I. THE ONTOLOGICAL INTERPRETATION OF SILENCE AND 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 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 performances of any sort are deviations from normal performances of that sort.² 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.

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-à-vis a world which is at least in some fundamental respects irreducibly other.³ 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.⁴ 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 interplay of the several plays of these components. The components of this synthesis, this dyad, are appropriately named the “determinate” and 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.⁵ 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.⁶ 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 is interplay.

The defense of this thesis consists in considering the phenomena to be accounted for and showing both that and how this thesis accounts for them. But it will become apparent that both the inner logic of the thesis and the phenomena to be accounted for preclude both the claim that my thesis is either exhaustive or definitive and the possibility 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.

II. THE DETERMINATE AND THE NONDETERMINATE IN THE SIGNITIVE 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.⁷ 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.⁸ Any sort of intentional performance, whether passive or active, can serve as that upon which the particular stabilization—nonstabilization involved in mediation is wrought.⁹ 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.

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 performance.

On the other hand, concrete discourse is in important respects non-determinate.¹⁰ 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. 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 counter-parts 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, non-stabilization 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.

III. THE SIGNITIVE AND THE OTHER DOMAINS OF ACTIVE 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 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 oneself. That is, action involves either changing one’s habitual or sedimented ways of mediating his encounter with the world or striving to maintain such a change against its tendency to decay into habit or routine. In the course of action or in its service something strictly worldly may be 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 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 non-stabilize. 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.¹¹ 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 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.

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 exemplified 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.¹² 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 appropriate type of discourse, for example, political discourse, artistic discourse, 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 or rhythms of mediations which make both history and tradition possible.

IV. THE DETERMINATE AND THE NONDETERMINATE IN HISTORY AND 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, 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 utterance 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.¹³

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 nondeterminate. 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.¹⁴ 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

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.¹⁶ 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 non-determinateness 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 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 AND THE NONDETERMINATE IN SPONTANEOUS 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.¹⁷ 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.”¹⁸ 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.¹⁹

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 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.²⁰ 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, 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 non-determinate 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 thev hold for the point of intersection, the play of desire and silence, between immediate and mediate experience. I can then go on to consider the bearing of my ontological claims upon the interpretation of man as a whole.

VI. MAN AS THE PLAY OF THE DETERMINATE AND THE 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 requirement 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.²¹ 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 PREEMINENCE IN MAN OF THE 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 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.²²

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 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. His mediational performances are destined to blossom into all-sense. Or is some third, perhaps “more modest,” alternative 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.²³ Terminal silence does not rule out so drastic an interpretation. However, by its own need for sustenance through subsequent discourse, it suggests that to be en route is to be a path-dweller, one whose kind of Being is precisely that of walking a path. To path, to walk a path, is both to follow it and to break it.

To be this kind of path-dweller is to be one whose Being is a tensional synthesis of the determinate and the nondeterminate. This tensional synthesis appears throughout the range of man’s life. It appears 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 of connections which have been described between silence and other sorts of intentional performances.

VIII. THE PREEMINENCE IN THE WORLD OF THE DETERMINATE

But my account is not 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.²⁴ 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.²⁵ 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.

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 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 possibilities, 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.²⁶

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 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 presents itself as that which is pliable by men but which plys its own “and so forth” in ways beyond man’s influence. From another standpoint, 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.

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 OF THE WORLD IN THE PLAY OF 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 or meaning. They issue from an interrogative endeavor to bring to presence that which is either latent or absent, to develop the sense of the interplay of the determinate and the nondeterminate.

This interrogation is not, however, an insistent summoning of the world to answer to man as to its master. Interrogation can, as Heidegger and others have 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 frequency 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 performances—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.

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 free-floating. 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 overwhelmed 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 path as one’s own does not have the sense of despoiling the world of its path, though it may be that, as some critics of the spread of technology have claimed, 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 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 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.²⁹

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.³⁰ 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 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 presides over, and so is involved with, this interplay. In fact, I suspect that the examination of some other phenomena, 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 OF THE INTERPRETATION TO THE 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 absence of determination or as derivative upon the more fundamental performances of discourse. But my interpretation shows these understandings of silence to be deficient because, in the final analysis, it is the nondeterminate which is preeminent in man and the determinate which is preeminent in the world.

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 determiner, but rather is the one who wonders, the one in whom nondeterminateness is preeminent even while he performs determining mediations.

Fourth, my ontological interpretation can account for why 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 occurences 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 со-constituents, 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 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.