Silence is something we are all familiar with, but it is also very enigmatic. When a person remains quiet, is something communicated or nothing at all? Scholars, linguists, and psychologists have debated this for centuries as to whether silence is communication, absence without connotation, or something in between. The problem is not merely theoretical, it affects human relationships, social life, and how we make sense.
At first glance, silence may appear as the absence of communication: no message, no word, no open expression. Silence is most often literally that way most of the time, it’s uninformative, empty, and neutral. Still, human beings hardly use a completely neutral term for silence. Even in the absence of words, silence is never “nothing.” Silence has the ability to convey emotion, convey intent, or convey thought. A pause in words, for example, can convey hesitation, thought, embarrassment, or tension. Silence can be louder than words merely because of human nature to infer meaning into it.
For teenagers, even the silence can feel unusually charged too. Among peers, a silence, nonanswer, or quiet scheming may indicate judgment, indifference, or closeness. Silence may be understood as rejection, assent, or underhanded manipulation. In conflict or intimacy, what is unsaid may have greater power to define relationships than what is spoken. Such duplicative aspect of silence makes it especially complex in human communication.
Silence also resists meaning and intentionality at the philosophical level. Communication is commonly understood to entail purpose: words, gestures, or symbols used knowingly to represent thought. Silence resists this. Is the occurrence of non-words intentional? Consider the moment when someone is silent deliberately. They may be silently disapproving, thinking, or morally withholding. Or silence may be unintentional, induced by confusion, fear, or difficulty articulating thought. Meaning is a matter of context, and it keeps before us the fact that meaning is relational, not inherent.
Silence is meaningful in philosophy and in the arts. Mystical philosophies have long employed silence as the means of truth, as a way of gaining knowledge that is greater than language. In Zen Buddhism, for example, silence is not emptiness but a place of knowing and perception. Silence is called upon: it establishes a dialogue between the state of deficiency and the human mind which interprets it. In fiction and poetry, the unsaid is eloquent, and the readers or the listeners are encouraged to use their feelings and imagination.
At a social level, silence is a weapon or an instrument. Group silence can perpetuate injustice, and social movements and demonstrations typically begin by breaking silence. Silence protects or hides, comforts or alienates. At a philosophical level, this shows that silence is never mere absence; rather, it is always within a web of meaning, relation, and interpretation.
Lastly, silence is communication, yet not communication. It is a consequence of doubleness: everything and nothing all at once. An appreciation for the two-sideness of silence instigates questioning of how human beings understand intention, emotion, and meaning. For young people and adults, an awareness of the possibility that silence can express thought without words invites watching, feeling, and thinking. Silence is not emptiness; it is the convergence of thinking, perceiving, and thinking, providing understanding lost when described only.