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 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.

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 expression 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 preeminences, 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, are 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 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 non-determinate 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 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.

II. ACCOUNTING FOR APPRECIATIONS OF 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 world. This complex set of relations is readily interpretable as a manifestation of the complex interplay of the determinateness and non-determinateness 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 discourse 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 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.¹ 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.² 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 determinate 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 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.³

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, more than in any other type of performance, the preeminence of the nondeterminate is expressed.⁴

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 appear. But he also speaks of that invisible Logos which is foundational for and lies behind every expression.⁵ It is not clear whether Merleau-Ponty understand Logos 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 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 Merleau-Ponty’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 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 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 allthe 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 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 nondeterminateness 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 furnished by the phenomenon of silence and an appropriate ontological interpretation of silence permits one to say only that such claims are intelligible and not devoid of all plausibility. But even to be able to say that much provides support for my interpretation. It shows that my interpretation can account in a nonreductionistic way for both the possibility and the limitations of performances of faith, disbelief, defiance, 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.

III. 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 topic-centered 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 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 man and the world, tradition and new discourses are mutually necessary for the occurrence of the other.

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.⁶ 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 calls man to respond to it. When he engages in topic-centered discourse, man emphasizes that his response 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.⁷ 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 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 I have described several presently actual types of topic-centered 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 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 my interpretation, which is itself admittedly a piece of philosophical discourse, philosophical discourse does not stand in any kind of hierarchical relationship to other types of topic-centered discourse.⁸ 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 discourse, 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.⁹

IV. THE ISSUE OF THE LITERAL AND THE 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 (langue). Each mediation, though, for reasons spelled out in Chapter Six, is necessarily open to further mediations. 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 nondeterminate. 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 these is founded upon and is developed from antecedent discourse which more proximately mediates man’s encounter with the world.¹⁰

The more proximate discursive mediations are those which are usually designated as either literal or metaphorical discourse.¹¹ 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.¹²

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.¹³

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.¹⁴ 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 discourse, he can also press the determinate mediations which he has either received or introduced in the direction 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.

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 fruitful 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.