Silence is a fundamental structure of Dasein that
aids care in preserving a constant expectation that attempts to ground its
possibilities in something impossibly outside of its worldliness. My first objective will be to define what
Silence is and how it relates to faith and miracles. As well, I will want to explain what exactly
it means to be “outside of worldliness.”
Next, I will speak specifically about Dasein and the problem that
existence has for Dasein as an always threatening groundlessness. Finally, I will discuss how Silence is used
by Dasein as anticipation for a response that Dasein knows can never come.
To begin with, Silence is to be understood as
an active refusal to communicate and not merely as an accidental or intentional
absence of audible stimuli. I am not here referring to the quietness of sitting
peacefully alone. Rather, Silence is a
result from an expectation of a response from something meaning giving or meaning
preserving; something which covers up the anxiety of being a nothingness. The
deaf can experience this Silence as vividly as any hearing-body.
Typically,
a miracle is that concrete event which roots faith in some higher faith,
whether it is God’s being born and dying, Moses parting the sea, or Buddha’s
reaching enlightenment. It is that event
in which we attempt to bridge the gap between our finite existence and the
existence of something infinite in our lives. But the catch lies in that this higher meaning
has to somehow be apart and above anything that contains our worldliness,
otherwise it is merely a common entity or event.
It
is here that Slavoj Žižek’s definition of the Sacred might be instrumental to
my analysis: the Sacred is a void inside ourselves which we seek to fill, yet
never can (Žižek 26 – 7). In order to
register as a miracle, an event would have to register within the believer as
something that satisfies the Sacred, but as Žižek explains, everything in this
world amounts to “shit” when it is expected to fill the Sacred (26). The key to Silence, then, is that it rests in
a transcendence which nothing in this world can ever satisfy.
Whatever registers as breaking the Silence
must come from without, and it must remain there. Thus, it must not ever be audible (or concrete) or else it becomes
worldly and suspect to the same groundlessness and finitude that haunts our own
lives. This is fundamentally the reason
why witnessing a miracle and accepting a miracle are not the same thing. The gap of absurdity is not overcome in this
world.
What
this leads to is that Silence has its source from something that is not in this
world and has as its function the drive to ground existence in something is
outside of this world, something eternal which the Sacred is held open for. But, as was mentioned before and explained
better later, Silence is an expectation and as such remains a background noise that
events are contrasted with or interpreted through. To better understand this and its everyday
function, it is necessary to examine some key features of Dasein as described
by Heidegger.
Dasein,
the being in which its own Being is an issue (Heidegger 164), can be understood
as an opening for meaning that grasps and accesses entities in relationship to
its project that it is engaged. This
process is that which gives entities their instrumental value and meaning to
Dasein, and have no grounding apart from their use in that project or projects. This groundlessness is a problem that
undermines and threatens Dasein’s very existence.
Heidegger
describes the way in which Dasein understands its existence is in terms of
possibilities of itself, whether they are chosen by Dasein or not (165). A neglecting of possibilities, a failure to
recognize the “mineness” (167 – 8) in existence, is constituent of an
inauthentic mode of Being. This
inauthentic mode of being is rooted in an absorption into the world in which
Dasein has been thrown, or an absorption into what Heidegger calls fallenness
(178). Here, Dasein has not taken any
ownership of possibilities or choices, but has merely fallen into the security
created for it. It is for this very
reason that Silence is disturbing, as Silence carries with it, as seen before,
a personal relation to possibilities. This is because Silence forces a
recognition of mineness within Dasein in order to recognize the criteria for a
miracle in approximation with certain expectations. This is how Silence participates in meaning
creation and forces an authentic criteria for faith to be subjective faith.
The
fact that this Silence can be the basis for these meaning producing
relationships is only evidence as to the paradoxical nature that Silence
assumes in everyday Dasein’s existence.
This is to say that Silence assumes itself actively within Dasein which
is what prevents Silence itself from being a nothingness. It is in this way that everyday occurrences
are elevated as a sign of something beyond: life itself is regarded as a
miracle, as is trash blowing in the wind a sign of divine presence. It would be ridiculous to say that this trash
fills the Sacred, as it is after all trash, however, it is the expectation of a
miracle (the outside hand behind the
trash) which creates the condition for Silence to exist. As explained by Žižek, you cannot play
hide-and-seek by only hiding, there needs to be another person seeking (Žižek 53). So too, you cannot have Silence without the
expectation of sound. And so, when listening for something outside of this
world, there is only this world to listen
in. The trash blowing in the wind takes on the appearance of divine
presence for the relationship it has with everything that it is not, everything
that it points to outside of itself.
This
is why Silence becomes a background noise heard only by Dasein, it becomes
something that Dasein actively seeks and in doing so produces as audible.
This Silence cannot exist on its own, but rather, it requires someone to
seek it. This mode of existing before
the fact indicates the way in which Silence is heavily involved in Dasein’s
tendency to project into its own possibilities (Heidegger 176), and so its
relationship to care. As residing
ultimately in projection and possibility, Silence is never in the here and now
but is always something which attempts to ground the potential. This lends itself the elusive quality which
allows the Sacred to remain unsatisfied, as discussed above, because whatever is slips through the void as worldly.
The
most fundamental use that Dasein has for Silence is to cover the possibility of
its own death, in the sense of meaning an ultimate limit put upon Dasein, and
thus an end to possibilities (180).
Silence is the noise beyond death, because that which serves as evidence
for the ultimate grounding of existence is also evidence to support its own
eternal possibility. Silence keeps alive
the passion of listening and
projecting because that which is ultimately to be heard always lies beyond.
It
is in this way that Dasein, in experiencing Silence expects to hear what cannot
be heard but at the same time plays an active role in Dasein’s meaning creation
upon its own possibilities. In other
words, from this persistent absence the Thing appears in its own
expectation. The expectation is enough
to hold open the space for the Sacred, which itself preserves faith in there
being something to fill it in the first place, although that something by
definition could never exist in any concrete form. Silence, then, becomes the
background noise which Dasein hears in order to cover up its own not hearing,
which in itself is what perpetuates its own search while it always points to
something beyond the finite and so beyond what is audible.
(Word Count: 1,312)
Works
Cited
Heidegger, Martin.
“Being and Time.” Existentialist
Philosophy. Ed. Nathan Oaklander.
New
Jersey:
Prentice Hall, Inc. 1996. 164 – 180.
Žižek, Slavoj. The Fragile Absolute. New York: Verso,
2000. Print.
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