Detail from Laurie Anderson's "The Weather" exhibit
Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC
Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC
For pretty obvious reasons, it's difficult to say something meaningful about silence, and yet, it has been a topic that one way or another has occupied the attention of philosophers among other writers. Famously, Wittgenstein ends the Tractatus with his enigmatic admonition to "pass over in silence" what we "cannot speak about" (Pears/McGuinness translation). But while silences generally are soundless, they can sometimes be pragmatically rich moments, not least in Wittgenstein's book.
One such way in which silences can be meaningful is via what Michal Ephratt calls "eloquent silence" (Ephratt 2008). The idea is that just as speech acts can have performative effects, so can silent moments (e.g., such as a gap in conversation); in this sense one might consider moments of eloquent silence to be silent speech acts. This seems to me to be such a rich idea, one that could be very helpful for the interpretation of cross-cultural discourse, as well as in moments of discursive failure. In this vein, I find Alessandra Tanesini's work on silence to be instructive (2018).
The Analects 1.3 (Ames and Rosemont Jr. 1998).
A few years ago, I wrote a paper on a topic that is related to silence, what I call moments of reticence. By "reticence," I have in mind a variety of actions in discursive situations, including an unwillingness to speak as well as redirection of conversation or inquiry. The paper focuses on the differential uses of silence and reticence in the Analects and in Wittgenstein's corpus. (Over the years, I have sensed a partial resonance between Wittgenstein and Confucianism, especially when it comes to ethics, practices, and language use.)
In passage 1.3 above, the Master highlights a theme that runs through the Analects, a suspicion of eloquent speech that is not accompanied by virtuous conduct. Sometimes this suspicion carries over into condemnations of glib speech and the importance in some circumstances of being "slow to speak." A remark of Wittgenstein's collected in Culture and Value suggests perhaps a similar attitude: "This is how philosophers should salute each other: 'Take your time!'" (Wittgenstein 1998, 91)
Periodically, I think about the topic of reticence, especially when it comes to religious and interreligious discourses. Sometimes, philosophers and religious writers have remarked on the difficulty in saying something, either because the topic is very abstract (as with apophatic theology, for example) or perhaps because the audience must be prepared for the message in some way before they are able to receive it. I envision one day of going beyond Wittgenstein and Confucianism and doing a close study of some Christian, Buddhist, and Daoist texts as well when it comes to discursive uses of silences and other forms of reticence in spiritual and/or philosophical projects.
References
Ames, Roger T., and Henry Rosemont, Jr., trans. 1998. The Analects of Confucius: A Philosophical Translation. New York: Ballantine Books.
Ephratt, Michal. 2008. “The Functions of Silence.” Journal of Pragmatics 40, no. 11:1909–1938.
Tanesini, Alessandra. 2018. “Eloquent Silences: Silence and Dissent.” In Voicing Dissent: The Ethics and Epistemology of Making Disagreement Public, edited by Casey Rebecca Johnson, pp. 109–128. London: Routledge.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1998. Culture and Value: Revised Edition, edited by G. H. von Wright with Heikki Nyman and translated by Peter Winch. London: Wiley-Blackwell.
