The Thing That Is Silence

The Convivial Society: Vol. 4, No. 14

Welcome to the Convivial Society. It’s been … a while. I’d say thank you for your patience, but I don’t imagine you were opening your email each morning in eager expectation of the next post. Or maybe you were, maybe you were. In any case, below you have an installment in three parts. First, because the newsletter has been unexpectedly dormant for a few months, a very brief welcome and (re-)introduction. Second, the thing itself, a few reflections in the ordinary style on silence and language in our digital milieu. Third, a slightly longer statement about the last few months, chiefly to thank those of you who have sustained your support throughout. This last section will be deleted in the web version of the post.

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What You Are Reading

The Convivial Society is a newsletter about technology, culture, and the moral life, all quite broadly construed. Most of you reading this are already familiar with the kind of writing I do here, but more than a few of you are receiving your first installment even though you might have signed up months ago, long enough to have forgotten that you signed up at all or to remember why. If it helps to jog your memory, many of you have made your way here as a result of John Naughton’s kind recommendation in the Guardian. Hopefully the quality will measure up, if not, you know what to do.

So, here’s a quick reminder of what I try to accomplish with this newsletter:

1. To think through the meaning of our technological environment for our shared lives. I subscribe to the McLuhanist sentiment that “we shape our tools and then our tools shape us.” And this is my effort to understand that dynamic and its consequences, especially as related to the very basic question, What does it mean to be human? Plumbed to a certain depth, the question of technology invariably entails the question of the human. (I should warn that I tend to proffer more questions and answers.)

2. To mine the insights and wisdom of certain older thinkers whose writing about technology has mostly fallen out of favor—Ivan Illich, Jacques Ellul, Marshall McLuhan, Neil Postman, among others—as well as many whose work is not ordinarily thought of as bearing directly on the question of technology: Simone Weil, Iris Murdoch, W. H. Auden, and Hannah Arendt, for example. Of course, contemporary writers and scholars from a wide array of disciplines also feature prominently. “Your writing led me to read the work of X” is one of the highest compliments I can be paid.

3. To commend alternative ways of conceiving of the good life and the just society that are not already beholden to the structures and imperatives of our contemporary techno-economic order and which do not conceive of the human being as fundamentally in service to that order. I’m sometimes labeled a tech critic, which is fine. But, in my view, critique that is not informed by some vision of the common good, however tentative or provisional, grows sterile and rancorous. The title of the newsletter alludes to the concept of conviviality, in Ivan Illich’s specialized sense, as just such a positive alternative.

I suppose there are probably more aims or themes that I could enumerate, but that should give new readers a decent map of the territory.

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The Thing That Is Silence

Close to the start of the year, I reflected on the plight of language under digital conditions. I was motivated by the sense that “something of consequence is happening to ordinary language, the lifeblood of human thought and action, under digital conditions.” More specifically, I proposed the following thesis: “that having built our political structures on the assumption that human experience and human society can be ordered by human language and speech, we may now be suffering through the discovery that the world we have built is no longer responsive to either.”

To put this in parlance that has grown increasingly familiar in the intervening months, the human-built world is already unaligned to human values and well-being because it operates at a scale and according to a logic that elude our comprehension and confound our agency. And this is so largely because it exists beyond the reach of ordinary language. The realm of speech, specifically its public and thus political quarters, increasingly becomes the realm of exasperating and maddening futility. And we may all be forgiven for feeling as if we are the idiots whose words, however full of sound and fury, finally signify nothing, and, more to the point, effect no change in the world.

Just as in the modern West faith was deemed too irrational and volatile for the public sphere and thus relegated to the relative obscurity of private life, so now it seems that language itself is being likewise banished to the realm of the private, which is to say that, whatever pretenses to the contrary, real power no longer resides in ordinary human speech.¹ We are not ruled by words but by formulas and algorithms and those who wield them.

That much was the gist of what was to be the first of a series of essays exploring the fate of language under digital conditions. Essays that were related to the theme did, in fact, follow, but the specific topics I announced—the paradoxes of language online, the relationship between silence and meaning and between metaphor and thought—I never explicitly took up.

So now, nearly a year later and after an unplanned hiatus, I find myself serendipitously drawn back to the theme of language but from a different angle: from the perspective of silence. The specific occasion has been my reading of The World of Silence², by the Swiss philosopher Max Picard.

Silence, like darkness, tends to be conceived chiefly as an absence, as nothing in itself. Darkness is merely the absence of light and, likewise, silence is merely the absence of sound. Considered this way, it’s tempting to imagine darkness and silence both as negations of some more positive reality. Light is to be preferred to darkness, and sound to silence. We bear this out when, if darkness or silence threaten, we instinctively flood our living spaces with both light and sound.

Not surprisingly, I suppose, it is hard to describe in words what I have chiefly learned from Picard. But if I were to try, it is this idea—which became more than idea, something sensible to me—that silence is what Picard called an autonomous reality, it is something of itself and not merely a negation, and, critically, that it is part of the nature of silence to be a vital, renewing force from whose absence we suffer more than we know.

“When language ceases, silence begins,” Picard explains early on. “But it does not begin because language ceases. The absence of language simply makes the presence of Silence more apparent.”

At another point, Picard puts the matter this way:

“Silence is not visible, and yet its existence is clearly apparent. It extends to the farthest distances, yet is so close to us that we can feel it as concretely as we feel our own bodies. It is intangible, yet we can feel it as directly as we feel materials and fabrics.”

Those were the lines that first helped me perceive silence as an autonomous reality, and they did so simply by leading me to think again about what silence feels like. When in the presence of silence, I do not feel an emptiness, rather I feel something. Something looming, something active, something that is at work on me. Having had over the last few months the occasion almost daily to sit in silence for a few brief moments, I came to describe the experience as the feeling of silence carving away at my interiority like a sculptor chipping away at stone, as if silence were stripping me of all that was not essential.

In other places, Picard’s descriptions of the phenomenology of silence take on an almost mystical quality, and, indeed, Picard is a religious thinker. He writes, for example, “Silence contains everything within itself. It is not waiting for anything; it is always wholly present in itself and it completely fills out the space in which it appears.”

I’m not sure how that sits with you, but it rang true to me. And as I read more and more of Picard, silence increasingly took on a certain solidity. It felt more and more like a presence and not an absence at all. It is, ultimately, a benign presence, but, in truth, it can often feel threatening and unsettling. For, as Picard puts it, “Man does not put silence to the test; silence puts man to the test.” And we do not enjoy being put to the test, however much we might need to be put to the test and would be better for having sustained it.

For all that Picard has to say about silence, he is also quite insistent that language has primacy over silence so far as human beings are concerned.

“[Silence] is creative, as language is creative,” Picard writes. “And it is formative of human beings as language is formative,” he adds, “but not in the same degree.” In his view, “It is language and not silence that makes man truly human. The word has supremacy over silence.”

But he immediately warns that “language becomes emaciated if it loses its connection with silence.” Thus Picard believes, writing in the mid-20th century, that the task before us “is to uncover the world of silence so obscured today—not for the sake of silence but for the sake of language.”

It was at this point that I began thinking about my earlier reflections on language under digital conditions. Perhaps it was the superabundance of speech, words, noise, all the more pronounced since Picard wrote more than 70 years ago, that paradoxically weakened our language and rendered it feckless and ineffectual.

Interestingly, Picard devotes a small chapter to the radio. Friends, it would be hard for me to overstate how much Picard appears to despise the radio. Although, to be fair, it is not radio itself he despises, but how the radio pushed silence to the margins of our experience by filling our spaces with a practically infinite supply of noise. You can imagine as well as I can how the advent of television, portable electronic devices, and finally the internet and smartphones have heightened the situation Picard found so distressing in his own age.

It is the easiest thing in the world to read Picard as a crank, particularly in the chapter on the radio, who could not come to terms with the way the world changed around him. I would encourage us to lay aside such judgments long enough to consider the possibility that Picard is on to something and that we would be better off if we sat with his claims for just a bit.

I mentioned earlier how we think of silence as an absence just as we think of darkness as an absence. Interestingly, in a relatively obscure passage I come back to frequently, Hannah Arendt made the following passing comments about darkness:

“Everything that lives, not vegetative life alone, emerges from darkness and, however strong its natural tendency to thrust itself into the light, it nevertheless needs the security of darkness to grow at all.”

Perhaps, we could just as easily say that everything that lives emerges from silence and however strong its tendency to express itself in sound it nevertheless needs the security of silence to express itself at all. Or something like that. The point is that we may need silence more than we’re willing to acknowledge and despite the fact that we have grown so uncomfortable with the presence of silence.

Returning more specifically to the relationship between language and silence, Picard offers us a series of valuable reflections in a style that is characteristically evocative and figurative.

“Words that merely come from other words are hard and aggressive,” he counsels. “Such words are also lonely, and a great part of the melancholy in the world today is due to the fact that man has made words lonely by separating them from silence.”

“Words that merely come from other words.” Are these not the words we are now most likely to encounter given the immediacy, intensity, and scale of our digital milieu? Words that have not passed through silence, silence which might nurture mutual comprehension and considered responses, but have rather emerged reactively and kinetically, even violently, from other words.

What Picard writes of his own time seems all the more true of our own:

“In the modern world language is far from both worlds of silence. It springs from noise and vanishes in noise. Silence is today no longer an autonomous world of its own; it is simply the place into which noise has not yet penetrated. It is a mere interruption of the continuity of noise, like a technical hitch in the noise-machine—that is what silence is today: the momentary breakdown of noise.”

By contrast, Picard believes, “one can hear silence sounding through speech. Real speech is in fact nothing but the resonance of silence.” What would it mean for us to so nourish our words with silence that they may be described as the resonance of silence. Again, the language is figurative and evocative, but perhaps that this the only kind of language that will do to help us perceive these subtle realities.

Finally, there is one last portion of Picard’s reflections that I will bring to your attention.

Picard asserts that “silence is the only phenomenon today that is ‘useless’.” “It does not fit into the world of profit and utility,” he continues, “it simply is. It seems to have no other purpose; it cannot be exploited.”

This uselessness is precisely what gives silence, in Picard’s view, its healing quality. Consider these words:

“Yet there is more help and healing in silence than in all the ‘useful things’. Purposeless, unexplainable silence suddenly appears at the side of the all-too-powerful, and frightens us by its very purposelessness. It interferes with the regular flow of the purposeful. It strengthens the untouchable, it lessens the damage inflicted by exploitation. It makes things whole again, by taking them back from the world of dissipation into the world of wholeness.”

This wholeness emerges from Picard’s metaphysical reflections on the nature of silence. At another point he speaks of silence as a substance that enters into us. That substance creates a buffer among the various, often conflicting realities within us. Our own contradictions must pass over the substance of silence before coming into contact with one another. In this way, silence is a substance protective of our inner life. Picard also suggests that “man is better able to endure things hostile to his own nature, things that use him up, if he has the silent substance within …. Technics in itself, life with machines, is not injurious unless the protective substance of silence is absent.”

These are not words to be analyzed. They are, I believe, simply to be contemplated, and their truth ascertained only in practice. But they struck me. They struck me for the promise Picard holds out of help and healing and wholeness. We live in a scattering time, to borrow a line from the poet Richard Wilbur. All the forces at play within us and without seem to be centrifugal forces, pulling us apart. I remain interested in understanding the nature of these forces. The critical conversation remains important. But I’m increasingly interested in how we might find and deploy alternative ways of being in the world. What are the practices that will sustain us? Silence may be just such a practice, and we may do well to experiment with whatever possibilities are afforded to us to enter into silence and to allow silence to enter into us.

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Happy New Year to each of you. May it be year in which we find some measure of healing and joy, perhaps by inviting silence to be a more frequent companion along the way.

I’ll leave you, as is my custom at this point in the year, with Richard Wilbur’s “Year’s End.”

Now winter downs the dying of the year,
And night is all a settlement of snow;
From the soft street the rooms of houses show
A gathered light, a shapen atmosphere,
Like frozen-over lakes whose ice is thin
And still allows some stirring down within.

I’ve known the wind by water banks to shake
The late leaves down, which frozen where they fell
And held in ice as dancers in a spell
Fluttered all winter long into a lake;
Graved on the dark in gestures of descent,
They seemed their own most perfect monument.

There was perfection in the death of ferns
Which laid their fragile cheeks against the stone
A million years. Great mammoths overthrown
Composedly have made their long sojourns,
Like palaces of patience, in the gray
And changeless lands of ice. And at Pompeii

The little dog lay curled and did not rise
But slept the deeper as the ashes rose
And found the people incomplete, and froze
The random hands, the loose unready eyes
Of men expecting yet another sun
To do the shapely thing they had not done.

These sudden ends of time must give us pause.
We fray into the future, rarely wrought
Save in the tapestries of afterthought.
More time, more time. Barrages of applause
Come muffled from a buried radio.
The New-year bells are wrangling with the snow.

1. Curiously, the Greek root of the word idiot describes a “private person,” someone who stands outside of public life. Language under digital conditions renders us all idiots, excluded from public life chiefly because public life depends on the health of public language.

2. First published in German in 1948 and translated into English in 1952. I vaguely remembered that someone had put me on to Picard’s book after I had written something that touched on the theme of silence. A search of the inbox reminded me that it was Samuel Matlack, the managing editor at The New Atlantis, back in March of 2021. So, thank you, Samuel. It took awhile, but I finally got to it. Poking around to learn a bit more about Picard, I stumbled on a review in the Los Angeles Review of Books from 2018, which began with this line: “Until about 10 years ago, Max Picard’s work The World of Silence (1952), neglected for decades, was almost the only serious examination of silence available.”