherwise than he does, he does not have to exercise this ability. So in principle, and again by reason of his nonedeterminateness, he can confine himself to engaging in only one type of discursive mediation. The second reason there can, but need not, be more than one type of discourse in each region is the finitude and openness of both man

and world.

Since man

and the world,

by reason

of their

finitude,

are always both present and absent to each other, no pattern of discourse can be definitive, Each pattern could be otherwise. On the other

hand, the openness of the world entails that its call is not closed and complete. The freedom of man entails that he is always available to respond anew to the new. But by the same token, there is no necessity that he expand any pattern of discourse by complicating a region of discourse with a multiplicity of types of discourse. This same set of considerations is directly applicable to the region of interlocutor-centered discourse. The upshot of my interpretation, then, is that, in principle, each region can consist of as few as one type of discourse and neither region is limited by a maximal number of types of discourse. A further consequence

of these considerations is that a hierarchical

Further Justification of the Interpretation

193

arrangement of a multiplicity of types within each region has no positive warrant. If, like Picard, one makes the move to faith, then such a hierarchy may have some basis. My position does not prelude such a supplementation which might justify a hierarchy. But without supplementation my interpretation offers no support to any sort of hierarchy. This consequence also holds for philosophical discourse. On interpretation, which is itself admittedly a piece of philosophical

course, philosophical

discourse

my dis-

does not stand in any kind of hier-

archical relationship to other types of topic-centered discourse.® Philosophical discourse is neither queen over nor handmaiden to any other type of discourse. Other philosophers notwithstanding, philosophical discourse is simply one type of topic-centered discourse. As a distinct type, it of course has unique features. But every type of discourse has features by virtue of which it is distinct from every other type. The distinctiveness of philosophical discourse provides no basis for positing a hierarchical relationship between it and other types of discourse. Several considerations support this conclusion. First, philosophical discourse is as finite and contingent as any other type of discourse. On the one hand, there could in fact be discourse without there being philosophy. On the other hand, philosophical discourse cannot express all meaning. Some meaning becomes articulable only in nonphilosophical types of discourse. Second, philosophical discourse, like every type of discourse, is under the sway of silence. Sometimes, philosophical discourse is appropriate. At other times, it is not. And from a somewhat different standpoint, the endeavor to appreciate fully the phenomenon of silence has had to consider its place in all types of discourse without giving precedence

to any one of them. Finally, even granted that its topic is the totality of experience, including the experience of multiple types of discourse, the scope of philosophical discourse is not unique. Religious discourse and claimed just so expensive a topic as its own. In principle, other types political discourse, each in its own way and at different times, have of discourse could take the totality of experience as its topic. As I suggested in Chapter Two, technological discourse may well do so. How many claims of this sort could be made good is a question I am unable to answer. But the fact that at least some other types of dis-

194

SILENCE

course, namely religious discourse and political discourse, have undertaken the task of making all of experience their topics shows that philosophical discourse is not unique in the scope of its topic. However philosophical discourse is to be distinguished from other types, it remains one of several ways of articulating the meaning of the

interplay of man and world. As such, it is one finite type among other finite types. No more than any other type does it engender an essential hierarchy of types.®

IV.

THE

ISSUE THE

OF

THE

LITERAL

AND

METAPHORICAL

My ontological interpretation of the phenomenon of silence is also fruitful inasmuch as it sheds light upon a number of widely recognized issues in the philosophy of discourse taken in a broad sense. I do not claim, of course, that definitive and comprehensive solutions to these issues can be simply deduced from my interpretation. Rather, my interpretation helps to specify the range within which acceptable solutions must fall. My purpose here is not to deal in detail with any of these standard issues but simply to indicate how my interpretation can be brought to bear upon them. Examples of the sorts of broad issues which I have in mind here are: What is the place of rhetoric in the manifestation of truth? What is to be made of the claims advanced by the several “structuralists,” concerning literary texts and the role of the author or reader? How is the connection between literal discourse and metaphorical discourse to be understood? I will exemplify the fruitfulness of my interpretation by considering briefly this last question. I assume that both metaphorical and literal

discourse,

however

these

are

defined,

mediate

their

author’s

and

audience’s experience of the world even if that world is restrictively defined as simply a language (Jangue). Each mediation, though, for reasons spelled out in Chapter Six, is necessarily open to further media-

tions. By reason of the irreducible play of the determinate and the nondeterminate which constitutes man, none of his performances can bring about something exclusively determinate or exclusively nonde-

terminate.

Univocal

discourse

and

omnivocal

discourse

(a play

of

words exclusively dealing with words as words) are, respectively, maximally determinate and maximally nondeterminate. But each of

Further Justification of the Interpretation

195

these is founded upon and is developed from antecedent discourse which more proximately mediates man’s encounter with the world.’ The more proximate discursive mediations are those which are usually designated as either literal or metaphorical discourse."! In both of these sorts of discourse there is a manifestation of both the determinate and the nondeterminate. Fundamentally, this must be the case if indeed both the performer of the mediation and that which is mediated are constituted by the respective plays of these two elements. It follows, then, that from a genetic standpoint both univocal discourse and omnivocal discourse are remote mediations of man’s encounter with the world. Both of them are founded upon the more proximate mediations effected literally or metaphorically. As founded,

both univocal and omnivocal discourse refer back, at least horizonally, to that upon which they are founded. By virtue of this tie to that which founds them, both univocal and omnivocal discourse retain elements of both determinateness and nondeterminateness.!2 Now, my interpretation does not require that the distinction between the literal and the metaphorical be cancelled. On the contrary, my interpretation accounts for the irreducible possibility of this distinction. That is, the interplay of the plays of man and world is such that in principle, neither literal discourse nor metaphorical discourse can be finally reduced to the other without remainder." By reason of man’s determinateness, his mediation is anchored both to previous mediations and to that which calls for mediation. On the

one hand, his discourse is linked to an established language or langue and to a sedimented tradition of usage. The discourse which is called literal emphasizes his deployment of the determinate language and tradition which he has received. Ricoeur is right in noticing that traditional or dead metaphors really belong to the literal dimension of discourse.4* On the other hand, in his fresh discourse man can, again by virtue of his determinateness, refine and develop the linguistic determinations he has received. For example, he can make more precise color discriminations than have been made in the past. In fresh dis-

course, he can also press the determinate either received

or introduced

mediations

in the direction

which he has

of univocity.

He

does

this most purely, though, when he puts out of consideration any direct reference which his discourse has to either the experienced world or to nonsignitive mediations. Such is the case, for example, when he develops an uninterpreted logic.

196

SILENCE

By reason of his nondeterminateness, though, metaphor is also an irreducible discursive possibility. No determination, whether received or introduced by man, can so bind him that it cannot be further mediated in a plurivocal fashion. That is, man can discursively mediate any immediate or previously mediated experience in such a way that either his own freedom or the openness of the world or both are thrown into relief. He does this by mediations in which the nondeterminate is emphasized. This plurivocal mediation can be pressed in the direction of omnivocity, or word play about words. Again, though, this is done most purely when reference to the world or to nonsignitive mediations is expressly put out of play.

On my interpretation then, both literal and metaphorical discourse, by reason of the interplay of the respective plays of man and world, are irreducible possibilities. Both literal and metaphorical discourse, however, are polyvocal. That is, both manifest man’s freedom and finitude and the world’s openness and finitude. Univocity and omnivocity are limit concepts which depend for their intelligibility upon something more fundamental, namely, polyvocal discourse.

V.

CONCLUSION

The defense of my ontological interpretation of the sense of the phenomenon of silence can now be brought to an end. That defense,

in summary, is that my interpretation (1) respects the full range of the ways in which silence appears, (2) is congruent with the intentional analysis of silence, (3) accommodates the important insights of many major thinkers who

have seriously considered silence, and

(4) is fruit-

ful in clarifying a number of substantial issues in the philosophy of discourse. Admittedly, this evidence is not enough to establish definitively my

interpretation. But, given the evidence discoverable in the phenomenon of silence itself, there is no reason to think that any interpretation could be definitively established. The evidence assembled here is enough, however, to commend strongly the acceptance of the interpretation which I have proposed.

NOTES

PREFACE 1. Max Scheler, The Nature of Sympathy, tr. by Peter Heath (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, Ltd. 1954), p. 225. 2. Max Picard, The World of Silence, tr. by Stanley Godman (Chicago: Gateway Books, 1952). CHAPTER

ONE

1. Don Ihde notes this in his Experimental Phenomenology G, P. Putnam’s Sons, 1977), pp. 68, 129.

z. John Cage has made something

(New York:

of the same point. See his Silence

(Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), pp. 22-23. But, as my interpretation of this distinction between silence and noiselessness will make clear, I do not agree

with

Cage’s view

of the implications

of this distinc-

tion. 3. Susan Sontag, “The Aesthetics of Silence,” in Styles of Radical Will (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966), p. 11. Sontag has many keen insights into silence. But these insights are fragmentary. Her essay, in

the final analysis, takes silence seriously but distorts its significance. 4. These aspects of silence foreshadow and depend for their sense on the more fundamental sense of the three levels of personal discourse and their associated silences discussed below, as in the intentional analysis of silence presented in Chapter Three will show. Nevertheless, the fact that interven-

ing silence and fore-and-after silence are readily recognized yet are neither

pure nor fundamental requires their description here. Just as an acceptable ontological interpretation of silence will have to account for the fact that silence can be mistaken for a merely negative or derivative phenomenon, so it will also have

to account for the fact that the two

most readily

identified aspects of silence are themselves derivative and impure. 5. See, for example, Stanley Rosen, Nibilism (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1969), p. xiii and passim; and Georges Gusdorf, Speaking, tr. by Paul T. Brockelman (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1965), pp. 88-90.

198

NOTES TO PAGES

8 TO 22

6. Edmund Husserl, The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness, ed. by Martin Heidegger, tr. by James S. Churchill (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1966), #8, pp. 44-45, and #11, pp. 50-52. 7. This possibility of a variety of stampings is a foreshadowing both of

a

distinction

between

tradition,

topic-centered discourse which

interlocutor-centered

I will draw

discourse,

in Chapter Two

and

and of an

identification of aspects of silence which in Chapter Three I will call per-

sonalizing and individualizing silences. Intentional analysis will show these various possible stampings are not mere modifications of and hence dependent upon intervening silence, as this first approximation has it. It is,

however, ontologically relevant that they seem to be. 8. Maurice Merleau-Ponty,

Phenomenology

of Perception, tr. by Colin

Smith (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), p. 180. 9. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs, tr. by Richard C. McCleary (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), p. 89. 10. See in this connection Herman Parret, “Husserl and the Neo-Humboldtians

on

Language,”

International

Philosophical

(March 1972): 43-68, esp. pp. 50-52. 11. In what follows it will be seen that sometimes

Quarterly

it would

12, No.

1

be more

appropriate to call the utterance the background and the silence the figure. 12. See Thomas Clifton, “The Poetics of Musical Silence,” The Musical Quarterly 62, no. 2 (April 1976): 164-167. 13. Anton Baumstark, Comparative Liturgy, revised by Bernard Botte, tr. by F. L. Cross, (London: A. R. Mowbray & Co., 1958), p. 20. 14. See in this connection Rufus M. Jones, “Rethinking Quaker Princi-

ples,” esp. pp. 108-111, and Howard

H. Brinton, “The Quaker Doctrine

of Inward Peace,” esp. pp. 179-182, in The Pendle Hill Reader, ed. by Herrymon Mauer (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1950). 15. Rudolph Otto, The Idea of the Holy, tr. by J. W. Harvey, 2nd ed. (London: Oxford University Press), pp. 210-214. 16. See Brice Parain, A Metaphysics of Language, tr. by Mary Mayer (Garden City: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1971) and Emmanuel Levinas, “Au dela de lessence,” Revue de Métaphysique et de morale, July-September 1970, pp. 265-283. 17. The occurrence of the silence of the to-be-said in Oedipus Rex is

brilliantly laid bare, in other terminology, by Charles Myers in his “Silence and the Unspoken: A Study of the Modes of Not Speaking” (Ph.D. diss., University of Texas at Austin,

1975). See esp. pp. 136-145. Pindar, as my

colleague Nancy Rubin has pointed out to me, was also much aware of his responsibility to poetize within the bounds of propriety established by the gods and what they will permit to be said of them. 18. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, tr. and ed. by Garret Barden and John Cumming (New York: Seabury Press, 1975), p. 16. 19. Ibid., p. 17. See also, concerning le bon sens, pp. 25-26. 20. Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling and Sickness unto Death, tr. by Walter Lowrie (Garden City: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1954),

pp. 114-116. For examples of malign silences short of the demoniacal see George Simenon’s The Cat and November. 21. Graham Greene, The Human Factor (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978), pp. 168-169. See also, for a related description, Eugene Ionesco,

Notes to Pages 22 to 36

199

Fragments of a Journal, tr. by Jean Stewart (New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1968), pp. 41-43. 22. Walker Percy, The Last Gentleman (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1966), p. 341. ; 23. Herbert Speigelberg has called my attention to the case of soliloquy. I think that this statement holds even there. But I will wait to deal with this case in detail until Chapter Three. CHAPTER

TWO

1. As will appear later in this chapter, both major regions of discourse arise against the backdrop of tradition.

2. I will return to the double-rayed character of the act of discoursing

in Chapter Three.

3. For Paul Ricoeur’s statement and understanding of the distinction between world and situation, see his “The Model of the Text: Meaning-

ful Action,’ New Literary History 5, no. 1 (Autumn 1973): 91-117; his “Metaphor and the Main Problem of Hermeneutics,” New Literary History 6, no. 1 (Autumn 1974): 95-110; and his Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1976), esp. pp. 25-44. For my animadiversions to some of the

consequences he draws from this distinction, see my “Ihde’s Listening and Voice Plus Two

Conjectures,” Philosophy Today

22, no. 1 (Spring 1978):

34-42.

4. There is even a sense, as will be seen later, in which the dead are included in the intended audience. 5. A fourth type, soliloquy, presents special problems which are better

handled in the context of Chapter Three. Soliloquy could be either interlocutor-centered or topic-centered, depending upon the orientation of the primary ray. The only thing special about soliloquous discourse which

needs to be mentioned here is that in soliloquy no audience distinct from the author is explicitly recognized. 6.

Obviously,

the

detachment

from

a situation

toward

a world

is cor-

related to an attachment to that world. The import of the correlation will be dealt with in the course of the ontological interpretation of silence. 7. If, following Thomas Kuhn, Paul Feyerabend, and others, the discourse of scientists ceases to be that of normal science, then clearly their

discourse refers to some other world. I am not prepared to try to characterize this new form of discourse among scientists. But, for present purposes, it is sufficient that there can be, and has been, the discourse of normal science. I also acknowledge that there are exceptions in the discourse employed in some sciences to what I say here. 8. See in this connection the interesting remarks of Hannah Arendt in her Between Past and Future (New York: Viking Press, 1968), pp. 265266.

9. See Gabriel Marcel, The Decline of Wisdom (London: The Harvill Press, 1954), pp. 6-7. It should be acknowledged here that the worlds of science and technology are today, and perhaps are in principle, interlocked. See in this connection Hans Jonas, “Straddling the Boundaries of

Theory and Practice” in Recombinant DNA: Science, Ethics, and Politics,

200

NOTES TO PAGES 36 TO 43

ed. by John Richards (New York: Academic Press, 1978), 10. See Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society, tr. Merton (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1964), pp. 136-139. to take a stand here on Ellul’s assessments. I only cite his 11.

See

Martin

Heidegger,

The

Question

Concerning

pp. 253-272. by Robert K. I do not wish descriptions.

Technology

and

Other Essays, tr. by William Lovitt (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), pp. 14-18. See also Michael Zimmerman, “Beyond ‘Humanism’: Heidegger’s Understanding of Technology,” Listening 12, no. 3 (Fall 1977): 74-83 and Edward G. Ballard, Man and Technology (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1978), pp. 83-84. 12. Scientific discourse has sometimes attempted to deal with its world in exclusively quantitative terms. But it has not always done so. My hunch is that quantitative differentiations themselves are conceived differently in scientific discourse than they are in technological discourse. But I will not pursue that matter here. What is important is that it is of the

essence of technological discourse to refer to a universe in which there are only quantitative differentiations. For another, related, paradoxical characteristic of the technological orientation, see Ballard, Op:.cit:, Pp. 237. 13. In calling attention to the paradoxical character of technological discourse,

I am

not

implicitly

criticizing

it. Other

types

of discourse

are

also paradoxical. My intention here remains simply to describe different types of discourse and their related silences. 14. See Joseph Anthony Mazzeo, Renaissance and Seventeenth-Century Studies (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964), pp. 148 and 151152. 15. Religious discourse, too, tends to take its world as a “world of worlds.” See below, footnote 22.

16. For Machiavelli, shapes.

For

example,

the necessity the

highest

of restraint in politics takes several

form

of public

spirit and

the

liberty

it

involves requires a willing, even grateful, acceptance of restraint. Or again, effective political discourse requires the kind of restraint which eschews systematic rigor in favor of flexibility. See Mazzeo, op. cit., pp. 123 and 132-135. 17. For a more extensive discussion of the political, see my “Renovating the Problem of Politics,” The Review of Metaphysics 39 (June 1976): 626-641, and “Politics and Coercion,” Philosophy Today 21 (Summer 1977): 103-114.

18. I do not rule out the possibility that something may be appraised

as morally neutral or indifferent. 19. On phronesis and morality, Method,

tr. and

ed. by

Garrett

see Hans-Georg

Barden

and

John

The Seabury Press, 1975), pp. 23 ff. and 283 ff. 20. In this connection,

see the

remarks

on

Gadamer, Cumming

Machiavelli

by

Truth (New

and

York:

Mazzeo,

op.

cit., pp. 139-144. 21. For present purposes I will consider only the discourse in which a religious community discusses and expresses its beliefs. What I say is not intended to cover the discourse between an individual and God unless it is incorporated,

by the community. such.

as the Abraham

and Isaac story is, into a document

used

I am not here dealing with the discourse of mystics as

Notes to Pages 44 to 54 22. Since there can be only one

competition of worlds” same person situation in tions of the ly a holy

“world

201

of worlds,”

there is a tension or

between politics and religion. That each tends to be a “world shows up when the focus of both politics and religion is the or relatively small group of persons. Notice, for example, the the multiple small kingdoms in early Ireland. “One of the funcruler was to patronize poets and musicians. The king, original-

man,

represented

and personified

his teath

[his people]

in deal-

ing with the otherworld.” Liam de Paor, “The Christian Triumph: The Golden Age,” in Treasures of Early Irish Art, 1500 B.C. to 1500 A.D., ed. by Polly Cone (Verona: Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, 1977), p. 94. Mutatis mutandis, much the same could be said concerning Hebraic leaders and Christian leaders, whether kings or popes. And religion and politics were hardly divorced in Egypt, Greece, or Rome. But when they are distin-

guished the tension between them appears. In another context I will try to show that this tension can be reduced only to the detriment of both. I would further suggest that today technology also tends to be a “world of worlds.” Unlike the thrusts of religion and politics in this regard, there

is no obvious countervailing thrust to technology. Therein may lie a large measure of its danger. 23. An apparent difference between artistic discourse and political discourse lies in the proximity of the audience to the author. In political discourse it appears that in principle the author must rather quickly get a response

from

his audience.

In artistic discourse it seems that there can be

a greater temporal or spatial remoteness between the author’s initiating utterance and the audience’s response. 24. Ricoeur has seen something of this. See his Interpretation

Theory,

PP: 59-60.

25. See Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, tr. by Wade Baskin (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966), pp. 9-14 and 76-78. There

are other respects in which

the analogy

between

langue and

tradition

breaks down. For example, Jangue in de Saussure’s sense is a closed, welldefined

system.

This

is not the

case

with

tradition,

especially

if tradition

includes within its extension ways of doing and making as well as ways of

saying. Elsewhere I expect to follow the prompting of Calvin O. Schrag and examine this analogy in more detail. 26. For a clear expression of tradition as a binding and joining at play in

education,

see

Hannah

Arendt’s

essay,

her Between Past and Future, esp. pp.

CHAPTER

“The

Crisis

in

Education,”

in

185-196.

THREE

1. J. N. Mohanty’s The Concept of Intentionality (St. Louis: Warren H. Green, 1972), esp. pp. 59-127, is most helpful in ordering the elements of this method. The intentional analysis undertaken here is directly oriented only toward a clarification of the sense of silence. Though it will demonstrate that the very sense of silence as a unitary phenomenon re-

quires

that

it be

given

some

ontological

interpretation,

the

intentional

analysis itself does not fully specify the interpretation. Consequently, will delay proposing an ontological interpretation until a later chapter.

I

202

NOTES TO PAGES

55 TO 65

2. Charles Myers nicely spells out several aspects of such a case. See his “Silence and the Unspoken: A Study of the Modes of Not Speaking” (Ph.D. diss., University of Texas at Austin, 1975). 3. Both worshipers and nonworshipers can, for assorted reasons, challenge the legitimacy of this third sort of case. But claims by worshipers to

have experienced this sort of case are not rare. There is no sound reason for rejecting their descriptions of their experiences. See Nancy Jackson, “Meeting Silence: The Religious Uses of Group Silence” (Ph.D. diss., Washington University, St. Louis, 1974), esp. Chapters 9 and 10. What I say in Section II of this chapter will confirm that there is indeed a dis-

tinct case of the sort in question here. 4. This is a generalized version of the Platonic question:

How

can I

seek to learn something if I do not already know it? 5. See Edmund Husserl’s account of this shift in his Experience and Judgment, ed. by Ludwig Landgrebe, tr. by James S. Churchill and Karl Ameriks (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), esp. pp. 197-

200.

6. I think, but will not try to establish here, that this proposal cannot

even handle case 1 unless the only instances which are allowed to count as instances of case 1 are those whose elements all belong to a system which is formally deductive. 7. Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, tr. by David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), Appendix III, pp. 328-329. 8. Ibid., p. 330. Bracketed words supplied by Walter Biemel.

9. This “notices nothing else” is an exaggeration. But it is not a troublesome one. 10. For the sense of “whole” in this context see my “Husserl’s Phenomenological Justification of a Universal Rigorous Science,” Philosophical Quarterly 16, no. 1 (March 1976): 63-80.

International

11. I am, of course, using the term “world” here in a different sense from

the way

I used

it in Chapter

Two

to speak of the scientific world,

the moral world, etc. Here I used it to mean the unitary totality of all possible referents of any sort of conscious performances.

12. I wish to distinguish here between a mere human individual which can be called an ego-pole and a full blown person who can be called a self. 13. What I have said in “On Speech and Temporality,” Philosophy Today 18, no. 3 (Fall 1974): 171-180, provides justification for claiming

that a self is empty until it actually thematizes another self as a distinct thematizer.

14. I no pure ceptual analysis

acknowledge that in actual concrete experience there is probably prelinguistic experience. But there is a distinction between perexperience and signitive experience which must be admitted in any of the sense of experience. My account here must take note of that

distinction. 15. What Hans-Georg Gadamer says about the different sorts of experi-

ence of the “Thou” is congruent with my description of the complexity of discourse. See his Truth and Method, tr. and ed. by Garrett Barden and

John Cummings

(New York: Seabury Press, 1975), pp. 320-325. So is what

Robert Sokolowski says about the voice of the judger. See his Husserlian

Notes to Pages 65 to 86 Meditations

(Evanston:

Northwestern

203

University Press,

1974), pp. 218-221.

16. For a somewhat fuller discussion of Molly’s soliloquy, see my “On

Speech and Temporality,” pp. 174-179. I do not, however, now wish to stand by everything I said in that article. 17. See in this connection Don Ihde, Listening and Voice (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1976), pp. 149-157, and my “Ihde’s Listening and Voice Plus Two Conjectures,” Philosophy Today 22, no. 1 (Spring 1978): 34-42. Writing can, of course, be little more than a copying. When it is, it is a kind of soliloquy. 18. Since I seem to be able to lecture myself, this other self may be my

own self. As has frequently been noted, this apparent possibility of lecturing oneself poses interesting puzzles. But this “other myself” cannot in turn

address

me,

the

lecturer.

See

in this connection

Gadamer,

Truth

and Method, p. 345. 19. This phenomenon may account for claims made by some artists that

they perform only for themselves and their coperformers. 20. The foundation for this anticipation is complex. But it need not be

analyzed here. And I am, of course, speaking of synchronic and diachronic lived time, not clock time. 21. There

are,

of

course,

cases

of fanatical

codiscourse.

In these

cases,

whatever shifts to other levels and shapes of discourse occur are at bottom trivial. The fanatical codiscourse has unmitigated supremacy. In this connection see Gabriel Marcel, Man Against Mass Society, tr. by G. S. Fraser (Chicago: Gateway Books, 1967) pp. 133-152.

22. St. Augustine apparently experienced this phenomenon. See Joseph Anthony Mazzeo, Renaissance and Seventeenth-Century York: Columbia University Press, 1964), pp. 16-23.

23. One significant dimension

Studies

(New

of silence that has not been explicitly

dealt with in these first three chapters is that which operates in the shuttling between the literal and the metaphorical elements in discourse. This dimension of silence is far from inconsequential. But it occurs within

all of the shapes of each of the levels of discourse from at least personalized soliloquy on up. Thus no special clarification of the genesis of the sense of silence would be gained by considering this dimension at this point. I will return to this topic, though,

in Chapter

Seven.

24. Much of Merleau-Ponty’s work shows a keen awareness of this predicament. How he coped with it is nicely pointed out by John Sallis in his Phenomenology and the Return to Beginnings (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1973). CHAPTER

FOUR

1. Alexander Kojéve, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, ed. by Allan Bloom, tr. by James H. Nichols, Jr. (New York and London: Basic Books, 1969), p. 35. 2. Ibid., p. 36. 3. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, tr. by A. V. Miller with

analysis of the text and foreward by J. N. Findlay

Press, 1977), p. 66. 4. Ibid., p. 194.

(Oxford:

Clarendon

204.

NOTES TO PAGES 86 TO 95

5. Ibid., p. 198. 6. See

Charles

Taylor,

“The

Opening

Arguments

gy,” in Hegel, ed. by Alaistair MacIntyre (Garden 1972), p. 166. 7. Guy Debrock’s “The Silence of Language in Cultural Hermeneutics (1973): 285-304, suggests that tive import for Hegel in the Phenomenology. But and unconvincing.

of the Phenomenolo-

City:

Anchor

Books,

Hegel’s Dialectic” in silence did have posithis essay is confused

8. Stanley Rosen, Nihilism (New Haven and London:

Yale University

Press, 1969), p. 207. In developing the connection between speech and desire, Rosen is taking up a theme extensively discussed by Kojéve, who

was Rosen’s teacher. Kojeve himself was developing a Hegelian theme. 9. Ibid., p. 209. 10. Ibid., p. 217.

ir. Ibid., pp. 217-218. 12. Ibid., pp. 229-230. 13. Ibid., pp. 220-221.

14. I will postpone until Chapter Six my own discussion of the relations holding among desire, discourse, and silence. 15. For

a detailed

criticism

of

the

notion

of

absolute

knowledge,

an-

other name for complete speech, see Gabriel Marcel, “Thoughts on the Idea of Absolute Knowledge and on the Participation of Thought in Being,” in his Philosophical Fragments: 1904-1974, tr. by Lionel A. Blain (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1965), pp. 42-82. 16. See Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, pp. 427-453, esp. PP. 439-44317. Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations, tr. by J. N. Findlay (New York: Humanities Press, 1970), 1: 270. 18. Ibid., p. 282. See also pp. 275-281. 19. Ibid., p. 280. 20. Ibid., p. 284. 21. Ibid., pp. 314-315. 22. Ibid., p. 321.

23. Ibid., p. 316. 24. Ibid., p. 327. 25. Ibid., pp. 327-328. 26. James Edie, Speaking and Meaning (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976), p. 150. My emphasis. 27. It should be noticed that, as in the case of the Hegelian complete speech thesis, so here there needs to be a supreme language, one composed

of only objective expressions. This is the language of philosophy as science. Robert Sokolowski, borrowing a term from Thomas Prufer, calls this language “Transcendentalese.” See Sokolowski, Husserlian Meditations (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974), pp. 122 and 252-270. 28. Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, tr. by David B. Allison (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), pp. 61-63. 29. Ibid., pp. 6 and 63-69.

30. Ibid., pp. 82-83.

Gadamer

makes

much

the same

point.

He

says

that the occasionality of human speech, rather than being a casual imperfection of its expressive power, is in fact the logical expression of the living virtuality of speech. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, tr.

Notes to Pages 95 to 100 by Garrett Barden and John Cumming - 416. : 31. Derrida, Speech

(New York:

and Phenomenona,

205 Seabury Press, 1975),

p. 68.

32. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, tr. by Colin Smith (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), pp. 178-179. I do not

agree, however, with

the sense of Merleau-Ponty’s

distinction between

authentic speech and second-order expressions. The way he draws distinction does not and cannot take tradition into account.

that

33. Ibid., p. 179. My addition in brackets. 34. This same point is made succinctly by Edie, op. cit., pp. 158-160. 35. Ibid., pp. 170-190. I will deal more fully in Chapter Five with Merleau-Ponty’s thought concerning silence. 36. See Husserl, Logical Investigations, 1: 322. 37- | am aware that Derrida’s own doctrine concerning discourse is

fundamentally incompatible with my general approach. From this standpoint I am still lodged in what he calls logocentrism. See, for example, his Of Grammatology,

uw. by

Gayatri

C. Spivak

(Baltimore:

Johns

Hopkins

University Press, 1976), pp. 10 ff. and passim. 38. In formulating these two theses I rely exclusively upon Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, tr. by Hazel Barnes (New York: Washington Square Press, 1963). The first thesis I will discuss is, I believe, faithful to

Sartre’s own position in that book. The second thesis corresponds to a widespread but quite possibly mistaken reading of Being and Nothingness. For my

present purposes,

though, it is more

which help to delimit the range

of the phenomenon expositions

of text.

important

of acceptable

to deal with

theses

ontological interpretations

of silence than it is to confine myself to scholarly My

responsibilities to scholarship

are satisfied, I think,

by acknowledging on the one hand that I am not dealing with the entire Sartrean corpus and on the other hand that I do not claim to be able to saddle Sartre himself

with

the second

stimulated these considerations. theses “Sartrean.” 39. Ibid., p. 240. Throughout will assume that intuition is not but rather that it belongs to

thesis. Nonetheless,

it is Sartre

who

So, with proper hedging, I will call these the discussion of the “Sartrean” theses I equivalent to or identical with perception what Husserl would call the predicative

sphere. The denial of my assumptions can easily be shown to lead to indefensible consequences. 40. Ibid.

41. Elsewhere Sartre explicitly espouses at least a special case of the complete speech thesis. He says: “The underlying intent of the Flaubert

is to show that at bottom everything can be communicated and that, without being god, any man who has access to the appropriate data can succeed

in understanding

another

Camus and Sartre (New

York:

man

perfectly.”

Quoted

in Germaine

Bree,

Dell Publishing Co., 1972), p. 9.

42. I do not have to grasp the specific object to which the instrument

or sign is oriented. But to recognize an instrument or sign as such I must

see that it is oriented to some determinate object or set of objects which

are distinct from it. 43. Again, it is quite difficult to see how can be said to grasp traces qua traces.

intuition of the Sartrean sort

206

NOTES

TO PAGES

IOI

TO

III

44. Sartre, op. cit., p. 475. 45. Ibid., p. 485.

46. Thomas W. Busch offers strong arguments to show that this widespread view of Being and Nothingness is a mistaken view. According to Busch, autonomy sought at the expense of the other is, for Sartre, characteristic only of inauthentic existence. Authentic existence would involve mutual respect. See Busch, “Sartre: The Phenomenological Reduction of Human Relationships,” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 6, no. 1 (January 1975): 55-61; and Busch, “Sartre and the Senses of Alienation,” The Southern Journal of Philosophy 15, no. 2 (Summer 1977): 151-160. 47. This trivial interpretation makes the thesis a kind of special case of the tautologous version of psychological egoism which amounts to saying

that “every voluntary action is prompted by a motive of the agent’s own.” For this version of psychological egoism and its refutation, see Joel Feinberg, Reason and Responsibility (Encino: Dickenson Publishing Co., 1971), . 491 ff.

nae

The primacy assigned to monologue by this thesis fits in well with

Sartre’s

remarks

concerning

cursive argument.

the

connection

between

In intuition, there is maximal

intuition

and

self-sufficiency

dis-

of the

knower. Though discourse is supposedly only an instrument leading to intuition, in monologic

discourse

the

speaker

engaged in discourse can ever be. 49. See in this connection Edmund

is as self-sufficient

as anyone

Husserl, Experience and Judgment,

ed. by Ludwig Landgrebe, tr. by James S. Churchill and Karl Ameriks (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), pp. 87-91, and Richard Zaner, The Problem of Embodiment (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1964), Pp. 112-116. 50. Sartre, Op. cit., pp. 294-297.

51. I understand, of course, that since man is an entity he is on the side of being as well as being the one who

encounters being. But there is no

dangerous ambiguity here. CHAPTER

FIVE

1. Here again, my concern is with the phenomenon of silence. I make no claim to offer an assessment of the overall work

2. Alex Wayman,

“Two

of any of these thinkers.

Traditions of India—truth and silence,” Phi-

losophy East and West 24 (October 1974): 389-403. 3. See S. N. Ganguly, “Culture, Communication, and Silence,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 29 (1968-69): 182-200. 4. Wayman, op. cit., p. 392.

5. Lik Kuen Tong, “The Meaning of Philosophical Silence: Some

Re-

flections on the Use of Language in Chinese Thought,” Journal of Chinese Philosophy 3 (1976): 170. 6. Ibid., p. 179. 7. Ibid., p. 176. See also Lao Tsu, Tao Te Ching, tr. by Gia-Fu-Feng and Jane English (New York: Vintage Books, 1972), esp. numbers 1, 8, 14, 23, 42, 43, §2, and 56.

Notes to Pages 111 to 179

207

8. Lik Kuen Tong, op. cit., pp. 177-179. 9. Wayman, op. cit., pp. 396-400.

10. I explicitly referred to this point in my remarks on Hegel and Rosen in Chapter Four. But some version of this correlation is a commonplace in Western thought.

11. See my “Heidegger, the Spokesman for the Dweller,” The Southern

Journal of Philosophy 12. Soren

tr. by 26-29. Fear City: 13.

15, no. 2 (Summer

Kierkegaard,

Fear

and

1977):

Trembling

189-199. and

Sickness

unto

Death,

Walter Lowrie (Garden City: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1954), pp. See also Louis Mackey, “The View from Pisgah: A Reading of and Trembling,” in Kierkegaard, ed. by Josiah Thompson (Garden Doubleday Anchor Books, 1972), esp. pp. 394-399. Kierkegaard, op. cit., p. 86. See also pp. 90 and 96-97. What Kierke-

gaard says in Sickness unto Death permanent possibility, though

about the capital importance of the

not the actuality, of despair can readily be

shown to be a special case of the importance of the permanent possibility of silence. 14. Ibid., p. 82. 15. Ibid., pp. 90-91. 16. Ibid., p. 97. 17. Ibid., p. 128. 18. See in this connection Heidegger’s brief but incisive remarks in W hat is Called Thinking? tr. by Fred D. Wieck and J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), pp. 15-16. 19. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World, ed. by Claude Lefort, tr. by John O’Neill (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), pp. 45-46. It must be noted that Merleau-Ponty does not always distinguish clearly between silence and muteness. To make silence fully

thematic this distinction must be insisted upon. In my presentation of Merleau-Ponty’s thought here, I believe that I am faithful to his insights without repeating his occasional vagueness. 20. Ibid., p. 46.

21. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “On the Phenomenology of Language,” in Signs, tr. by Richard C. McCleary (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964) p. 97. 22. Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World, pp. 143-144. 23. Ibid., p. 14. 24. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, ed. by Claude Lefort, tr. by Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), Pp- 143-146. See also The Prose of the World, p. 14. 25. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, p. 155.

26. It is worth recalling in this connection Ortega y Gasset’s remarks about the contemplative stillness which man needs to remain man. See his

Man and People, tr. by Willard R. Trask (New York: W. W. Norton and

Co., 1957), Pp- 11-37.

27. See, for example, Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, tr. by Colin Smith (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), pp. 106-132 and 182-190. 28. Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World, p. 144. 29. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, p. 129.

208

NOTES TO PAGES 119 TO 128

30. Ibid. 31. Ibid., p. 179. 32. Claude Lefort, “Introduction,” in The Visible and the Invisible, pp. XXvili-xxix. Again, it is useful to note that what is called silence by Lefort and Merleau-Ponty is broader than the phenomenon which is the topic of this book. But the phenomenon with which I am concerned is included in that to which Merleau-Ponty’s term refers. 33. I owe this insight to Gabriel Marcel. See his The Mystery of Being, tr. by G. S. Fraser (Chicago: Gateway Books, 1960), 1: 137. MerleauPonty himself speaks of a wild world (un monde sauvage) and a wild spirit (un esprit sauvage), pp- 180-181.

See his “The

Philosopher

and His

Shadow,”

in Signs,

34. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, p. 39. See also his Phenomenology of Perception, p. 184. 35- Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World, p. 37. 36. Ibid., p. 67. 37- Merleau-Ponty, “Introduction,” in Signs, pp. 20-21. 38. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, p. 103. 39. Ibid., pp. 149, 215-217, 225, 236-238 and passim. For a good account of this position, see Atherton

C. Lowry,

“Merleau-Ponty

and Fundamental

Ontology,” International Philosophical Quarterly 15, no. 4 (December 1975): 397-409, and his “The Invisible World of Merleau-Ponty,” Philos-

ophy Today 23, no. 4 (1979): 294-303.

40. tion 41. 42. 4344. 45. 46.

Merleau-Ponty also notes the structural similarity between percepand speech. See The Visible and the Invisible, pp. 126 and 152-155. Ibid., p. ror. My emphasis. Merleau-Ponty, “The Philosopher and His Shadow,” in Signs, p. 181. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, pp. 103-104. See Lowry, “Merleau-Ponty and Fundamental Ontology,” p. 407. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, p. 102. To the reader familiar with Heidegger's work, my heavy debt to

him for many parts of this book will long since have been obvious. 47. Werner Marx, “The Word in Another Beginning: Poetic Dwelling and the Role of the Poet,” in On Heidegger and Language, ed. by Joseph J. Kockelmans (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1972), p- 240. 48. Ibid., p. 241. Heidegger also speaks of an ineluctable darkness which

is at play in all thinking. “The dark,” he says, “keeps what is light in its presence; what is light belongs to it.” Martin Heidegger, “Principles of Thinking,” in his The Piety of Thinking, tr. with commentary by James G. Hart and John C. Moraldo (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,

1976), p. 56. 49. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, tr. by John Marquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), Pp. 314. 50. Ibid., p. 318. st. Ibid., p. 343. 52. Ibid., p. 345. 53. Ibid., p. 348. Heidegger, I think, clarifies these matters in What Is

Called Thinking? There he says that thought and speech are essentially bound

up

with

one

another.

But

action

is, in important

respects,

distinct

Notes to Pages 128 to 139

209

from both thought and speech. See pp. 4 and 16. 54. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 438. 55. Ibid., pp. 369-370. . 56. See Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking? pp. 117-118, 132-133, 175, and 232-233. 57. Martin Heidegger, On the Way to Language, tr. by Peter D. Hertz (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), p. 127. On the meaning of Ereignis, see Walter Biemal, Martin Heidegger, tr. by J. L. Metha (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976), pp. 161-163. 58. Heidegger, On the Way to Language, p. 219. 59. Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking? p. 133. 60. Heidegger, On the Way to Language, pp. 71-72. See in this connection Gabriel Marcel, Man Against Mass Society, tr. by G. S. Fraser

(Chicago: Gateway Books, 1962), p. 172. It is noteworthy that Heidegger came to regard Being and Time

as an assertive investigation.

61. Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking? p. 178. 62. See Werner Marx, Heidegger and the Tradition, tr. by Theodore Kisiel and Murray Greene (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1971), p. 227. 63. Ibid., pp. 202-203 and 250. 64. Ibid., pp. 202-203. Of considerable importance is the fact mentioned but undeveloped by Marx that Heidegger has not thought out the mode in which a state is founded. See p. 227 n. 65. That there are important differences between what Picard says about silence and my account of it will be obvious to those familiar with his work, There is no point here to a detailed assault on those claims of his which are at variance with mine. 66. Max Picard, The World of Silence, tr. by Stanley Godman (Chicago: Gateway Books, 1952), p. 1. 67. Ibid., p. 3.

68. Ibid, p. 139. In keeping with

my

large definition of discourse

as

including music, gesture, and the visual arts, I would make comparable claims about silence and the poetic manifestations in each of these modes. 69. Ibid., p. 141. 7o. Ibid., p. 28. 71. See in this connection Hannah Arendt’s remarks on the political

importance of Jesus’ injunction to forgive seventy times seven times in her The 210. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. poem

Human

Condition

(Garden

City:

Doubleday

Books,

1959), pp. 212-

Picard, op. cit., p. 29. Ibid., p. 54. Ibid., pp. 25-26. Ibid., p. 219. Ibid., p. 25. Ibid., p. 36. Ibid., pp. 38-39. Ibid., pp. 231-232. My emphasis. See in this connection Heidegger’s comments on Stefan “Words” in On the Way to Language, pp. 140-156.

George’s

210

NOTES TO PAGES 140 TO 153 CHAPTER

SIX

1. Actional performances do not, primarily, intend fully determinate objects. But silence cuts streams of these performances, just as it cuts other streams. 2. See Robert Sokolowski, Presence and Absence: A Philosophical Investigation of Language and Being (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), p. 12. Also, as Gilbert Ryle has said, it cannot be that all coins

are

counterfeit.

See

his Dilemmas

(Cambridge:

Cambridge

University

Press, 1964), pp- 94-95. _. 3. Throughout this chapter, I use the term “world” as I did in Chapter Three and not as in Chapter Two. Here, as in Chapter Three, there is only

one world, the complex totality of all actual possible meanings educible by

intentional

performances

of any

sort. The

oneness

of the world

re-

ferred to here is the foundation of the possibility that some one or the other of the several worlds

distinguished

in Chapter

Two

aim at being

the world of worlds. At this point, though, I only wish to insist that, what-

ever else the world may be, it is not a mere moment of man’s life. It is not completely a concoction brewed by man. 4. Whether primates or some other groups of entities should be counted with men or with the things of the world facing men is of no consequence here. 5. My guess is prompted by the works of Picard and Marcel. 6. See Jacob Klein, Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra, tr. by Eva Brann (Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1968), Chapter 7, esp. pp. 95-98. See also in this connection Edward G. Ballard, Man and Technology (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1978), pp. 12-13. 7. The other two domains of active mediational performances are the domains of action and of fabrication-destruction.

8. Throughout the rest of this work I use the word “nonstabilization” in a technical sense. The “non-” is not fundamentally privative. Sometimes “nonstabilization” does have the privative sense of “destabilization.” But at other times it simply means ‘without-stabilization.’ I take both destabilization and leaving-without-stabilization to be particular modes of the more fundamental nonstabilization. For similar reasons, I have used “nondeterminateness,”

rather

than

“indeterminateness.”

My

usage

will

occasionally

jar. I hope that it does not do so unnecessarily. g. Later in this chapter I will show tion

are

also

found

in

mediational. 10. It is not necessary

performances

here

that stabilization and nonstabilizawhich

are

not,

to spell out in detail

properly

the

speaking,

nondeterminate

aspects of discourse. A few examples will suffice. 11. It would be interesting to analyze the enterprise of information processing in terms of these three domains

of human

mediation and then to

assess in the light of this analysis the claims made

about or based upon

this process. 12. An example of this capacity of signitive performances to prolong the

efficacy of all types of mediation

is the Bible.

Think,

for

influence of the temple in Jerusalem long after its physical

example,

of the

destruction.

13. The practicing historian, of course, deals with both history and tra-

Notes to Pages

153 to 171

211

dition. An important part of his work is to distinguish one from the other. He will also deal with factors which are in no way attributable to mediational

performances,

tural occurrences,

for

example,

droughts

history, and tradition

and

earthquakes.

are inseparable

Though

na-

and are all grist

for the practicing historian, a proper assessment of his work requires that these three elements be carefully distinguished from one another. 14. See Pietro Pucci, Hesiod and the Language of Poetry (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1977), pp. 22-29, and n. 44, p. 42. 15. Martin Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking? tr. by Fred D. Wieck and J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), p. 141. 16. Pucci, op. cit., pp. 8-16.

17. See Edmund Husserl, Experience and Judgment, ed. by Ludwig Landgrebe, tr. by James S. Churchill and Karl Ameriks (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), pp. 71-86 and 103-106. 18. Robert Sokolowski, “Picturing,” The Review of Metaphysics 31 no. 1 (September 1977): 20. 19. See Ibid., pp. 3-28. 20. For

purposes

of my

ontological

interpretation

of silence,

I happily

do not have to ask whether or to what extent perception, imagination, and picturing are themselves mediating performances.

are sufficiently different from

Even

signitive, actional, and

if they are, they

fabricational

per-

formances that my argument is not adversely affected.

21. Soren

Kierkegaard, in Sickness unto Death, apparently recognized

that human freedom and finitude went hand in hand. See Fear and Trembling and Sickness unto Death, tr. by Walter Lowrie (Garden City: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1954), pp. 162-172. 22. Terminal silence, when interpreted, functions in a way much like

that ascribed by others, for example, Sartre and some theologians, to what has been called the fundamental project or the fundamental option. 23. My position here owes much to Heidegger. See in this connection

my “Heidegger, Spokesman for the Dweller,” The Southern Journal of Philosophy 15, no. 2 (Summer 1977): 189-199. 24. Higher order performances, of course, can take lower order performances as their referent or topic. And each performance does refer

nonthematically and horizonally to itself as well as to that which is its

focal topic. 25. See in this connection Husserl, Experience and Judgment, pp. 87101. 26. See in this connection Robert Sokolowski’s excellent study Presence and Absence: A Philosophical Investigation of Language and Being. 27. I do not speak of the world as free because the term “freedom” has

connotations which are inappropriate for describing the world.

28. I am not idly playing with the words “ply” and “reply.” Etymologically, “ply” has the sense of folding or pleating, which tends to the sense

of forming or performing, even performing diligently. To reply is to fold again, to fold back, to form again, which leads to the sense of responding,

even responding explicitly, to that which

interchange.

Obviously,

has already set the terms of the

I have been influenced

here by Heidegger.

29. See Robert Sokolowski, Husserlian Mediations western University Press, 1974), pp. 223-225.

(Evanston:

North-

212

NOTES TO PAGES

30. See

Wade

Ferdinand

Baskin

de

(New

Saussure,

York:

171 TO 195

Course

in

McGraw-Hill,

CHAPTER

General

Linguistics,

tr.

by

1966), pp. 77-78.

SEVEN

1. See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, ed. by Claude Lefort, tr. by Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), pp. 125-126, 145-146, 154-155, 179 and passim. Also see his Phenomenology of Perception, tr. by Colin Smith (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), pp. 100-102. 2. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, pp. 101, 103 and passim. 3. There is a disagreement between Merleau-Ponty and me concerning

the status of perception. I think that it is misleading to treat perception as an active discourse

human

and

performance

action.

He

would

like other active make

perception,

performances

such

like

emerge

discourse,

as

from a primordial silence. For me, silence cuts perception and opens the way for signitive performances. It is important to note this disagreement here. But this is not the place to develop the details of my argument

against Merleau-Ponty’s position. 4. My interpretation accommodates silence

which

reveals

the unity

Merleau-Ponty’s

of a man’s

perceptual,

claim

that it is

discursive,

and

ac-

tional performances. But the disagreement mentioned in the previous note is not attenuated. I understand the place of the phenomenon of silence

in this integration in a different way than he does. 5. Atherton

Lowry,

“The

Invisible World

of Merleau-Ponty,”

Philos-

ophy Today 23, no. 4 (1979): 294-303.

6. There is no necessity for the interlocutors to have a highly developed

sense of themselves as interlocutors for them to engage in interlocutorcentered discourse. It may well be that topic-centered discourse requires greater reflective self awareness than does interlocutor-centered discourse. But that question is tangential to what is at issue here. 7. James Edie notes this, though in a less general way, in his Speech and Meaning (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976), p. 158.

8. I am happy that there is no need here for me to specify further the basic characteristics of philosophical discourse. 9. For a different set of considerations

leading

to the same

conclusions,

see Heidegger, The End of Philosophy, tr. by Joan Stanbaugh (New York: Harper and Row, 1973). See also Thomas Sheehan, “After Philosophy: A Protreptic,” Philosophy Today 22, no. 3 (Fall 1978): 239-243. 10. See Edie, op. cit., p. 160.

11. As “strike,”

any “run,”

dictionary and

“go,”

shows, have

many several

words, literal

for

example,

meanings.

So

verbs the

like

literal

is

not equivalent to the univocal. 12. Gaston Bachelard’s account of how scientific theories have historical-

ly been framed in a mixture of terms belonging to different semantic con-

texts

illustrates an important

Philosophy

1968).

of

No,

tr.

by

G.

facet of this general C.

Waterston

(New

position. York:

See his The Orion

Press,

Notes to Page 195 13. My Bruzina’s_

213

position here is not so radical as is Heidegger’s. excellent

“Heidegger

on

the

Metaphor

and

See Ronald

Philosophy,”

in

Heidegger and Modern Philosophy, ed. by Michael Murray (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), pp. 184-200. 14. Paul Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1976), p. 52.