Silence and Romance

" ‘Fools!’ said I, ‘you cannot know

Silence like a cancer grows’..."

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Or so says Mr. Simon, in his and partner Art Garfunkel’s hauntingly beautiful ‘Sounds of Silence’. But the analogy between silence and cancer he deploys here has one simple problem: Cancer is obviously and always bad for us; silence isn’t. Indeed, sometimes silence seems positively good for us—so much so that what is lost in such sloppy indictments of silence is what we might call its nutritive qualities--particularly to malnourished modern minds which know so little of it. Carl Sandburg, in his wonderful biography, tells us of Lincoln that 'silence was immense in the building of the man'. In his early days as a surveyor and woodcutter, Lincoln grew up strong in the quiet, 'like the corn in an Illinois field'. And it is out in the fields, where nothing but breezes rustle the leaves, in which a soul as great, natural, and inscrutable as Lincoln's could wind its way out of the earth. If one wonders why such souls do not grow any more, it may have something to do with the absence of silence as soil.

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But this silence upon which (perhaps even by which) Lincoln was raised (that Lincoln who went on to re-unite a country now synonymous with freedom of speech) is a silence whose reputation is more or less captured by Mr. Simon above. But how can both be right? How can the same silence raise a Lincoln, and 'like a cancer grow'? Of course, motivation for the defamation of silence is not hard to come by. Silence is repulsive to many for its associations with solitude, and solitude—real solitude— is feared. Whether this fear of solitude is healthy is a separate question. The present point is that the connection between the two--between silence and solitude-- is unclear. It may be that words and language are thought to be our means of com-municating, as though human relations were not merely related to language but rooted in it. Haven't we been told that 'language is what makes us human' often enough? And don’t we use words to ‘break the silence’ and by breaking the silence end our solitude? Don’t we, on this basis, suppose this breaking to be a good thing? But if experience is any guide, this, again, is an overly sloppy characterization of silence. It overlooks the kinds of human connectedness which seem somehow based on quietness; it does not give sufficient weight to the phenomenological fact that it is not in conversation but in a special kind of silence in which we feel most human; it forgets that ideal intimacy which thrives in the absence of words.

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2. This is not some grand or mystical point. We know directly that no amount of speech can save us from solitude. We have all been with persons by whom words were disbursed in a kind of desperation, with conversation a constant attempt to connect--to lasso oneself to the other and vice versa, to forcefully prevent the two from flying apart. Words are flung out from such speakers the way a spider, having slipped from a ledge, might sling thread after thread at some receding anchor point as he falls. And they are relentless (“ever reeling them/ever tirelessly speeding them). With such word-deployers, talk is a tension--a suspension bridge between persons which gives its users no peace or sure footing, and shakes and rattles at the slightest wind. Each participant stands at the far end of this shuddering contraption and is understandably reluctant to commit to it their full weight; it seems to flimsy a thing to enable one to move towards the other. Yet are we not to connect by speaking to each other? But then, with respect to talking to each other as a means of connecting, what has gone wrong?

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Words here, we might say, are working too hard. Those who put them to such use do so under false, or at least exaggerated, expectations. If words are used to connect people in any intimacy beyond trade/economy, too much is being expected of them. To see the connection words always fail to make, consider the opposite case: a few of the lucky have, if only for a few moments, known a silence in which everything was sure--a kind of social certainty between persons which is not constituted by materiel as suspect as words. This sociality does away with suspense entirely. At such remarkable moments, one can acknowledge with words the connection; but one never supposes that the connection could be supported, much less constituted, by either knowledge or words. In this silence, one does not talk to understand the other; rather, talk enjoys the backdrop of a prior understanding. Before the questions, answers, compliments, and, eventually, accusations, there is a background welcome--an a priori confidence one has been admitted to which one is confident will never be withdrawn. Not that Language has no role; but its use cannot establish the conditions by which it can enjoy this background understanding. Its role is limited. It contributes to this form of interpersonal/Personal intimacy--this faith two persons find in each other-- the way our religious tradition claims Reason is said to contribute to Faith. Reason can not ground Faith; instead, Reason is ‘Faith, seeking understanding’. Faith, an interpersonal understanding, is silent, though about this silence reason can certainly speak. But Reason adds nothing to Faith's substantive silence.

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So, in a face-to-face, one seeks, through speech, a better understanding about the other; but who connects on the basis of 'about'? Whose intimacy is bolstered by, much less built upon, a sharing of information, however personal? Whose faith? What has information to do with intimacy? One can know everything about someone without 'knowing what they are about' in the relevant sense. And someone who only knew about persons, not ‘what they’re all about’ would not know persons at all. Such a connection between persons based solely on knowing about persons, is, in fact, a description not of a perfect sociality, but of the perfect sociopath.

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3. So we seek a pure sociality which Reason and words cannot establish, only acknowledge. Sincerity—an openness to another, which is not constrained to pass through the over-narrow aperture of words—is for this reason indigenous to silence. We know that, with respect to establishing this intimacy, there is nothing to say. One still seeks, through language, knowledge of others; but the knowledge about others only matters to us against the background of this 'sound of silence', so sweet to us that we are always straining at, or rather, past words to get at it; we are always listening for it. We seek it, but do not find it—particularly if we suppose, absurdly, that it is something words might contain. But how are we to seek this silence? How can we go about trying to hear silence? How might this Social Silence be listened for?

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4. Speaking broadly, we have both individual and collective examples of how not to listen. Both in individual experience as persons and as one among peers--both as our irreducibly separate selves and as members of Western culture—we have already gone quite far down the wrong road. But the cultural fear of silence, coupled with the individual’s quest for it, have to be taken together if either is to be understood. This is why the desperate chatter of two thirty-somethings in a diner, both panicked for connection, should be read against the larger cultural tradition in which their little (but infinitely important) drama is played out, and vice versa. For consider both cases at once—even consider both cases as one: is not the dissolution of desperate words into an understanding both silent and superior, the ultimate aim of each of us-- of all of us when we are one of the people at the table? Likewise, isn't the aim of philosophy (understood as epistemology) the end of philosophy? Isn’t the practice of raising questions about knowledge to know, and so settle them, and so justify being quiet about them? In both the personal and philosophical cases, isn't the idea to reach an understanding that we need no longer reach for?

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But both in both cases we seem to suppose that words are the way to reach this understanding. And this seems wrong. In the personal case, words inspired by a desperate attempt to connect are a de facto acknowledgment of the failure to do so. Nevertheless, in cars, cafes, kitchens, bedrooms, words are launched, fall, and shatter--small memorials to failed connections which litter our wasted evenings—like little white crosses--tombstones on hillsides. Words fail to connect us as we hope, because that is not what they are for. They died trying, because they were trying to do the impossible. Likewise, in its own looming way, the role of the word, already out of character in Western romance, is miserably mis-cast in Western philosophy. That knowledge should be our link to other minds! That we should talk our way to each other!

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5. It is open to us to reject this role for language in both cases. If we accept Silence of this special sort we have been describing, we get, as a result, the background ethical solution to every supposedly epistemic anxiety. For the deep uneasiness of Western culture at the prospect of absent knowledge must, for it to grip us as it does, be rooted in a powerful individual worry. And it is. For the Western urge to alleviate the terror of skepticism is, at root, driven by terror of solipsism. And, loosely but accurately speaking, the fear of the thirty-somethings at the restaurant is that fear which has given rise to the bulk of Western philosophy. Consider our couple: they are two people with a terror of solipsism. And this terror is at root, not the worry of being condemned to being deceived about reality—is not a concern about distorted vision; rather, it is a fear far deeper: the fear of being invisible. The terror that we do not know (in Western parlance, do not see) is the sublimated terror of being unseen. “No one sees!” the Cartesian might worry; but this worry has its roots in the heart, which worries “Dear God! I see no one, and no one sees me!” The fear of the unknown, and the fear of not knowing, are, at bottom, the single fear of every one of us that we will never be known. To understand the world... is this our quest? What for? Who for? No. Our quest as persons is to be understood, and to be understanding, with reference to each other, without reference to knowledge. And this is the 'knowledge' in which silence is at home. Silence is even evidence of having reached such an understanding.

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6. Of course, even the philosophies of the East, which did not care for the West's exultation of language (which freed them to make their own brilliant and novel mistakes) did not suppose that words were of no value. But the value of words and concepts was, as it were, a grudging concession, a temporary instrumentalist grant of reprieve; a work permit was issued them provided they take their natural place, subject to the requirements of the understanding that says nothing--provided speech was properly subject to silence. As the Zhuangzi has it:

"A fish trap is for catching fish; once you have the fish, you can forget about the trap. A rabbit-snare is for catching rabbits; once you've got the rabbits, you can forget about the snare. Words are for catching ideas; once you've caught the ideas, you can forget about the words. Now where can I find a person who has forgotten about words, so that I may have a word with him?"

Our account of the sociality of the right kind of Silence clearly rejects some implications from this citation. First, we may reject that words are a necessary condition for understanding each other wordlessly. It might be wiser to content (as Levinas does) that word-less understandings are the precondition for the narrower, non-personal understandings which words can contain. More important to expunge, however, is the idea that words are primarily and originally for gathering ideas rather than connecting to persons. If the first word ‘broke’ the Silence we are discussing, it shattered the peace of an original understanding, not created it. And perhaps this is another aspect of the quest for connection: the sense that we are re-establishing an original connection lost. Words cannot establish contact, perhaps— only re-establish it. At any rate, the more original the word, we should say that the more explicitly it will be found carrying out its function of acknowledging, recognizing, repairing this original intimacy. Surely 'hello' is the first word, and a word par excellence, not ‘green’ or 'fire' or 'cat'! For who would break the Silence merely to describe?!

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But, if we consider the quest of the West, which, at bottom, is a quest of Western individuals for interpersonal connection, we can say, of the couple incessantly talking over their over-priced dinners, that what they are seeking by their incessant talking is some one to whom they need not talk. They seek, not to break the silence, but repair it. They seek a silence which they both hear—the antithesis of solitude—to which they can together repair. This Silence, they hope, will never be broken. Two persons, understanding and understood. Nothing said established it; and now that it is established, there is nothing more to say... And this is to say that for all its appalling dryness and tiresome pretensions of inhuman rigor, Western philosophy is, in a very direct sense, a manifestation of these two frustrated daters; literally speaking, its air of objectivity and epistemic obsessions have fundamentally romantic roots.