Silence, the Word and the Sacred

Introduction

INTRODUCTION Da6, wenn die Stille kehrt, auch eine Sprache sei.1 If to be human possesses a certain arete, surely that defining characteristic is the ability both to speak and to speak about the significance of speech. The continuous return to Plato's Phaedrus in contemporary philosophical discourse is only one of the many reminders of this fact. But such a specifically human property is to be understood as more than a fact. It is a condition and habit of our being. While it may be that thought is possible without the articulation of language, its social realization is perceptible only insofar as it may be organized as part of a system of signs. It may be possible to assert, then, that when we speak, therefore we are. And it is not only we who find our being there. The world too —as we know it—becomes what it is, remindingus of the singer in Wallace Stevens's poem, "The Idea of Order at Key West": She was the single artificer of the world In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea, Whatever self it had, became the self That was her song, for she was the maker.2 So the sea is realized in song, and so we sing, for no other reason than The maker's rage to order words of the sea, Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred, And of ourselves and of our origins, In ghostlier demarcations,keener sounds. For what else evokes in us the sense "of ourselves and of origins"? Surely it is not "[t]he meaningless plungingsof water and the wind," for the discourse they possess does not appear, at least, to have the capability of self-explication, to translate itself into other discourse of the self. It is. It cannot transformitself and say, as the fine old Latin proverb declares, sum ut fiam. We are because of the self-transformatory character of the discourseswith whichwe are engaged. It should be said, then, the world for us is a discursive possibility, and the world in whichwe sing becomes world for us as it is given birth in language. To say as much, however, should not imply that what we call "world" is only a figment of a perfervid imagination, any more than that we are a figment of the real. For the world cannot be feigned, and to pretend as much would be the same as sayingthe world is only art, which is a mistake that some readings of Stevens are capable of making. The worldisnotother.Wearetheworldinwhatappearstobeanecessary 2 Silence, The Word and the Sacred realization through which the world utters itself, as Rilke puts it in his Ninth Duino Elegy: Erde, ist es nicht dies, was du willst: unsichtbar in uns zu erstehen?3 For David Bohm such a relation is expressed as one of implicit to explicit in which what we refer to as our or human consciousness is an enfolding of matter and world. What marks their relationship is the continuous movement between consciousness and world, each profoundly and mutually transformingthe other. "As each human being takes part in the process of this totality," he argues, "he isfundamentally changed in the very activity in which his aim is to change that reality which is the content of his consciousness."4 So it is impossible to think the world as a human feigning, for each is part of the other. We are the world, then, as its consciousness, and both of us, one is summoned to say, are projections, to use Bohm's word, of some higher-dimensionalreality, which we are given in the course of its unfolding to raise to consciousness. An aspect of that raising (and the metaphor of raising, which itself implies a transcendent order and seems so "natural" after Rilke, is perhaps only valid as a cue) is the uttering of the implicit. Unlike the languages that developed from Latin, "consciousness" does not for us connote conscience, suggesting that to be conscious is to raise perception to a higher level of perception in a movement analogous to a world rising within. We are, perhaps, wrong to use the metaphor rising, for it seems to suggest that the transcendent destroys a possibility of immanence. Let us say, then, that we cannot transcend (no climbing over, no transgression); let us say that if all relations are those of implicit and explicit, only immanence explains, that is, the dwellingwithin. This means that the sense of space that is...