PREFACE

1. Max Scheler, The Nature of Sympathy, tr. by Peter Heath (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, Ltd. 1954), p. 225.

2. Max Picard, The World of Silence, tr. by Stanley Godman (Chicago: Gateway Books, 1952).

CHAPTER ONE

1. Don Ihde notes this in his Experimental Phenomenology (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1977), pp. 68, 129.

2. John Cage has made something of the same point. See his Silence (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), pp. 22-23. But, as my interpretation of this distinction between silence and noiselessness will make clear, I do not agree with Cage’s view of the implications of this distinction.

3. Susan Sontag, “The Aesthetics of Silence,” in Styles of Radical Will (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966), p. 11. Sontag has many keen insights into silence. But these insights are fragmentary. Her essay, in the final analysis, takes silence seriously but distorts its significance.

4. These aspects of silence foreshadow and depend for their sense on the more fundamental sense of the three levels of personal discourse and their associated silences discussed below, as in the intentional analysis of silence presented in Chapter Three will show. Nevertheless, the fact that intervening silence and fore-and-after silence are readily recognized yet are neither pure nor fundamental requires their description here. Just as an acceptable ontological interpretation of silence will have to account for the fact that silence can be mistaken for a merely negative or derivative phenomenon, so it will also have to account for the fact that the two most readily identified aspects of silence are themselves derivative and impure.

5. See, for example, Stanley Rosen, Nihilism (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1969), p. xiii and passim; and Georges Gusdorf, Speaking, tr. by Paul T. Brockelman (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1965), pp. 88-90.

6. Edmund Husserl, The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness, ed. by Martin Heidegger, tr. by James S. Churchill (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1966), #8, pp. 44-45, and #11, pp. 50-52.

7. This possibility of a variety of stampings is a foreshadowing both of a distinction between tradition, interlocutor-centered discourse, and topic-centered discourse which I will draw in Chapter Two and of an identification of aspects of silence which in Chapter Three I will call personalizing and individualizing silences. Intentional analysis will show these various possible stampings are not mere modifications of and hence dependent upon intervening silence, as this first approximation has it. It is, however, ontologically relevant that they seem to be.

8. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, tr. by Colin Smith (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), p. 180.

9. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs, tr. by Richard C. McCleary (Evan-ston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), p. 89.

10. See in this connection Herman Parret, “Husserl and the Neo-Hum-boldtians on Language,” International Philosophical Quarterly 12, No. 1 (March 1972): 43-68, esp. pp. 50-52.

11. In what follows it will be seen that sometimes it would be more appropriate to call the utterance the background and the silence the figure.

12. See Thomas Clifton, “The Poetics of Musical Silence,” The Musical Quarterly 62, no. 2 (April 1976): 164-167.

13. Anton Baumstark, Comparative Liturgy, revised by Bernard Botte, tr. by F. L. Cross, (London: A. R. Mowbray & Co., 1958), p. 20.

14. See in this connection Rufus M. Jones, “Rethinking Quaker Principlies,” esp. pp. 108-111, and Howard H. Brinton, “The Quaker Doctrine of Inward Peace,” esp. pp. 179-182, in The Pendle Hill Reader, ed. by Herrymon Mauer (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1950).

15. Rudolph Otto, The Idea of the Holy, tr. by J. W. Harvey, 2nd ed. (London: Oxford University Press), pp. 210-214.

16. See Brice Parain, A Metaphysics of Language, tr. by Mary Mayer (Garden City: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1971) and Emmanuel Levinas, “Au delà de l’essence,” Revue de Métaphysique et de morale, July-September 1970, pp. 265-283.

17. The occurrence of the silence of the to-be-said in Oedipus Rex is brilliantly laid bare, in other terminology, by Charles Myers in his “Silence and the Unspoken: A Study of the Modes of Not Speaking” (Ph.D. diss., University of Texas at Austin, 1975). See esp. pp. 136-145. Pindar, as my colleague Nancy Rubin has pointed out to me, was also much aware of his responsibility to poetize within the bounds of propriety established by the gods and what they will permit to be said of them.

18. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, tr. and ed. by Garret Barden and John Cumming (New York: Seabury Press, 1975), p. 16.

19. Ibid., p. 17. See also, concerning le bon sens, pp. 25-26.

20. Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling and Sickness unto Death, tr. by Walter Lowrie (Garden City: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1954), pp. 114-116. For examples of malign silences short of the demoniacal see George Simenon’s The Cat and November.

21. Graham Greene, The Human Factor (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978), pp. 168-169. See also, for a related description, Eugene Ionesco, Fragments of a Journal, tr. by Jean Stewart (New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1968), pp. 41-43.

22. Walker Percy, The Last Gentleman (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1966), p. 341.

23. Herbert Speigelberg has called my attention to the case of soliloquy. I think that this statement holds even there. But I will wait to deal with this case in detail until Chapter Three.

CHAPTER TWO

1. As will appear later in this chapter, both major regions of discourse arise against the backdrop of tradition.

2. I will return to the double-rayed character of the act of discoursing in Chapter Three.

3. For Paul Ricoeur’s statement and understanding of the distinction between world and situation, see his “The Model of the Text: Meaningful Action,” New Literary History 5, no. 1 (Autumn 1973): 91-117; his “Metaphor and the Main Problem of Hermeneutics,” New Literary History 6, no. 1 (Autumn 1974): 95-110; and his Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1976), esp. pp. 25-44. For my animadiversions to some of the consequences he draws from this distinction, see my “Ihde’s Listening and Voice Plus Two Conjectures,” Philosophy Today 22, no. 1 (Spring 1978): 34-42.

4. There is even a sense, as will be seen later, in which the dead are included in the intended audience.

5. A fourth type, soliloquy, presents special problems which are better handled in the context of Chapter Three. Soliloquy could be either inter-locutor-centered or topic-centered, depending upon the orientation of the primary ray. The only thing special about soliloquous discourse which needs to be mentioned here is that in soliloquy no audience distinct from the author is explicitly recognized.

6. Obviously, the detachment from a situation toward a world is correlated to an attachment to that world. The import of the correlation will be dealt with in the course of the ontological interpretation of silence.

7. If, following Thomas Kuhn, Paul Feyerabend, and others, the discourse of scientists ceases to be that of normal science, then clearly their discourse refers to some other world. I am not prepared to try to characterize this new form of discourse among scientists. But, for present purposes, it is sufficient that there can be, and has been, the discourse of normal science. I also acknowledge that there are exceptions in the discourse employed in some sciences to what I say here.

8.See in this connection the interesting remarks of Hannah Arendt in her Between Past and Future (New York: Viking Press, 1968), pp. 265-266.

9. See Gabriel Marcel, The Decline of Wisdom (London: The Harvill Press, 1954), pp. 6-7. It should be acknowledged here that the worlds of science and technology are today, and perhaps are in principle, interlocked. See in this connection Hans Jonas, “Straddling the Boundaries of Theory and Practice” in Recombinant DNA: Science, Ethics, and Politics, ed. by John Richards (New York: Academic Press, 1978), pp. 253-272.

10. See Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society, tr. by Robert K. Merton (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1964), pp. 136-139. I do not wish to take a stand here on Ellul’s assessments. I only cite his descriptions.

11. See Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, tr. by William Lovitt (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), pp. 14-18. See also Michael Zimmerman, “Beyond ‘Humanism’: Heidegger’s Understanding of Technology,” Listening 12, no. 3 (Fall 1977): 74-83 and Edward G. Ballard, Man and Technology (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1978), pp. 83-84.

12. Scientific discourse has sometimes attempted to deal with its world in exclusively quantitative terms. But it has not always done so. My hunch is that quantitative differentiations themselves are conceived differently in scientific discourse than they are in technological discourse. But I will not pursue that matter here. What is important is that it is of the essence of technological discourse to refer to a universe in which there are only quantitative differentiations. For another, related, paradoxical characteristic of the technological orientation, see Ballard, op. cit., p. 137.

13. In calling attention to the paradoxical character of technological discourse, I am not implicitly criticizing it. Other types of discourse are also paradoxical. My intention here remains simply to describe different types of discourse and their related silences.

14. See Joseph Anthony Mazzeo, Renaissance and Seventeenth-Century Studies (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964), pp. 148 and 151-152.

15. Religious discourse, too, tends to take its world as a “world of worlds.” See below, footnote 2 2.

16. For Machiavelli, the necessity of restraint in politics takes several shapes. For example, the highest form of public spirit and the liberty it involves requires a willing, even grateful, acceptance of restraint. Or again, effective political discourse requires the kind of restraint which eschews systematic rigor in favor of flexibility. See Mazzeo, op. cit., pp. 123 and 132-135.

17. For a more extensive discussion of the political, see my “Renovating the Problem of Politics,” The Review of Metaphysics 39 (June 1976): 626-641, and “Politics and Coercion,” Philosophy Today 2 1 (Summer 1977): 103-114.

18. I do not rule out the possibility that something may be appraised as morally neutral or indifferent.

19. On phronesis and morality, see Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, tr. and ed. by Garrett Barden and John Cumming (New York: The Seabury Press, 1975), pp. 23 ff. and 283 ff.

20. In this connection, see the remarks on Machiavelli by Mazzeo, op. cit., pp. 139-144.

21. For present purposes I will consider only the discourse in which a religious community discusses and expresses its beliefs. What I say is not intended to cover the discourse between an individual and God unless it is incorporated, as the Abraham and Isaac story is, into a document used by the community. I am not here dealing with the discourse of mystics as such.

22. Since there can be only one “world of worlds,” there is a tension or competition between politics and religion. That each tends to be a “world of worlds” shows up when the focus of both politics and religion is the same person or relatively small group of persons. Notice, for example, the situation in the multiple small kingdoms in early Ireland. “One of the functions of the ruler was to patronize poets and musicians. The king, originally a holy man, represented and personified his truth [his people] in dealing with the otherworld.” Liam de Paor, “The Christian Triumph: The Golden Age,” in Treasures of Early Irish Art, 1500 B.C. to 1500 A.D., ed. by Polly Cone (Verona: Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, 1977), Ρ. 94. Mutatis mutandis, much the same could be said concerning Hebraic leaders and Christian leaders, whether kings or popes. And religion and politics were hardly divorced in Egypt, Greece, or Rome. But when they are distinguished the tension between them appears. In another context I will try to show that this tension can be reduced only to the detriment of both. I would further suggest that today technology also tends to be a “world of worlds.” Unlike the thrusts of religion and politics in this regard, there is no obvious countervailing thrust to technology. Therein may lie a large measure of its danger.

23. An apparent difference between artistic discourse and political discourse lies in the proximity of the audience to the author. In political discourse it appears that in principle the author must rather quickly get a response from his audience. In artistic discourse it seems that there can be a greater temporal or spatial remoteness between the author’s initiating utterance and the audience’s response.

24. Ricoeur has seen something of this. See his Interpretation Theory, pp. 59-60.

25. See Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, tr. by Wade Baskin (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966), pp. 9-14 and 76-78. There are other respects in which the analogy between langue and tradition breaks down. For example, langue in de Saussure’s sense is a closed, well-defined system. This is not the case with tradition, especially if tradition includes within its extension ways of doing and making as well as ways of saying. Elsewhere I expect to follow the prompting of Calvin O. Schrag and examine this analogy in more detail.

26. For a clear expression of tradition as a binding and joining at play in education, see Hannah Arendt’s essay, “The Crisis in Education,” in her Between Past and Future, esp. pp. 185-196.

CHAPTER THREE

1. J. N. Mohanty’s The Concept of Intentionality (St. Louis: Warren H. Green, 1972), esp. pp. 59-127, is most helpful in ordering the elements of this method. The intentional analysis undertaken here is directly oriented only toward a clarification of the sense of silence. Though it will demonstrate that the very sense of silence as a unitary phenomenon requires that it be given some ontological interpretation, the intentional analysis itself does not fully specify the interpretation. Consequently, I will delay proposing an ontological interpretation until a later chapter.

2. Charles Myers nicely spells out several aspects of such a case. See his “Silence and the Unspoken: A Study of the Modes of Not Speaking” (Ph.D. diss., University of Texas at Austin, 1975).

3. Both worshipers and nonworshipers can, for assorted reasons, challenge the legitimacy of this third sort of case. But claims by worshipers to have experienced this sort of case are not rare. There is no sound reason for rejecting their descriptions of their experiences. See Nancy Jackson, “Meeting Silence: The Religious Uses of Group Silence” (Ph.D. diss., Washington University, St. Louis, 1974), esp. Chapters 9 and 10. What I say in Section II of this chapter will confirm that there is indeed a distinet case of the sort in question here.

4. This is a generalized version of the Platonic question: How can I seek to learn something if I do not already know it?

5. See Edmund Husserl’s account of this shift in his Experience and Judgment, ed. by Ludwig Landgrebe, tr. by James S. Churchill and Karl Ameriks (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), esp. pp. 197-200.

6. I think, but will not try to establish here, that this proposal cannot even handle case I unless the only instances which are allowed to count as instances of case I are those whose elements all belong to a system which is formally deductive.

7. Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, tr. by David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), Appendix III, pp. 328-329.

8. Ibid., p. 330. Bracketed words supplied by Walter Biemel.

9. This “notices nothing else” is an exaggeration. But it is not a troublesome one.

10. For the sense of “whole” in this context see my “Husserl’s Phenomenological Justification of a Universal Rigorous Science,” International Philosophical Quarterly 16, no. I (March 1976): 63-80.

11. I am, of course, using the term “world” here in a different sense from the way I used it in Chapter Two to speak of the scientific world, the moral world, etc. Here I used it to mean the unitary totality of all possible referents of any sort of conscious performances.

12. I wish to distinguish here between a mere human individual which can be called an ego-pole and a full blown person who can be called a self.

13. What I have said in “On Speech and Temporality,” Philosophy Today 18, no. 3 (Fall 1974): 171-180, provides justification for claiming that a self is empty until it actually thematizes another self as a distinct thematizer.

14. I acknowledge that in actual concrete experience there is probably no pure prelinguistic experience. But there is a distinction between perceptual experience and signitive experience which must be admitted in any analysis of the sense of experience. My account here must take note of that distinction.

15. What Hans-Georg Gadamer says about the different sorts of experience of the “Thou” is congruent with my description of the complexity of discourse. See his Truth and Method, tr. and ed. by Garrett Barden and John Cummings (New York: Seabury Press, 1975), PP. 320-325. So is what Robert Sokolowski says about the voice of the judger. See his Husserlian Meditations (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974), pp. 218-221.

16. For a somewhat fuller discussion of Molly’s soliloquy, see my “On Speech and Temporality,” pp. 174-179. I do not, however, now wish to stand by everything I said in that article.

17. See in this connection Don Ihde, Listening and Voice (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1976), pp. 149-157, and my “Ihde’s Listening and Voice Plus Two Conjectures,” Philosophy Today 22, no. I (Spring 1978): 34-42. Writing can, of course, be little more than a copying. When it is, it is a kind of soliloquy.

18. Since I seem to be able to lecture myself, this other self may be my own self. As has frequently been noted, this apparent possibility of lecturing oneself poses interesting puzzles. But this “other myself” cannot in turn address me, the lecturer. See in this connection Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 345.

19. This phenomenon may account for claims made by some artists that they perform only for themselves and their coperformers.

20. The foundation for this anticipation is complex. But it need not be analyzed here. And I am, of course, speaking of synchronic and diachronic lived time, not clock time.

21. There are, of course, cases of fanatical codiscourse. In these cases, whatever shifts to other levels and shapes of discourse occur are at bottom trivial. The fanatical codiscourse has unmitigated supremacy. In this connection see Gabriel Marcel, Man Against Mass Society, tr. by G. S. Fraser (Chicago: Gateway Books, 1967) pp. 133-152.

22. St. Augustine apparently experienced this phenomenon. See Joseph Anthony Mazzeo, Renaissance and Seventeenth-Century Studies (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964), pp. 16-23.

23. One significant dimension of silence that has not been explicitly dealt with in these first three chapters is that which operates in the shuttling between the literal and the metaphorical elements in discourse. This dimension of silence is far from inconsequential. But it occurs within all of the shapes of each of the levels of discourse from at least personalized soliloquy on up. Thus no special clarification of the genesis of the sense of silence would be gained by considering this dimension at this point. I will return to this topic, though, in Chapter Seven.

24. Much of Merleau-Ponty’s work shows a keen awareness of this predicament. How he coped with it is nicely pointed out by John Sallis in his Phenomenology and the Return to Beginnings (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1973).

CHAPTER FOUR

1. Alexander Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, ed. by Allan Bloom, tr. by James H. Nichols, Jr. (New York and London: Basic Books, 1969), p. 35.

2. Ibid., p. 36.

3. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, tr. by A. V. Miller with analysis of the text and foreward by J. N. Findlay (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), p. 66.

4. Ibid., p. 194.

5. Ibid., p. 198.

6. See Charles Taylor, “The Opening Arguments of the Phenomenology in Hegel, ed. by Alaistair Maclntyre (Garden City: Anchor Books, 1972), p. 166.

7. Guy Debrock’s “The Silence of Language in Hegel’s Dialectic” in Cultural Hermeneutics (1973): 285-304, suggests that silence did have positive import for Hegel in the Phenomenology. But this essay is confused and unconvincing.

8. Stanley Rosen, Nihilism (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1969), p. 207. In developing the connection between speech and desire, Rosen is taking up a theme extensively discussed by Kojève, who was Rosen’s teacher. Kojève himself was developing a Hegelian theme.

9. Ibid., p. 209.

10. Ibid., p. 217.

11. Ibid., pp. 217-218.

12. Ibid., pp. 229-230.

13. Ibid., pp. 220-221.

14. I will postpone until Chapter Six my own discussion of the relations holding among desire, discourse, and silence.

15. For a detailed criticism of the notion of absolute knowledge, another name for complete speech, see Gabriel Marcel, “Thoughts on the Idea of Absolute Knowledge and on the Participation of Thought in Being,” in his Philosophical Fragments: 1904-1914, tr. by Lionel A. Blain (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1965), pp. 42-82.

16. See Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, pp. 427-453, esp. pp. 439-443.

17. Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations, tr. by J. N. Findlay (New York: Humanities Press, 1970), 1: 270.

18. Ibid., p. 282. See also pp. 275-281.

19. Ibid., p. 280.

20. Ibid., p. 284.

21. Ibid., pp. 314-315.

22. Ibid., p. 321.

23. Ibid., p. 316.

24. Ibid., p. 327.

25. Ibid., pp. 327-328.

26. James Edie, Speaking and Meaning (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976), p. 150. My emphasis.

27. It should be noticed that, as in the case of the Hegelian complete speech thesis, so here there needs to be a supreme language, one composed of only objective expressions. This is the language of philosophy as science. Robert Sokolowski, borrowing a term from Thomas Prufer, calls this language “Transcendentalese.” See Sokolowski, Husserlian Meditations (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974), pp. 122 and 252-270.

28. Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, tr. by David B. Allison (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), PP. 61-63.

29. Ibid., pp. 6 and 63-69.

30. Ibid., pp. 82-83. Gadamer makes much the same point. He says that the occasionality of human speech, rather than being a casual imperfection of its expressive power, is in fact the logical expression of the living virtuality of speech. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, tr. by Garrett Barden and John Cumming (New York: Seabury Press, 1975), p. 416.

31. Derrida, Speech and Phenomenona, p. 68.

32. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, tr. by Colin Smith (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), pp. 178-179. I do not agree, however, with the sense of Merleau-Ponty’s distinction between authentic speech and second-order expressions. The way he draws that distinction does not and cannot take tradition into account.

33. Ibid., p. 179. My addition in brackets.

34. This same point is made succinctly by Edie, op. cit., pp. 158-160.

35. Ibid., pp. 170-190. I will deal more fully in Chapter Five with Merleau-Ponty’s thought concerning silence.

36. See Husserl, Logical Investigations, 1: 322.

37. I am aware that Derrida’s own doctrine concerning discourse is fundamentally incompatible with my general approach. From this standpoint I am still lodged in what he calls logocentrism. See, for example, his Of Grammatology, tr. by Gayatri C. Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), pp. 10 ff. and passim.

38. In formulating these two theses I rely exclusively upon Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, tr. by Hazel Barnes (New York: Washington Square Press, 1963). The first thesis I will discuss is, I believe, faithful to Sartre’s own position in that book. The second thesis corresponds to a widespread but quite possibly mistaken reading of Being and Nothingness. For my present purposes, though, it is more important to deal with theses which help to delimit the range of acceptable ontological interpretations of the phenomenon of silence than it is to confine myself to scholarly expositions of text. My responsibilities to scholarship are satisfied, I think, by acknowledging on the one hand that I am not dealing with the entire Sartrean corpus and on the other hand that I do not claim to be able to saddle Sartre himself with the second thesis. Nonetheless, it is Sartre who stimulated these considerations. So, with proper hedging, I will call these theses “Sartrean.”

39. Ibid., p. 240. Throughout the discussion of the “Sartrean” theses I will assume that intuition is not equivalent to or identical with perception but rather that it belongs to what Husserl would call the predicative sphere. The denial of my assumptions can easily be shown to lead to indefensible consequences.

40. Ibid.

41. Elsewhere Sartre explicitly espouses at least a special case of the complete speech thesis. He says: “The underlying intent of the Flaubert is to show that at bottom everything can be communicated and that, without being god, any man who has access to the appropriate data can succeed in understanding another man perfectly.” Quoted in Germaine Bree, Camus and Sartre (New York: Dell Publishing Co., 1972), p. 9.

42. I do not have to grasp the specific object to which the instrument or sign is oriented. But to recognize an instrument or sign as such I must see that it is oriented to some determinate object or set of objects which are distinct from it.

43. Again, it is quite difficult to see how intuition of the Sartrean sort can be said to grasp traces qua traces.

44. Sartre, op. cit., p. 475.

45. Ibid., p. 485.

46. Thomas W. Busch offers strong arguments to show that this widespread view of Being and Nothingness is a mistaken view. According to Busch, autonomy sought at the expense of the other is, for Sartre, characteristic only of inauthentic existence. Authentic existence would involve mutual respect. See Busch, “Sartre: The Phenomenological Reduction of Human Relationships,” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 6, no. 1 (January 1975): 55-61; and Busch, “Sartre and the Senses of Alienation,” The Southern Journal of Philosophy 15, no. 2 (Summer 1977): 151-160.

47. This trivial interpretation makes the thesis a kind of special case of the tautologous version of psychological egoism which amounts to saying that “every voluntary action is prompted by a motive of the agent’s own.” For this version of psychological egoism and its refutation, see Joel Feinberg, Reason and Responsibility (Encino: Dickenson Publishing Co., 1971), pp. 491 ff.

48. The primacy assigned to monologue by this thesis fits in well with Sartre’s remarks concerning the connection between intuition and discursive argument. In intuition, there is maximal self-sufficiency of the knower. Though discourse is supposedly only an instrument leading to intuition, in monologic discourse the speaker is as self-sufficient as anyone engaged in discourse can ever be.

49. See in this connection Edmund Husserl, Experience and Judgment, ed. by Ludwig Landgrebe, tr. by James S. Churchill and Karl Ameriks (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), pp. 87-91, and Richard Zaner, The Problem of Embodiment (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1964), pp. 112-116.

50. Sartre, op. cit., pp. 294-297.

51. I understand, of course, that since man is an entity he is on the side of being as well as being the one who encounters being. But there is no dangerous ambiguity here.

CHAPTER FIVE

1. Here again, my concern is with the phenomenon of silence. I make no claim to offer an assessment of the overall work of any of these thinkers.

2. Alex Wayman, “Two Traditions of India—truth and silence,” Philosophy East and West 24 (October 1974): 389-403.

3.See S. N. Ganguly, “Culture, Communication, and Silence,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 29 (1968-69): 182-200.

4. Wayman, op. cit., p. 392.

5. Lik Kuen Tong, “The Meaning of Philosophical Silence: Some Reflections on the Use of Language in Chinese Thought,” Journal of Chinese Philosophy 3 (1976): 170.

6. Ibid., p. 179.

7. Ibid., p. 176. See also Lao Tsu, Tao Te Ching, tr. by Gia-Fu-Feng and Jane English (New York: Vintage Books, 1972), esp. numbers 1, 8, 14, 23, 42, 43, 52, and 56.

8. Lik Kuen Tong, op. cit., pp. 177-179.

9. Wayman, op. cit., pp. 396-400.

10. I explicitly referred to this point in my remarks on Hegel and Rosen in Chapter Four. But some version of this correlation is a commonplace in Western thought.

11. See my “Heidegger, the Spokesman for the Dweller,” The Southern Journal of Philosophy 15, no. 2 (Summer 1977): 189-199.

12. Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling and Sickness unto Death, tr. by Walter Lowrie (Garden City: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1954), pp. 26-29. See also Louis Mackey, “The View from Pisgah: A Reading of Fear and Trembling,” in Kierkegaard, ed. by Josiah Thompson (Garden City: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1972), esp. pp. 394-399.

13. Kierkegaard, op. cit., p. 86. See also pp. 90 and 96-97. What Kierkegaard says in Sickness unto Death about the capital importance of the permanent possibility, though not the actuality, of despair can readily be shown to be a special case of the importance of the permanent possibility of silence.

14. Ibid., p. 82.

15. Ibid., pp. 90-91.

16. Ibid., p. 97.

17. Ibid., p. 128.

18. See in this connection Heidegger’s brief but incisive remarks in What is Called Thinking? tr. by Fred D. Wieck and J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), pp. 15-16.

19. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World, ed. by Claude Lef ort, tr. by John O’Neill (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), pp. 45-46. It must be noted that Merleau-Ponty does not always distinguish clearly between silence and muteness. To make silence fully thematic this distinction must be insisted upon. In my presentation of Merleau-Ponty’s thought here, I believe that I am faithful to his insights without repeating his occasional vagueness.

20. Ibid., p. 46.

21. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “On the Phenomenology of Language,” in Signs, tr. by Richard C. McCleary (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964) p. 97.

22. Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World, pp. 143-144.

23. Ibid., p. 14.

24. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, ed. by Claude Lefort, tr. by Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), pp. 143-146. See also The Prose of the World, p. 14.

25. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, p. 155.

26. It is worth recalling in this connection Ortega y Gasset’s remarks about the contemplative stillness which man needs to remain man. See his Man and People, tr. by Willard R. Trask (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1957), pp. 11-37.

27. See, for example, Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, tr. by Colin Smith (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), pp. 106-132 and 182-190.

28. Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World, p. 144.

29. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, p. 129.

30. Ibid.

31. Ibid., p. 179.

32. Claude Lefort, “Introduction,” in The Visible and the Invisible, pp. xxviii-xxix. Again, it is useful to note that what is called silence by Lefort and Merleau-Ponty is broader than the phenomenon which is the topic of this book. But the phenomenon with which I am concerned is included in that to which Merleau-Ponty’s term refers.

33. I owe this insight to Gabriel Marcel. See his The Mystery of Being, tr. by G. S. Fraser (Chicago: Gateway Books, 1960), 1: 137. Merleau-Ponty himself speaks of a wild world (un monde sauvage) and a wild spirit (un esprit sauvage). See his “The Philosopher and His Shadow,” in Signs, pp. 180-181.

34. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, p. 39. See also his Phenomenology of Perception, p. 184.

35. Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World, p. 37.

36. Ibid., p. 67.

37. Merleau-Ponty, “Introduction,” in Signs, pp. 20-21.

38. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, p. 103.

39. Ibid., pp. 149, 215-217, 225, 236-238 and passim. For a good account of this position, see Atherton C. Lowry, “Merleau-Ponty and Fundamental Ontology,” International Philosophical Quarterly 15, no. 4 (December 1975): 397-409, and his “The Invisible World of Merleau-Ponty,” Philosophy Today 23, no. 4 (1979): 294-303.

40. Merleau-Ponty also notes the structural similarity between perception and speech. See The Visible and the Invisible, pp. 126 and 152-155.

41. Ibid., p. 101. My emphasis.

42. Merleau-Ponty, “The Philosopher and His Shadow,” in Signs, p. 181.

43. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, pp. 103-104.

44. See Lowry, “Merleau-Ponty and Fundamental Ontology,” p. 407.

45. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, p. 102.

46. To the reader familiar with Heideggers work, my heavy debt to him for many parts of this book will long since have been obvious.

47. Werner Marx, “The Word in Another Beginning: Poetic Dwelling and the Role of the Poet,” in On Heidegger and Language, ed. by Joseph J. Kockelmans (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1972), p. 240.

48. Ibid., p. 241. Heidegger also speaks of an ineluctable darkness which is at play in all thinking. “The dark,” he says, “keeps what is light in its presence; what is light belongs to it.” Martin Heidegger, “Principles of Thinking,” in his The Piety of Thinking, tr. with commentary by James G. Hart and John C. Moraldo (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,

49. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, tr. by John Marquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), p. 314.

50. Ibid., p. 318.

51. Ibid., p. 343.

52. Ibid., p. 345.

53. Ibid., p. 348. Heidegger, I think, clarifies these matters in What Is Called Thinking? There he says that thought and speech are essentially bound up with one another. But action is, in important respects, distinct from both thought and speech. See pp. 4 and 16.

54. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 438.

55. Ibid., pp. 369-370.

56. See Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking? pp. 117-118, 132-133, 175, and 232-233.

57. Martin Heidegger, On the Way to Language, tr. by Peter D. Hertz (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), p. 127. On the meaning of Ereignis, see Walter Biemal, Martin Heidegger, tr. by J. L. Metha (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976), pp. 161-163.

58. Heidegger, On the Way to Language, p. 219.

59. Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking? p. 133.

60. Heidegger, On the Way to Language, pp. 71-72. See in this connection Gabriel Marcel, Man Against Mass Society, tr. by G. S. Fraser (Chicago: Gateway Books, 1962), p. 172. It is noteworthy that Heidegger came to regard Being and Time as an assertive investigation.

61. Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking? p. 178.

62. See Werner Marx, Heidegger and the Tradition, tr. by Theodore Kisiel and Murray Greene (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1971), p. 227.

63. Ibid., pp. 202-203 and 250.

64. Ibid., pp. 202-203. Of considerable importance is the fact mentioned but undeveloped by Marx that Heidegger has not thought out the mode in which a state is founded. See p. 227 n.

65. That there are important differences between what Picard says about silence and my account of it Will be obvious to those familiar with his work. There is no point here to a detailed assault on those claims of his which are at variance with mine.

66. Max Picard, The World of Silence, tr. by Stanley Godman (Chicago: Gateway Books, 1952), p. 1.

67. Ibid., p. 3.

68. Ibid, p. 139. In keeping with my large definition of discourse as including music, gesture, and the visual arts, I would make comparable claims about silence and the poetic manifestations in each of these modes.

69. Ibid., p. 141.

70. Ibid., p. 28.

71. See in this connection Hannah Arendt’s remarks on the political importance of Jesus’ injunction to forgive seventy times seven times in her The Human Condition (Garden City: Doubleday Books, 1959), pp. 212-219.

72. Picard, op. cit., p. 29.

73. Ibid., p. 54.

74. Ibid., pp. 25-26.

75. Ibid., p. 219.

76. Ibid., p. 25.

77. Ibid., p. 36.

78. Ibid., pp. 38-39.

79. Ibid., pp. 231-232. My emphasis.

80. See in this connection Heidegger’s comments on Stefan George’s poem “Words” in On the Way to Language, pp. 140-156.

CHAPTER SIX

1. Actional performances do not, primarily, intend fully determinate objects. But silence cuts streams of these performances, just as it cuts other streams.

2. See Robert Sokolowski, Presence and Absence: A Philosophical Investigation of Language and Being (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), p. 12. Also, as Gilbert Ryle has said, it cannot be that all coins are counterfeit. See his Dilemmas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964), pp. 94-95.

3. Throughout this chapter, I use the term “world” as I did in Chapter Three and not as in Chapter Two. Here, as in Chapter Three, there is only one world, the complex totality of all actual possible meanings educible by intentional performances of any sort. The oneness of the world referred to here is the foundation of the possibility that some one or the other of the several worlds distinguished in Chapter Two aim at being the world of worlds. At this point, though, I only wish to insist that, whatever else the world may be, it is not a mere moment of man’s life. It is not completely a concoction brewed by man.

4. Whether primates or some other groups of entities should be counted with men or with the things of the world facing men is of no consequence here.

5. My guess is prompted by the works of Picard and Marcel.

6. See Jacob Klein, Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra, tr. by Eva Brann (Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1968), Chapter 7, esp. pp. 95-98. See also in this connection Edward G. Ballard, Man and Technology (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1978), pp. 12-13.

7. The other two domains of active mediational performances are the domains of action and of fabrication-destruction.

8. Throughout the rest of this work I use the word “nonstabilization” in a technical sense. The “non-” is not fundamentally privative. Sometimes “nonstabilization” does have the privative sense of “destabilization.” But at other times it simply means ‘without-stabilization.’ I take both destabilization and leaving-without-stabilization to be particular modes of the more fundamental nonstabilization. For similar reasons, I have used “nondeterminateness,” rather than “indeterminateness.” My usage will occasionally jar. I hope that it does not do so unnecessarily.

9. Later in this chapter I will show that stabilization and nonstabilization are also found in performances which are not, properly speaking, mediational.

10. It is not necessary here to spell out in detail the nondeterminate aspects of discourse. A few examples will suffice.

11. It would be interesting to analyze the enterprise of information processing in terms of these three domains of human mediation and then to assess in the light of this analysis the claims made about or based upon this process.

12. An example of this capacity of signitive performances to prolong the efficacy of all types of mediation is the Bible. Think, for example, of the influence of the temple in Jerusalem long after its physical destruction.

13. The practicing historian, of course, deals with both history and tradition. An important part of his work is to distinguish one from the other. He will also deal with factors which are in no way attributable to mediational performances, for example, droughts and earthquakes. Though natural occurrences, history, and tradition are inseparable and are all grist for the practicing historian, a proper assessment of his work requires that these three elements be carefully distinguished from one another.

14. See Pietro Pucci, Hesiod and the Language of Poetry (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1977), pp. 22-29, and n. 44, p. 42.

15. Martin Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking? tr. by Fred D. Wieck and J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), p. 141.

16. Pucci, op. cit., pp. 8-16.

17. See Edmund Husserl, Experience and Judgment, ed. by Ludwig Landgrebe, tr. by James S. Churchill and Karl Ameriks (Evanston: North-western University Press, 1973), pp. 71-86 and 103-106.

18. Robert Sokolowski, “Picturing,” The Review of Metaphysics 31 no. 1 (September 1977): 20.

19. See Ibid., pp. 3-28.

20. For purposes of my ontological interpretation of silence, I happily do not have to ask whether or to what extent perception, imagination, and picturing are themselves mediating performances. Even if they are, they are sufficiently different from signitive, actional, and fabricational performances that my argument is not adversely affected.

21. Soren Kierkegaard, in Sickness unto Death, apparently recognized that human freedom and finitude went hand in hand. See Fear and Trembling and Sickness unto Death, tr. by Walter Lowrie (Garden City: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1954), PP. 162-172.

22. Terminal silence, when interpreted, functions in a way much like that ascribed by others, for example, Sartre and some theologians, to what has been called the fundamental project or the fundamental option.

23. My position here owes much to Heidegger. See in this connection my “Heidegger, Spokesman for the Dweller,” The Southern Journal of Philosophy 15, no. 2 (Summer 1977): 189-199.

24. Higher order performances, of course, can take lower order performances as their referent or topic. And each performance does refer nonthematically and horizonally to itself as well as to that which is its focal topic.

25. See in this connection Husserl, Experience and Judgment pp. 87-101.

26. See in this connection Robert Sokolowski’s excellent study Presence and Absence: A Philosophical Investigation of Language and Being.

27. I do not speak of the world as free because the term “freedom” has connotations which are inappropriate for describing the world.

28. I am not idly playing with the words “ply” and “reply.” Etymologically, “ply” has the sense of folding or pleating, which tends to the sense of forming or performing, even performing diligently. To reply is to fold again, to fold back, to form again, which leads to the sense of responding, even responding explicitly, to that which has already set the terms of the interchange. Obviously, I have been influenced here by Heidegger.

29. See Robert Sokolowski, Husserlian Mediations (Evanston: North-western University Press, 1974), PP. 223-225.

30. See Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, tr. by Wade Baskin (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966), pp. 77-78.

CHAPTER SEVEN

1. See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, ed. by Claude Lefort, tr. by Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), pp. 125-126, 145-146, 154-155, 179 and passim. Also see his Phenomenology of Perception, tr. by Colin Smith (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), pp. 100-102.

2. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, pp. 101, 103 and passim.

3. There is a disagreement between Merleau-Ponty and me concerning the status of perception. I think that it is misleading to treat perception as an active human performance like other active performances such as discourse and action. He would make perception, like discourse, emerge from a primordial silence. For me, silence cuts perception and opens the way for signitive performances. It is important to note this disagreement here. But this is not the place to develop the details of my argument against Merleau-Ponty’s position.

4. My interpretation accommodates Merleau-Ponty’s claim that it is silence which reveals the unity of a man’s perceptual, discursive, and actional performances. But the disagreement mentioned in the previous note is not attenuated. I understand the place of the phenomenon of silence in this integration in a different way than he does.

5. Atherton Lowry, “The Invisible World of Merleau-Ponty,” Philosophy Today 23, no. 4 (1979): 294-303.

6. There is no necessity for the interlocutors to have a highly developed sense of themselves as interlocutors for them to engage in interlocutorcentered discourse. It may well be that topic-centered discourse requires greater reflective self awareness than does interlocutor-centered discourse. But that question is tangential to what is at issue here.

7. James Edie notes this, though in a less general way, in his Speech and Meaning (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976), p. 158.

8. I am happy that there is no need here for me to specify further the basic characteristics of philosophical discourse.

9. For a different set of considerations leading to the same conclusions, see Heidegger, The End of Philosophy, tr. by Joan Stanbaugh (New York: Harper and Row, 1973). See also Thomas Sheehan, “After Philosophy: A Protreptic,” Philosophy Today 22, no. 3 (Fall 1978): 239-243.

10. See Edie, op. cit., p. 160.

11. As any dictionary shows, many words, for example, verbs like “strike,” “run,” and “go,” have several literal meanings. So the literal is not equivalent to the univocal.

12. Gaston Bachelard’s account of how scientific theories have historically been framed in a mixture of terms belonging to different semantic contexts illustrates an important facet of this general position. See his The Philosophy of No, tr. by G. C. Waterston (New York: Orion Press, 1968).

13. My position here is not so radical as is Heidegger’s. See Ronald Bruzina’s excellent “Heidegger on the Metaphor and Philosophy,” in Heidegger and Modern Philosophy, ed. by Michael Murray (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), pp. 184-200.

14. Paul Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1976), p. 52.