SAYING WHAT IS NOT SAID

Whenever I write something, whenever I “make a point,” I am acutely aware that I am “opening Pandora’s box,” releasing so much more which has not been said. My so-called “thesis” releases so many anti-theses. In making a “positive” statement, so many negative statements are instantly revealed, though unwritten. David Miller expressed such points of view, noting also the revelation of so many “mis-takes.” To “say something,” one must “take a point of view,” “a position,” that, by its very nature, is de-cisive, that is, “killing,” as it were, other points of view which are also “true in themselves.” So, is it wiser or “truer” to not delineate anything at all, but to keep silent? Or is silence itself a particular point of view or position taken? It would seem that silence could be a definite statement and not representative of impartiality or a superior moral stance whatsoever. It seems to me that silence can be quite active, with its own inherent agency. For instance, if one does not vote as an expression of one’s disapproval, the absence of that vote is a vote for the “other side.” Of course, there are those who believe themselves to be “above it all,” and of the cosmological and metaphysical “greater context” in which time and space and humanity and history occur, so that they may deduce that “nothing matters” in such a context. I have been of that mind and still often am, however, it is a fatalistic and nilhilistic perspective that perceives one’s life and oneself as inherently insignificant, if not even invisible to the point of non-existence. It is a view that one is fated to nothingness, to be nothing. And it is an absolutely false view in that it holds the individual as somehow not a part of the whole, as not a participant in the unfolding of what happens and of what is. In fact and logically, we are a part of “it all”; we participate in the unfolding and expression of fate, of what happens, of life, and of our own lives in particular. What we may call “God,” “the universe,” the “Dao,” our “ground of being,” Self, or source, is not separate from us, not only “out there,” but also “in here,” within ourselves. Of course, this brings up the questions, “Well, then, just what are ‘we’”? and “Just how do we define ‘inner’ and ‘outer’”? Every thought we have digresses to another perhaps underlying thought and endlessly so. Nothing can quite ever be explained, much less understood in the way of explanations.

          To come back to my original statement that what we say reveals in its own particular way (which is not just “reading between the lines” and surely not necessarily oppositional or paradoxical) releases so much more of what is not said. I read somewhere that Wittgenstein said of his writings, something to the effect that, “the value to be found in this book is in not what I say, but what I do not say.” Forgive me for not being able to find the exact quote. However, Wittgenstein does reflect, in Tractatus, my own points here and elsewhere:

The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is, and everything happens as it does happen: in it no value exists—and if it did, it would have no value.

If there is any value that does have value, it must lie outside the whole sphere of what happens and is the case. For all that happens and is the case is accidental. 

What makes it not-accidental cannot lie within the world, since if it did it would itself be accidental.

And so it is clear that ethics cannot be put into words.

If we take eternity to mean no infinite temporal duration but timelessness, the eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Our life has no end…

God does not reveal himself in the world.

(John Gardner, Mickelsson’s Ghosts, Knopf, 1982, p.479)

          Everything we think, believe, and say is out of context because we do not, at least consciously, have a knowledge or even really a grasp of the possible vastness or simplicity of context. Our thoughts, and the thoughts of the “great minds” of religion and philosophy and physics (for that matter) weave in and weave out, warp and woof, ebb and flow. That which I present in my writing tends to be that which “arises within me” implicitly (to use Giegerich’s descriptive term in The Soul’s Logical Life, 45), or somewhat intuitively, which I then truly attempt to make explicit. If it simply provokes thought in the reader, I am satisfied.