I. SILENCE IN EASTERN THOUGHT

Two positions concerning silence which are found in Eastern thought are particularly pertinent to the formulation of an adequate ontological interpretation of silence. These positions, though they are not mutually consistent in all respects, point to a dimension of silence that has not been explicitly dealt with thus far, namely, silence as implicated in an entire way of life, including action as well as thought and discourse.

Alex Wayman has called attention to two traditions in India concerning the relation between truth or saying and silence. One tradition gives preeminence to truth, the other to silence. Both of these traditions are found within both Buddhism and Hinduism.² What is of importance for present purposes, however, is not the disagreement between these traditions but some of the generally accepted elements found in both. First, a muni is a person vowed to silence. But he is also “the capable one,” the independent person, the one who achieves enlightenment without depending upon a teacher. He is the one whose acts of body, speech, and mind are muted. Indeed, the Sanskrit word “SHANTAM,” means more than the English “silence.” It also means peace, quiet, restfulness, etc., and has connotations of considerable solemnity. In short, silence pervades the person of its practitioner and provides him with the basis for both security and freedom in all dimensions of his life.³

Further, at least within Buddhism, several forms of the Buddha’s own silence are distinguished: his ascetic or purifying silence, the silence after his enlightenment in which he withheld his doctrine from the people at large, and the selective silence he sometimes observed concerning questions about the ultimates. And Buddhas were said to help certain advanced disciples with a kind of silent power.⁴ Silence, then, is not only ingredient in all the dimensions of an enlightened person’s individual life but also lies at the foundation of his capacity to lead others, to exercise influence within the community.

Quite similar insights into the place of silence are found in both Taoism and Confusianism. There, speech and silence are correlative concepts. Without silence there is no speech and without at least the possibility of speech there is no silence. One can say that

Speech that would be truthful must be authentic speech, the cautious speech born of integrity and sincerity of heart. Sincere speech is tactical. It requires the use of the right word at the right time to the right person about the right topic for the right motive. Authentic speech is speech properly procured from silence or, in other words, speech which observes the principle of limitation separating speech from silence.

Discourse, thought, and action are ultimately inseparable in Chinese philosophy.⁶ The connection between the distinctions between speech and silence on the one hand and between speech and action on the other is indissoluble. “Indeed, the two distinctions are almost identical. For the embodiment of silence is action. Speech stems from the silence of action and returns to the silence of action. . . . the Truth of Tao is not just to be thought and said, but, above all, to be done and enacted.”⁷

The apex of authentic speech is absolutely spontaneous discourse. Here speech and silence are united. What is fundamentally said and heard is not human words but rather the infinite silence which is the voice and word of Tao. In this spontaneous discourse, authentic speech is one with authentic silence. This discourse is the most efficacious of human achievements, for here man is at one with the all-creative Tao.⁸

Rather than dwelling upon the explicit mystical dimension of these themes drawn from Eastern thought, the focus here is upon the connection to which they point between silence and action. Action springs from desire, and the highest action from the highest desire, whether this be conceived as the noblest desire or as the transcendence of desire.⁹ In any case, some form of correlation between speech on the one hand and action and desire on the other hand is widely recognized.¹⁰ What the Eastern traditions add is the connection between silence and action or desire. Silence, in these traditions, is not merely intelligible. It is also efficacious. Within these traditions, the efficacy of silence is often described in a way that bears striking similarities to the efficacy Heidegger ascribes to authentic dwelling and building.¹¹ But one need not limit his considerations only to benign efficacy. If silence is efficacious, then it is efficacious in all of its manifestations, some of which may be malign.

Nonetheless, Eastern thought does show that an adequate ontological interpretation of the phenomenon of silence must take up the question of its connection with action as well as with discourse. This brief excursus into Eastern thought yields two substantial, closely related insights into this question. First, there is no fundamental antithesis among silence, discourse, and action. Second, there is no fundamental antithesis between intelligibility or knowing and efficacy or doing.

These insights, if taken alone, would not be sufficient for developing an acceptable ontological interpretation of silence. But they do corroborate in important ways the reflections on silence of Kierkegaard, Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, and Picard. It is to these latter thinkers that I now turn.

II. SILENCE AND KIERKEGAARD’S KNIGHT OF FAITH

The task which Kierkegaard, as John of Silence, sets himself in Fear and Trembling is to reflect on just what is involved in acknowledging Abraham as the father of faith. This requires John to meditate on the story of Abraham and Isaac. To get the meditation underway, John cannot just launch into the topic. He must attune himself to hear that which he seeks to understand.¹² The attuning here consists of four imagined scenes, each of which fails to reach the biblical account John wants to hear. But at the same time, these four attempts are not useless. Somehow they are necessary initial stabs. Their usefulness, however, would evaporate if any of them were to be taken as satisfactory simply because it satisfied requirements which John himself established. They remain useful only insofar as they are subject to the requirements of the biblical text. Only as so subjected can they play a role in John’s effort to hear what the Abraham story has to say.

This phenomenon of tuning or attuning points toward two related aspects of the connection between discourse and silence. First, without the discursive initiative of men, without their risk-laden proposings, nothing could be heard or understood aright. Simply to await passively an overwhelming revelation in which all is given without risk is to wait in vain. But second, to propose, to insist upon making one’s discursive initiative decisive, is to destroy any chance that his initiative will succeed in understanding aright that which is presented for understanding. All useful tuning initiative is a response which cannot with impunity be more than preparatory. It is prompted by something which claims one’s attention, a tune to be properly played. Man’s reply is an effort to accommodate, not the tune to himself, but himself to the tune.

But not all discourse is preparatory. There is attuned discourse. Yet even here, the discourse remains a response. It can never be complete, nor even definitive in some limited specified respect. Kierkegaard makes this clear in his discussion of the silence of the “well-attuned” man, the knight of faith.

Kierkegaard says that whereas ethics requires discourse, requires revelation, the knight of faith cannot make himself intelligible to anyone, not even to himself. The knight of faith “knows that it is refreshing to become intelligible to oneself in the universal so that he understands it and so that every individual who understands him understands through him in turn the universal, and both rejoice in the security of the universal.”¹³ But this knight also knows that one knight of faith can never help another to become such a knight. If one is to become a knight of faith, he must abandon both guidance from other men and interest in guiding them. As Kierkegaard says: “In these regions, partnership is unthinkable.”¹⁴ Even so, the knight of faith, for example, Abraham, is efficacious in his silence as a witness.¹⁵

The silence involved here is not an unambiguous silence. Since a man cannot know that he is a knight of faith and that his distance from the articulateness of the universal, the ethical, is defensible, silence is not without both its conceptual and its emotional ambiguity. It is always experienced as risky. Secrecy and silence are really what make a man great because they are the characteristics of inwardness. But this greatness may be either demoniacal or divine. When one would surpass the tragic hero, who stands at the apex of ethical life, then one encounters the paradox that silence is both the divine and the demoniacal. “Silence is the snare of the demon, and the more one keeps silent, the more terrifying the demon becomes; but silence is also the mutual understanding between the Deity and the individual.”¹⁶

And yet, Abraham, the figure par excellence of man related to the divine, the father of faith, does have a last word. He does not keep totally silent. Abraham could not explain to himself, to Isaac, or to anyone else why he was going to kill Isaac. It is precisely his knighthood in faith which requires silence of him. To try to give an account of what he planned to do would have been to fall back to a level below that of the tragic hero, would have been to yield to temptation. And yet, he does utter a last word. In response to Isaac’s question, Abraham says: “God will provide Himself the lamb for the burnt offering, my Son.” Here, Kierkegaard says, Abraham’s reply is in the form of irony. “First and foremost, he [Abraham] does not say anything.... it is always irony when I say something and do not say anything.... he is speaking no untruth, but neither is he saying anything, for he speaks a foreign language.”¹⁷

Kierkegaard’s discussion of the Abraham story points to an element of the connection between silence and discourse which goes beyond his own explicit claims. What happens when Abraham breaks into words, even though he does not, at least according to Kierkegaard, say anything? First, the silence is illuminated as a silence which, for the speaker, is indeed terminal. What is said, in effect, does not span the silence but rather is refracted by it. The saying, in its poverty, clarifies the silence whence it issues. What distinguishes this case from others in which discourse clarifies silence is that here the clarification of silence is achieved precisely by the nondeterminateness of the discourse instead of by its determinateness. That is, in the present case, it is the discourse which is maximally nondeterminate, and the silence which gains some specification, namely, its character of being terminal.

Second, the discourse is not, Kierkegaard not withstanding, radically empty. Rather, it is strange. Its strangeness lies at least in part in the fact that what is said has no antecedents whence it follows and no consequences following from it. The saying stands alone. No “and so forth” is associated with discourse of this sort. The kind of silence which is at play here prohibits discourse issuing from it from having antecedents or consequences belonging to its same level. This silence, a terminal silence, shows the strangeness of the saying even to its author. In this respect silence clarifies its own character while at the same time keeping what is said maximally nondeterminate.

Third, whatever clarification it gains through the strange discourse issuing from it, terminal silence cannot be made fully transparent. Whatever is said, neither the author nor the audience can be sure whether this silence is divine or demonical. That ambiguity is beyond resolution. What is said, by its own nondeterminacy, reveals this irrecusable ambiguity. Take two biblical sayings: Abraham’s “God will provide Himself the lamb for the burnt offering, my son,” and Jesus’ “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Is the silence whence these issue a silence of despair, hope, presumption, desparation, madness, or something else? The strangeness of these sayings clarifies the silence whence they come but cannot render that silence fully determinate.

These three points show that the connection between discourse and silence is not always to be thought of either as the connection between discourse as the determinate element and silence as the nondeterminate element or as the connection between discourse as revealing and silence as concealing. Some silences reveal, others conceal. Some silences stand to discourse as the nondeterminate to the determinate, others as the determinate to the nondeterminate. If both dimensions of all our signitive performances, namely, discourse and silence, sometimes appear as determinate and sometimes as nondeterminate, then what does this show about the signified to which the signitive performances are ultimately oriented? This issue is one which an acceptable ontological interpretation of silence must address.

Further, the distinction between attuned discourse and attuning discourse which Kierkegaard employs here raises questions about the several levels and shapes of discourse which were distinguished in the intentional analysis of silence. Is attunement progressive as one moves from shape to shape? Does this discourse become attuned at some particular point in this progression? If so, then some worthwhile conclusions about education as attuning could be derived.¹⁸ Though a detailed consideration of this question falls outside the scope of this work, I will return briefly to this point in the next chapter.

What comes to light through this reflection on Fear and Trembling is the irreducible polyvalency and ambiguity both of discourse and silence and of the intrinsic connection between them. The scope and character of this ambiguity can be made more explicit through a consideration of Merleau-Ponty’s reflection on speech and its relation to silence.

III. MERLEAU-PONTY’S ELUCIDATION OF SILENCE

In the course of his subtle, detailed, and precise reflections on speech and language, Merleau-Ponty has revealed an acute awareness of the pervasive and crucial involvement of silence in discourse. I will not attempt here to give a full account of the importance of his rich description of the connections between silence and discourse. But the present task of developing an appropriate ontological interpretation of the phenomenon of silence is substantially furthered by following several of the leads which his works furnish.

Merleau-Ponty says:

In a footnote, Merleau-Ponty adds: “One does not know what one is saying, one knows after one has said it.”²⁰ This constant conjunction of speech and silence manifests important features of the dialogical situation and of the world which is signified in discourse.

In the experience of dialogue, the participants reach each other’s meanings. Here there is no fundamental, essential rivalry for preeminence. Rather, each recognizes his own activity in hearing just as much as in speaking. Both speaking and hearing are understood, in dialogue, to be a common effort to bring to light something that makes sense. In fact, as Merleau-Ponty says, “to the extent that I understand, I no longer know who is speaking and who is listening.”²¹ Further, the participants in dialogue experience this common effort as one which they have not, strictly speaking, initiated. Dialogue, insofar as it is carried on in an already established language and refers to a world which is older than the present dialogue, is recognized as a continuation of an effort that has long been under way.²²

Much the same can be said for reading and writing. Both of these presuppose the experience of spoken dialogue. And again, in principle, there is no struggle for supremacy by either the reader or the author. Their enterprise is a common one. The activity of the reader requires the activity of the writer and vice versa. The entire enterprise of either speaking or writing is senseless without an audience. The enterprise of reading and listening is likewise senseless without an author, taken precisely as an author.²³

But more than some special feature of dialogue is at stake here. The intertwining of the participants in dialogue is, on the one hand, an elaboration of the perceptual intertwining which reveals to each of us that not only do we see and touch but that we are also visible and tangible for others. And on the other hand, dialogue is intertwined with the thought of each participant. Their thoughts are not, of course, their stable property, a finished product to which they allude by means of speech. Rather, the thought of each makes possible and is made possible by dialogue and by the perceptual domain with which dialogue is continuous.²⁴

Discourse, thought, and perception, then, are not autonomous domains. They mutually implicate one another. Our access to any of them involves all of them. Each of these is, to be sure, distinct from the others. But the possibility of the transition from one to the other arises from what Merleau-Ponty calls the phenomenon of reversibility, the phenomenon of my being so inserted into the world that I am both seer and seen, hearer of my own and others’ speech, learner of my own and others’ thoughts. This same phenomenon of reversibility intertwines these three dimensions one with the others. In Merleau-Ponty’s words:

The intentional analysis of silence showed how performances of silence were needed to spread out discourse, to make possible new levels and shapes of discourse. If Merleau-Ponty is correct in his claim that discourse, perception, and thought are inextricably intertwined, then it is pertinent to ask whether both perception and thought are also spread out by some performances similar to silence. The initial useful suggestion which can be made is that the several ways in which silence appears in conjunction with discourse is analogous, on the one hand, with the multiple ways in which perception can be focused and, on the other hand, with the several modes of thinking in which a person can engage. In perception, one can concentrate on touch, or on sight, or on combinations of senses, etc. In thought, one can muse, plan, construct theories, calculate, etc.

The first suggestion points toward a second, namely, the suggestion that silence is a manifestation of human freedom as are its analogues in perception and thought. That is, however world-bound I am, I am not simply subjected to the world. Rather, the world is in a kind of dialogue with me. For this dialogue to proceed I must both speak and listen. The silence ingredient in both speaking and listening is necessary for the preservation of my role as active participant in this dialogue.²⁶ Similarly, for lively perception there must be shifts of focus which requires perceptual “silencings” or “cuttings,” and for lively thought I must vary what I think about and how I relate the elements of thought. A “cutting” is required for these variations to occur.

These two suggestions can be amplified if they are conjoined to Merleau-Ponty’s frequent claim that both perception and speech are action.²⁷ Though it is, I think, an exaggeration to say that speech and perception are action, lively action, like lively speech, perception, and thought, requires cuts as well as achievings. If this is so, then the fact that the signitive domain is constituted by silence as well as discourse is not a “defect.” Every domain of distinctively human performances is analogously constituted of a “silent” element and a “discursive” or achieving element.

Now perception, signification, thought, and action, together with their fundamental interconnections, are essential characteristics which constitute man. Man is that totality whose essential moments are perception, signification, thought, and action. It is from this totality that the very being of man is to be interpreted. Man is not all of a piece. He is that being who is simultaneously both free and ineluctably world bound. His very being is to be not the world nor a piece thereof. Rather it is to be a response to the world. Man himself, then, is constituted both by a cut and by a determinate positive element. This twofold constitution is at the root of his essential ambiguity. He is, as all of his perception, signification, thought, and action show, a determinate, finite “opening upon—response to” the world.

The character of this response can be made more explicit by developing a second lead furnished by Merleau-Ponty. He says:

In The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty goes on to say that the interrogative is not derived from the indicative and the positive. It is neither a form of negation nor of affirmation. Rather, the interrogative is a fundamental manner of aiming at something which cannot be surpassed by any statement or “answer.” Perhaps, he says, this interrogative, this “question-knowing,” is “the proper mode of our relationship with Being, as though it were the mute or reticent interlocutor of our questions.”²⁹ If so, then Being is already silently at play in all of our particular affirmations, negations, and even in particular questions which prepare for specific answers. Philosophy’s task, he says, is to disclose this nonposited Being, for “philosophy is the reconversion of silence and speech into one another.³⁰

Therefore, originary and fundamental silence is not the contrary of language.³¹ Rather than being that which thwarts language, silence is that which opens the way for language’s potency. Speech, at least philosophical speech, must hear speech and silence together, for speech is born from silence and seeks its conclusion in silence. This is the case because there is, in principle, an exchange between experience and language. Neither is closed within itself.³²

It is worth pausing here to consider just what is involved in interrogation. First, interrogation presupposes that previous discourse is, in at least some respects, unfinished. Second, interrogation in its routine, more obvious occurrences, involves the positing of some distinguishable entities or elements. This is what is recognized in the truism that the question predelineates the answer. Third, and less obviously, the interrogation is itself a response to something which has been encountered as not fully transparent to the interrogator. Thus, not only the answer but the question itself has the character of a response. Now the very notion of response implies that the poles of this relation, namely Being and man, are close to one another but do not fully coincide. In fact, the response manifests the poles as both distinct and as in proximity to one another. Fourth, if discourse is to remain response, it can never claim completeness for itself. Silence, then, both at the origin and at the termination of specific discourse is required for discourse to manifest itself as a response. And only as response to that which is already there does discourse make sense. Silence, then, is required for the intelligibility both of what is said in discourse and of discourse itself as discourse. Fifth, interrogation as response involves initiative on the part of the interrogator but also his dependence upon or belonging to that to which he responds. Sixth, some interrogation, that which is considered especially important because it initiates new discourse, amounts to an interruption of the “and so forth” of some previously prevailing stream of discourse.

These features of what Merleau-Ponty calls philosophical interrogation are features which my intentional analysis has shown belong to silence. The fundamental interrogation, that which lies beyond specifie questions, affirmations, and denials, is itself constituted by both speech and silence.

The thrust of Merleau-Ponty’s thought, then, issues in the view that man as a totality is to be understood as that being who responds to the world interrogatorily. Whether he is engaged in perception, thought, speech, or action, he is, at bottom, interrogating the world. And interrogation embraces both silence and speech.

At this point, let me propose an amendment to Merleau-Ponty’s account of fundamental interrogation. Though it is an amendment which his position can readily accommodate, it is nontrivial. I suggest that interrogation, in those of its manifestations which inaugurate new discourse, is essentially bound up with what can be called the exclamatory.³³ The exclamatory springs from being confronted with the surprising, the intruding. The exclamatory qua exclamatory does not posit or achieve. It acknowledges. It is that which the ancients called wonder. The exclamatory, like interrogation, involves both silence and speech. But the speech here is primitive, newborn, whereas in questioning, speech has matured. In the exclamatory, man’s awe and finitude in the face of the world makes its first appearance. He does not yet initiate an inquiry. Rather, he hears a call, a call which makes response meaningful. This hearing exclamation is already responsive but does not yet make its own response.

I do not claim that the exclamatory is more fundamental than the interrogatory. Rather, it appears that the philosophical interrogative, the fundamental interrogative, which Merleau-Ponty says is perhaps the proper and fundamental mode of our relationship with Being, is itself exclamatory.

The amendment I propose makes even clearer just how fully all of the features of the phenomenon of silence uncovered in its intentional analysis, especially those of finitude and awe, show up in what Merleau-Ponty calls fundamental interrogation. The ontological implication of this amendment is that man’s interrogation of the world responds to promptings issuing from the world.

Now if man is not to be fundamentally absurd—and what nonhypothetical evidence could establish his absurdity?—then the world must be such that man, the finite opening, is an appropriate opening upon it. That is, man’s response to the world must be, at bottom, a response which the world itself, by its call to man, legitimizes. The promptings issuing from the world to which man responds in exclamatory interrogation must be promptings which make the world accessible. This accessibility, of course, does not mean that man reaches an exhaustive truth. But it does mean that, when he perceives, signifies, thinks, or acts, he is not engaged in fundamental and irrecusable folly.

A third set of considerations introduced by Merleau-Ponty’s discussions of speech and silence brings to light some of the characteristics which the world must have if man’s exclamatory—interrogative response is to be appropriate and senseful. If reflection, and the discourse which gives expression to reflection, is not to terminate in falsity, reflection must follow the path by which the world has disclosed itself to us in perception. Instead of surveying the world, reflection must immerse itself in the world. Reflection, if it is to issue in truth,

The world itself calls for reflection and discourse. It gives itself as that which is to be brought to articulation. But its call is not for us to achieve coincidence with it. We respond to its call, and arouse rejerences in it, only by interrogating it.

For interrogation to continue to occur, complete articulation or perfect expression cannot have been achieved. This state of affairs does not mean, though, that continued interrogation is a sign of weakness on our part. It rather is the appropriate response to the way the world shows itself. As Merleau-Ponty says, the things we perceive would not become present and evident to us unless they were inexhaustible, unless they were never given completely. They would not have the taste of permanency which we perceive in them unless they were experienced as being available for inspection throughout an unending span of time.³⁵ What Merleau-Ponty explicitly says of the painter holds good for every perceiver:

The world, then, and its things are never simply present. They are both present and absent. In Merleau-Ponty’s words:

In both of these dimensions, presence and absence, the world and its things call for interrogation. This interrogation is, in principle, interminable because the call is interminable. There is no simple relativism here however. The call can be a call to say the same as that which has been said before. But the saving is truthful only if it responds to the present call and says what the present call means to say.

Interrogation, as I have said, is jointly constituted by discourse and silence. Since this is so, and since the world is such that it calls for exclamatory interrogation as the foundational mode of human responsiveness to that call, and if the being of the world is available to man for truthful articulation, then the being of the world must be such that both constitutent features of interrogation, namely, discourse and silence, are required for accessibility to the world’s being. The world itself must exist in the interrogative mode, that is, as an open field for inquiry.³⁸

Merleau-Ponty goes on in his ontology to make the intersection of man and world more explicit. According to his ontology, both the being of man and the being of the world are constituted by both positivity and negativity. Each of these, as the reverse of the other, encroaches on the other. Similarly, man and world encroach upon each other. The negative is not the denial of the positive, but rather its depth. In both the being of man and in that of the world, there a paradoxical identity in difference, an identity, in his terms, of the visible and the invisible. Being simultaneously, in man, in the world, and in their intersection, reveals and conceals.³⁹

Merleau-Ponty, of course, couches his formulation of ontology in terms of the flesh and perception. But since man himself is constituted by both a positive and a negative element, then distinctively human performances will all similarly manifest these two elements. The signitive domain, too, is constituted by both positivity and negativity.⁴⁰

Thus far, the consideration of Merleau-Ponty’s thought has brought to the fore several elements of capital importance for developing an appropriate ontological interpretation of the phenomenon of silence. First, the active performance of silence, by virtue of the interconnections obtaining among the fundamental human domains of perceptual, signitive, and actional performances, brings to light important features of man’s kind of being. All of his human performances are, from the outset, social in character. All of his performances are both free and world bound. Second, Merleau-Ponty’s reflections upon interrogation open the way for appreciating just what is meant by the claim that the being of the world itself can only appear to man as both present and absent, as a field for inquiry. The world itself, like man, is not all of a piece. These characteristics of both the being of man and the being of the world he encounters point toward an ontology which maintains that Being itself is not all of a piece but rather is that whose only appropriate description must be in terms of poles in tension.

But Merleau-Ponty’s thought does not yield merely the formal description of man and world as poles in tension. He proposes a concrete interpretation of their intertwining. He says, as I mentioned above, that speech is woven from the thread of silence, that silence, as the fundamental interrogative, is the ground of speech which precedes speech and from which speech stands forth. Something comparable holds for perception and thought. I see a tree against the ground of the visible. I think a connection between Napoleon and Julius Caesar against the ground of the intelligible. Man then is, prior to his determinate constitutive performances, primordially an opening onto the world. This world onto which he opens is and remains no determinate thing, not even a determinate field. It is a horizon. All signification aims “at a universe of brute being and of coexistence, toward which we were already thrown when we spoke and thought.”⁴¹ This universe in principle cannot be either objectified or reflectively approximated through ideal references because it is a latent or dissimulated horizon.

If silence, as the fundamental interrogative, is the ground of speech which precedes speech as well as accompanies it, and if the world as horizon is the ground which precedes as well as accompanies the appearance of objects, then neither discourse and silence nor thing and horizon are, at bottom, simply formally coeval poles in tension. Rather, silence and world are, respectively, the insurpassable foundations for discourse and other types of human performances and for objects of human performances. Silence is that on which all discourse depends for its very being as discourse. World is that upon which every thing and event depends for its very being as object.

Merleau-Ponty says:

One is entitled then to conclude that the intertwining of foundational silence and world is this irrelative to which all else is relative. The fact that neither silence nor world could appear as what they are except through the emergence of discourse and objects is, to be sure, not be to forgotten. But this fact in no way detracts from their irrelative status.

A man’s senses, his body, his capacity to speak and understand speech are all dimensions to which he can refer the world, are all measures for the world. But they are not ways for him to make the world immanent in himself or to bring the world into adequation with himself. Rather, in his fundamental openness to the world, man is one sole continuous question. As men, we are

In short, on Merleau-Ponty’s account, man as interrogator and world as horizon jointly constitute the background whence specific performances and objects arise. Both man and world are constituted by dimensions of both positivity and negativity.

But just how is the world related to man? Merleau-Ponty gives no clear account. For the most part, Merleau-Ponty takes man to be at least coeval with the world, if not indeed to have a certain primacy over the world. The few occasions on which he speaks of the being of the world as primary are left undeveloped.⁴⁴ Further, though quite clearly man as conscious is fundamentally distinct from the world, Merleau-Ponty provides no account of the ontological foundation for man’s distinctiveness.

The amendment which I proposed to Merleau-Ponty’s claim concerning the basic mode of man’s relationship to the world, namely, that it is not merely the interrogative, but rather is the exclamatory interrogative, provides a clue to a more satisfactory account of how man is distinct from the world and of how he is most basically related to it. If the exclamatory dimension of man’s relation to the world endures through time and is not absurd, then that fact is better accounted for by interpreting the world as an at least partially determinate theme rather than as a thoroughly nondeterminate horizon. Such an interpretation, indeed, is more consonant with a number of Merleau-Ponty’s own descriptions of phenomena than is his own interpretation.

The exclamatory dimension, by virtue of the elements of surprise and freshness which it entails, likewise points in the direction of interpreting the world as enjoying a certain primacy over man. Man must acknowledge the world in order to effect anything in it. If this acknowledgment is, by virtue of newness, elicited repeatedly, then this fact, too, suggests that the world is not fully nondeterminate.

I will return to this issue in Chapter Six. But now let me summarize the positive contributions which Merleau-Ponty’s thought makes toward the formulation of an adequate ontological interpretation of silence.

First, Merleau-Ponty’s account of speech and silence in the main corroborates the results obtained through the intentional analysis of silence. Both silence and speech are recognized by him as complex, positive phenomena. Speech and its intertwined silence are from the outset social. Monologue has no preeminence and silence is not primordially a retreat into privacy. In fact, in man’s bearing toward other men and the world, silence has a certain primacy over discourse.

Second, the complex connection between silence and discourse is not a feature peculiar to the signitive domain. All domains of human performances, those of perception, thought, and action, as well as that of the signitive, are constituted by both a cutting and an achieving. The intercalation of distinct elements in the signitive domain is not a defect peculiar to that domain. Rather, it is a manifestation of the human condition itself.

Third, and finally, neither man nor the world is all of a piece. Nor is their intersection. An acceptable ontological interpretation of man and the world must account for this multidimensional complexity.

Though Merleau-Ponty gives only a vague answer to the basic question of the ontological foundation of the distinction between man and world, he occasionally hints that the world enjoys a certain preeminence over man. His reflections on man as that openness whose fundamental encounter with the world, as perception shows, lets the world be instead of positing it,⁴⁵ are reminiscent of significant parts of Heidegger’s thought. It is natural now to look to Heidegger for further considerations which a comprehensive ontological interpretation of silence would have to accommodate.

IV. HEIDEGGER AND SILENCE

In this section I make no foolish pretense of having distilled the essence of Heidegger’s extraordinarily rich reflections on discourse and silence. Rather, I wish simply to set forth some of the prominent lines of his thought and bring them into play in my own endeavor to formulate a satisfactory ontological interpretation of the phenomenon of silence.⁴⁶

Heidegger’s long reflection on language and discourse culminates in the claim that language includes within itself a nonhuman activity, a Saying (Sage), which must be carefully distinguished from human speaking. This claim rests on two premises. First, Being, unconcealedness (aletheia), world grant the coming of whatever is present in its presence. Second, language is involved in this granting or giving. This Saying does not belong to the human domain. But it calls, makes demands, and gathers itself into the “word,” which “word” likewise is not a human word. Dasein belongs to Saying. It listens to Saying and Saying’s “word” and responds by bringing what it hears into human words.⁴⁷

Saying itself, according to Heidegger, can be described in terms of a stream. Everything which addresses itself to Dasein is embedded in this stream. The addressing itself makes no sound. It is silent, but nonetheless its silence can be heard as a form of Saying. This stream of silence springs from Lethe. This means, in Werner Marx’s word, “that the stream has its source (Quelle) in that which has not yet been said and that which must remain unsaid: the ‘unsaid.’ ”⁴⁸ Thus, human discourse is a response to a Saying which addresses itself to Dasein, which Saying itself is rooted in a primordial unsaid.

Anticipations of the conclusions in which Heidegger’s reflections on language culminate are to be found already in Being and Time. Before I give further consideration to these conclusions, it is important to take note of some key parts of that work.

In his analysis of conscience in Being and Time, Heidegger finds that conscience is fundamentally a call. This call has the character of an appeal. It calls Dasein to its own deepest potentiality for being its unique self.⁴⁹ This call does not assert anything. It has nothing to tell. Nor does it set into motion an inner “soliloquy” or debate in which causes get pleaded. Rather, conscience, which is a mode of discourse,

The content of the call can be given different interpretations and is apparently indefinite. Likewise, the call can be misheard and drawn into “idle talk,” into routine, thoughtless chatter. But the direction of the call is unequivocal. It calls Dasein back from the noisiness of idle talk into the reticence which belongs to Dasein’s potentiality for authentic existence.

Dasein, by reason of that distinctiveness which precludes its reduction to simply being one of a series of interchangeable worldly entities, is itself the caller from whom the call of conscience comes. This call, when authentically heard, is a wanting to have a conscience. Dasein, in wanting to have a conscience, wordlessly calls itself back into its own stillness. It is not, at bottom, called by conscience to some specific utterance or course of conduct. Dasein is called to become still. “Only in reticence, therefore, is this silent discourse understood appropriately in wanting to have a conscience. It takes the words away from the common-sense idle talk.”⁵¹

The call of conscience does not, however, call Dasein away from the world. To the contrary, Dasein, in its disclosure to itself as wanting to have a conscience, is disclosed in its entirety as Being-in-the-World. Thus the World, too, is disclosed in the very disclosure brought about by the call of conscience. And with the disclosure of the world, the entities within the world come to light.

But Dasein’s way of Being, in all of its modes, discloses the world with its constituent entities. The distinctive feature of the disclosure effected in wanting to have a conscience is what Heidegger calls resoluteness. Resoluteness is, in its essence, “always the resoluteness of some factical Dasein at a particular time. . . . Resoluteness ‘exists’ only as a resolution which understandingly projects itself.”⁵² Resoluteness is not, then, a virtue which Dasein can cultivate in independence or isolation from the world. Resoluteness, rather, both manifests and faithfully responds to the concrete possibilities which are available to Dasein.

Thus, the call of conscience does not call Dasein to some empty or abstract ideal of existence. Rather it calls Dasein forth into what Heidegger calls a Situation, a concrete state of affairs which a specific Dasein can indeed seize upon in the unique way made possible by its own potentiality-for-Being. Dasein, then, in its resolute response to the call of conscience is already taking action. Heidegger calls the resoluteness of Dasein the authenticity of care. Care, that fundamental, all inclusive solicitude of Dasein for everything that is in any way whatsoever as well as for Being itself, is the fundamental action which “must already be presupposed as a whole when we distinguish between theoretical and practical behaviour.”⁵³

Later in Being and Time, Heidegger shows that resoluteness is possible for Dasein only by reason of Dasein’s having the character of temporality. Only because Dasein’s kind of Being is precisely to be spread out, not to be all at once, can Dasein be resolute and care. Temporality is the fundamental meaning of authentic care. And the finitude of temporality is, Heidegger concludes, “the hidden basis of Dasein’s historicality.”⁵⁴

Even though the doctrine of Being and Time and the findings of the initial descriptions and the intentional analysis of silence cannot be simply conflated, they do harmonize in several significant ways. First, the call of conscience does not utter anything determinate. Rather, it interrupts the chatter of the “they” and the “they-self.” As such, it involves a leap, a risky venture. Second, the call can, on the one hand, be mis-heard. On the other hand, it can be given different interpretations. In that sense, the call is complex. Third, the call is nonetheless unequivocal as regards the direction it takes. It calls Dasein back to its own potentiality-for-Being. In effect, the call works to personalize and so to make more authentic what one actually utters. In these respects, the call of conscience resembles aspects of silence. Silence, like the call of conscience, is not, at bottom, a way of expressing something determinate. Yet some of the ways in which silence appears do play a role in personalizing and individuating discourse. Silence, too, is unequivocal inasmuch as, however it shows itself, it shows itself as a positive performance which cuts, riskily leaps from, or interrupts the “and so forth” of a previously prevalent stream of performances.

The caller of the call of conscience is Dasein itself. And Dasein’s appropriate response to this call, namely, wanting to have a conscience, is manifested as reticence. This reticence, far from shutting Dasein up within itself, is the primordial way in which Dasein discloses itself. It is in reticent resoluteness that Dasein is authentically and primordially individuated.⁵⁵ Similarly, silence is not simply undergone. It is a positive performance by virtue of which man shifts from confinement within an “and so forth” of some sort and, in opening up new fields of meaning, at the same time clarifies himself and his potentialities for himself.

Whenever Dasein is disclosed, then so too is Dasein’s world disclosed along with the things in the world. The call of conscience responded to in reticence is essential to this disclosure. The disclosure of both Dasein and the world and the unity in which Dasein and world are embraced is inextricably bound up with the historicality, the finite temporality of Dasein. Similarly, as its description and analysis have shown, silence, too, not only sheds light upon man but also plays an essential role in his exploration of the world. That is, without performances of silence, neither man nor the world can appear. Or if they can appear, they can do so only in a highly impoverished version.

Finally, like the call of conscience which calls Dasein to resoluteness in quite definite, concrete Situations, silence also, in all of its manifestations, is inextricably involved with temporality and finitude. Cuts in the “and so forth” are necessarily oriented to being timely. But performances under the sway of the requirement of timeliness are always risky. In their ineluctable riskiness, performances of silence at bottom announce man’s distinctiveness from the world with which he is always involved. These performances reveal man’s condition of being, in Heideggerian terms, a thrown project, of being uncanny.

In Being and Time, then, the interrelation of silence, authentic discourse as response, and temporality appears in the course of laying bare what is involved in the call of conscience. Specifically, silence both is a cut in an “and so forth” and points unequivocally toward authentic resoluteness. This silence or reticence is the fundamental response of Dasein to the call which claims it back from the they-self. Out of this fundamental reticent response all authentic speech is born. The authentic resoluteness toward which silence points and in which Dasein’s response to the call of conscience consists is a resoluteness for grasping the Situation in a timely manner. This timely grasping is possible only because Dasein itself is radically historical, that is, both finite and temporal. In Being and Time, then, the attuning and timing to which Kierkegaard called attention are given an elaboration more in keeping with their importance.

Not everything in Being and Time’s treatment of the call of conscience, though, is in complete harmony with the descriptions and analysis presented earlier in this book. The reticence involved in wanting to have a conscience is indeed the counterpart of what I have called terminal silence. Not only is it a silence which cannot be surpassed, but it is also that silence which reverberates back across the entire domain of discourse and modifies the sense of what is said in any level or shape thereof. But it is not evident that at the time of Being and Time Heideggar had yet recognized an originary reticence or silence as that which inaugurates the entire signitive domain. The call of conscience, rather, itself issues forth to recall Dasein from its lostness in the chatter of the they-self. The call, as re-call, cures and restores rather than amplifies. It calls Dasein back from inauthentic discourse to authentic discourse. Silence, then, in Being and Time, fundamentally has to do with a mode of discourse rather than discourse itself. It has to do with establishing authentic discourse and overcoming inauthentic discourse. This position is not fully consonant with the account of silence which I have proposed.

But Being and Time is not Heidegger’s last word on discourse and silence. As I pointed out at the beginning of this section, Heidegger went on to situate his early insights concerning discourse and silence into a more comprehensive setting.

In this later setting, authentic or creative discourse, and the silence which is necessarily ingredient therein, does not primordially arise from Dasein itself.⁵⁶ Rather, it arises as a response to a primordial Saying. This Saying, Heidegger maintains, has its source in that which must remain unsaid.

Saying itself is a showing. It is that showing which allows both that which is present to appear and that which is absent to fade from appearance. Saying is the showing forth of what Heidegger calls Ereignis, the Event of Appropriation. This Appropriation “yields the opening of the clearing in which present beings can persist and from which absent beings can depart while keeping their persistence in the withdrawal.”⁵⁷ Appropriation likewise grants men their capacity to speak. It frees men to encounter and answer Saying. In Heidegger’s words:

The Saying which calls men to speak is no constraining force. On the contrary, this call is precisely that which establishes the scope of freedom in which men can dwell as free.⁵⁹ Nonetheless, man and his speech are fundamentally bound to that which Being allots to him. Thus, the proper response to Saying is not in the first instance an assertive investigation. Rather, it is a hearkening and a listening. It is a pious questioning which is obedient and submissive to that which the call of Being gives man to think about.⁶⁰ The human discourse which arises from this thinking is fruitful only if it leads its participants into the unspoken.⁶¹

But being bound to what Being grants does not turn man into something passive. Even though the later Heidegger speaks of man as essentially attuned in a befitting manner to that which Being grants, as basically obedient to Being, and as submitted to the Event of Appropriation, he nonetheless recognizes that man is a necessary, creative coplayer in the coming to pass of the world. Without man’s creative play there would be neither world nor thing. The world, of course, is not created by man, is not his product. But without man there would be no meaningful sense or significations.⁶²

In the later Heidegger, then, silence is that in which all discourse not only terminates but also originates. Man first hears the Saying and then responds to what it calls on him to speak. Human performances of silence, at least as coconstitutive moments, establish and maintain the entire signitive domain. Man’s silence is the basis of his speech. This silence is not elicited from him as coplayer from within himself, as Being and Time would have it. Rather, it is elicited by the call of Being, by the soundless Saying of the Event of Appropriation. In and through his thoughtful response to this Saying, man finds that this Saying itself springs forth from that which must remain unsaid. In the face of the unsaid, man must cease to speak. He must remain silent. Though he has not said it in so many words, Heidegger has now made it clear that not only man’s speech but also his performances of silence are needed to allow to appear that which Being grants to him.

In his later works, then, Heidegger’s appreciation of the place of silence has extended to its originating as well as to its terminating function. And he has achieved this extension without losing sight of the cut or leap involved in silence. The cut makes it possible for the world and its things, for man himself, and for the relation between man and the world to become manifest.

Nonetheless, there is a not inconsequential incompleteness in Heidegger’s thought, even in his last published thought, concerning discourse and silence as revelatory of Being. As Werner Marx has pointed out, what Heidegger says about the sense of Being and man’s encounter with it holds good only for “creative” men and their works, for poets and philosophers, especially in his later works, which clearly ignore everyday men.⁶³ Given this restriction of Heidegger’s attention simply to the works and “things” of creative men, to their creative discourse and silences, Marx is correct in saying that

The account of silence which I have proposed has not been confined to only creative discourse and creative silence. It has ranged over the entire domain of the signitive. As a consequence, what has been uncovered there does not require the awkward effort of trying to bridge a gap between already described and apparently discrete regions. In fact, the intentional analysis of silence, if conjoined with Heidegger’s insights, shows that Being needs each of the shapes and levels of discourse as well as all the sorts of silence in order to appear in its fullness.

But whatever the limitations of the scope of Heidegger’s thought concerning discourse and silence, his work gives decisive direction to the way in which an acceptable ontological interpretation of silence must proceed. Human performances of silence and speech are what they are precisely because they are responsive to Being which stands in need of them in order to appear at all. Being, then, can only appear as that which stands in need of man, who himself would make no sense unless he were responding to that which called him to speak. Thus, discourse and silence show both man and Being to be finite and temporal. The temporality-finitude of man and Being does not amount to a sheer discreteness of their moments. Rather, man and Being are epochal, marked by both continuities and discontinuities. Discourse and silence are risky because, however determinate man and Being may be, they cannot be fully determinate. Saying does not present a script for man to read. But neither does it give him a blank page to inscribe however he pleases.

These Heideggerian insights can be extended, through the description and analysis of silence, to the entire domain of signification. When so extended, they can play a major role in unifying many of the other elements, drawn from other thinkers, which this study has shown must enter into a satisfactory interpretation of the significance of the phenomenon of silence. In this extension, however, it will become clear that Heidegger’s own contribution, as well as those other contributions which it helps to unify, is best thought of in terms and ways which have their roots in the history of Western thought concerning man and Being.

But before the ontological interpretation of silence is undertaken, it is important to give substance to the somewhat formal description and analysis I have presented of the ways in which silence appears. Max Picard’s The World of Silence furnishes an abundance of evidence for what might be called the material manifestations of silence.

V. PICARD AND THE WORLD OF SILENCE

In his extremely rich book The World of Silence, Max Picard uses the word “silence” in several different ways. Sometimes it refers to human performances, sometimes to conditions for such performances, sometimes to features of the experienced world, and sometimes to a manifestation in the human world of the power of the otherworldly. Or again, Picard at times takes silence to be a feature belonging to the very being of man or some other entity. At other times, he takes silence to be an achievement, a fulfilling of one’s capacities, a perfecting of one’s being.

But this is not the place to sort out or criticize Picard’s diverse uses of the word “silence.” Rather, I want to pay attention to his splendid insights into the multiple ways in which silence concretely appears within the span of human performances and experiences. In general, Picard’s work corroborates my account of the multiple ways in which silence appears.⁶⁵ He describes, albeit in other terms, a fore-silence, an after-silence, and an intervening silence. He notices both originary and terminal silences. But beyond merely lending corroboration to these distinctions, he fleshes them out in concrete areas of experience.

In language which is reminiscent of Heidegger, Picard says that it is silence which looks at man rather than man who looks at silence. “Man does not put silence to the test; silence puts man to the test.”⁶⁶ Silence, he continues, neither increases nor develops in the course of time. Rather, it is time which increases or grows in silence. Silence, he notes, is useless in the sense that it cannot be exploited. And yet, by its very “uselessness,” silence can perform a healing function. Silence, he writes,

Silence, then, is that cut, that interruption of an “and so forth,” which binds and joins. This healing binding and joining shows up in the acts of forgiving and forgetting. Language, Picard says, sinks back into silence.

The clearest and most perfect interplay of silence and word occurs in poetry. “Great poetry,” Picard says, “is a mosaic inlaid into silence.”⁶⁸ Not only is the poetic word intimately related to the silence whence it comes, but through its own spirit the poetic word itself effects silence. Words which participate in this profound way in the world of silence manifest something quite different from words which ignore silence. It is this intimate connection between word and silence which marks the poetry of Hölderlin, Goethe, Shakespeare, Laoste, and Sophocles. In their works, Picard says,

When language sinks back into silence, it is forgotten. But forgetting is not annihilation. Rather, “forgetting prepares the way for forgiveness.”⁷⁰ Through forgiving, people detach themselves from at least some of the dimensions of that which has become determinate in discourse, together with the “and so forth” which the determinate engenders. In so doing, they exercise their freedom in such a way that a genuine we-community is both made possible and is sustained.⁷¹ Forgiving reaches its apex in that forgetting which does not simply befall man but which he undertakes to achieve. Again in language which reminds one of Heidegger, Picard says, “It is as though behind silence were the absolute word to which, through silence, human language moves. It is as though the human word were sustained by the absolute word. . . . Silence is like a remembrance of that word.”⁷² In forgiving and forgetting the human word, then, man returns to contact with the enabling absolute word from which all human words ultimately spring and to which they refer. Forgiving and for getting repudiate the pseudodefinitiveness of the human word.

Silence contributes to the foundation of human community in another way. It does so by virtue of its connection with both humor and death. On the one hand, in silence the contradictions and nonsense which I find both within myself and confronting me lose their either-or character. It is silence which allows me to accept with grace, with humor even, the ineluctable incompleteness of my life and the ultimate unfulfillability of my dreams.⁷³ On the other hand, forgiving and forgetting, and the silence which makes them possible, likewise point the way toward death, death taken as a positive achievement, death as an entrusting to others’ care that to which one has devoted himself. Death in this positive sense is a forgiving of the survivor for surviving and a yielding to him of one’s own discourse in such a way that the survivor is freely accepted as the one who will respond to it beyond our chance to rebut him.⁷⁴

Conversely, we the survivors are responsible to the dead. We make ourselves worthy of our trust by listening in silence to them. Only through the silence in his own life can a man hear the words of the dead. In this silent listening, “the dead carry the silence into the world of man, the world of the word. They give it some of the power that is in silence.”⁷⁵

Thus, the entire domain of human discourse is suspended between an originary silence whence discourse arises and a terminal silence, death, into which it departs. From its originary silence, discourse receives it originality, simplicity, and innocence. From death it receives its fragility, its incapacity to correspond perfectly to its referent, in short, its finitude.⁷⁶ A man’s first word is marked by death as truly as by freshness. A man’s last word is marked by freshness as truly as by death.

Silence, then, is a requisite for binding and joining ourselves both to our contemporaries and to our ancestors and descendents. But this binding is a yielding to their freedom. As such, it involves a risk. And even if the risk is accepted, the emotional and intellectual ambivalence of the experience of silence is not thereby converted into sheer benignity. In silence, as Kierkegaard had already pointed out, “there is present not only the power of healing and friendship but also the power of darkness and terror.”⁷⁷ Death is bitter as well as sweet. And even though it is less obvious, birth too is both bitter and sweet, whether it is our own or another’s. For in neither case can we successfully deny it and its claim.

Silence, then, can not only link men to one another. It can also menace discourse and threaten man with an isolation from which the only egress is violence. If silence overwhelms discourse, then it is demonic. But discourse, if it is that discourse which responds to the absolute word, exorcises the demonic dimension of silence. In Picard’s words:

But, of course, the exorcism can never be definitive. The temporality of man, of discourse, and of silence itself, precludes such a possibility.

This absolute word which must be hearkened to if the demonic in silence is to be exorcised to any degree at all does not, of course, stand forth in obvious self-presence. It is accessible only in prayer. Picard says:

Prayer, for Picard, rests upon faith. With the sort of circumspection which philosophy requires, I would prefer to say that prayer rests upon hope. And the object of that hope is that there is that absolute word which commissions our discourse. Beyond that, Picard, and anyone as a man, may certainly go to God. But the philosopher, and here I follow Heidegger, speaks with more reserve.

In any case, prayer and faith or hope spring forth as a leap from the encounter with that irrecusably polyvalent silence which stands at the beginning and end of all human discourse. In prayer and faith or hope, words come to their end. Of themselves, Picard says, they return to silence. Thus words can only spring forth as temporalized responses. They cannot definitively resolve silence’s polyvalency. But then it is of the very nature of prayer, faith, and hope to eschew any hint of definitive resolution, a resolution which would purport to be fully achieved.

The leap to prayer and either faith or hope, of course, is not the only possible response to this encounter with silence. Silence can be, in Promethean fashion, denounced and defied. It can be answered by despair. It can even be, in large measure, ignored. An acceptable ontological interpretation of the phenomenon must account for all of these possibilities and must elucidate how it is that, insofar as none of these responses is irreversible, whichever response is made is always infected with traces or foreshadows of the other, unmade, responses.

Picard himself does not develop a careful analysis of the many ways in which silence appears. Nor does he distinguish silence from muteness by making it clear that silence is an active human performance. As a consequence, he is in no position to develop an adequate ontological interpretation of the phenomenon of silence. Nonetheless, his concrete insights and vivid descriptions of many aspects of silence bring substantial richness to reflection on this phenomenon. No satisfactory ontological interpretation can neglect them.

VI. SUMMARY

As a proximate preparation for proposing an ontological interpretation of silence, let me summarize what has been gained in the course of this chapter. Eastern thought shows that silence is intimately bound up not only with discourse but also with action and desire. Silence itself is efficacious. In fact, according Taoism, at the apex of human performances, authentic speech is one with authentic silence and, in their oneness, they are the most efficacious of human achievements. What the ontological interpretation must explore is this purported interpenetration of discourse, silence, action and desire.

Meditation on Kierkegaard’s treatment of Abraham shows that it is unacceptable to regard discourse as always the determinate element set over against silence as the nondeterminate element. Sometimes silence is the determinate and discourse the nondeterminate. Or from another angle, neither discourse nor silence exclusively reveals. Both discourse and silence sometimes reveal and sometimes conceal.

Merleau-Ponty points the way to several major aspects of the meaning of silence. First, by virtue of the interconnections obtaining among the fundamental human domains of perceptual, signitive, and actional performances, performances of silence manifest important dimensions both of the social character of man’s being and of the complex unity which he as an individual lives out. Second, since man is as he is, then the world is such that it can only appear as that which is both present and absent, as a field for inquiry. Thus, if both man and world show this complexity of presence and absence, Being itself is to be described in terms of poles in tension and not in terms of undifferentiated simplicity. Being is such that man is an interrogatory opening on the world understood as horizon. Silence is at the foundation of this opening.

In a quite similar way, Heidegger holds that authentic human discourse arises as a response to a primordial Saying. It is the call of this Saying which establishes the scope of freedom in which free men can dwell. To respond to this Saying man must both hearken to it in silence and recognize what must remain unsaid. Saying itself, which has its source in the unsaid, shows forth the Event of Appropriation by virtue of which man and Being belong together. Man can appear as man only in response to Saying. And both Being and beings can appear as such only by virtue of man’s response in speech.⁸⁰ Both man and Being, then, are characterized, each in its own way, by a temporality, finitude, and freedom which are epochal. These characteristics are brought to light through the interplay of discourse and silence.

Finally, Picard spells out in some detail the links between silence on the one hand and forgiving, forgetting, death, poetry, and prayer, on the other hand. In the process, he again points to the polyvalence of silence. He himself moves on to find in silence an opening for faith. This faith is not immediately justified by the encounter with silence. Rather it is the outcome of an ontological interpretation of that encounter. Silence, with its polyvalency, does not unequivocally dictate that it be interpretated in terms of faith. But it does require that some ontological interpretation of it be attempted. It is to that task that I now turn.