**Links to**: [[Metaphysics of Presence]], [[Absence]], [[Apophasis]], [[Silence]], [[Arguments from]], [[Différance]], [[Wittgenstein]], [[Avidya]], [[12 Negintelligibility]], [[The schein of negintelligibility]], [[Lack]]. # _**argumentum ex silentio**_ Arguments from silence are, whether ‘truly out of ignorance’ or willingly out of ‘purposeful omission,’ situations where the lack of particular information makes the argument. The interesting thing about the argument from silence is that everything is an argument from silence. We do not know, therefore we speculate.^[It is also [[Avidya]], [[12 Negintelligibility]].] How do we learn (anew), if we do not attempt a plunge into total unknowing? 莊子與惠子遊於濠梁之上。莊子曰：儵魚出遊從容，是魚樂也。 Zhuangzi and Huizi were enjoying themselves on the bridge over the Hao River. Zhuangzi said, “The minnows are darting about free and easy! This is how fish are happy.” 惠子曰：子非魚，安知魚之樂。莊子曰：子非我，安知我不知魚之樂。 Huizi replied, “You are not a fish. How do you know that the fish are happy?” Zhuangzi said, “You are not I. How do you know that I do not know that the fish are happy?” 惠子曰：我非子，固不知子矣；子固非魚也，子之不知魚之樂全矣。 Huizi said, “I am not you, to be sure, so of course I don't know about you. But you obviously are not a fish; so the case is complete that you do not know that the fish are happy.” 莊子曰：請循其本。子曰汝安知魚樂云者，既已知吾知之而問我，我知之濠上也。 Zhuangzi said, “Let's go back to the beginning of this. You said, How do you know that the fish are happy; but in asking me this, you already knew that I know it. I know it right here above the Hao.” — Zhuangzi, chapter 17 (Watson translation), accessed 7 June 11:44 on Wikipedia. %% "In the field of classical studies, it often refers to the assertion that an author is ignorant of a subject, based on the lack of references to it in the author's available writings. .... based on a writer's failure to mention an event, are distinct from arguments from ignorance which rely on a total "absence of evidence" and are widely considered unreliable; however arguments from silence themselves are also generally viewed as rather weak in many cases; or considered as fallacies." _The Routledge Companion to Epistemology_ by Sven Bernecker and Duncan Pritchard (2010) [ISBN](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISBN_(identifier) "ISBN (identifier)") [0-415-96219-6](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:BookSources/0-415-96219-6 "Special:BookSources/0-415-96219-6") [Routledge](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Routledge "Routledge") pp. 64–65 "arguments from silence are, as a rule, quite weak; there are many examples where reasoning from silence would lead us astray." John Lange, _The Argument from Silence_, History and Theory, Vol. 5, No. 3 (1966), pp. 288–301 ### Author's [[Interest]] It is believed that the importance of an event can affect whether or not contemporary authors will mention it. Historian Krishnaji Chitnis suggests that for the argument from silence to be valid, the event must be of interest and significance to the individual recording it, otherwise it may be ignored. An example of this is the lack of mention of the Magna Carta by contemporary authors, despite it being recognized as a crucial national document by later historians. Similarly, at the turn of the first century, there was a lack of discernible mention of Christians by Roman authors such as Martial and Juvenal. Classicist Timothy Barnes notes that this may be because of the low level of interest and awareness of the Christian religion within the Roman Empire. Theologian Peter Lampe suggests that this silence from Roman sources may _____ ![[sarraute 1.png]] Tirasait p. 85 __________ For [[STRP]]: main focus is all those silent people who were actually chill and left no mark. ______ "Opening the second page of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung some weeks ago, an image stood out showing a woman writing with chalk on one of two stand-up black silhouettes (Marti, 2015, p. 2). Th e image accompanies a short article entitled “Columbia excavates mass grave”, reporting on the fi ndings of former killings of civilians by paramilitary groups and revealing the corpses of up to 300 disappeared individuals. Th e caption of the images says “ceremony for the families of the disappeared of Medellín”. Th e actual text of the woman writing translates “**we are the sound of silence**”." (Brunner Conjunctions pdf he sent) _____________ "How else can one write but of those things which one doesn't know, or knows badly? It is precisely there that we imagine having something tot say. We write only at the frontiers of our knowledge, at the border which separates our knowledge from our ignorance and transforms the one into the other. Only in this manner are we resolved to write. ... Perhaps writing has a relation to silence altogether more threatening than that which it is supposed to entertain with death." (preface French, [[Difference and Repetition]]) __________ “Silence is the ultimate weapon of power.” Charles De Gaulle (18th President of the French Republic) (found quote in Jose Luis Espejos homepage The Politics of Aural Space) ___________ Maynard Solomon, [[Mozart]] scholar, writes of Mozart writing to Constanze (wife), about the success of _The Magic Flute_ (1791): > "But what always gives me the most pleasure is the _silent approval_! You can see how this opera is becoming more and more esteemed." ... He went to hear his opera almost every night, taking along [friends and] relatives. Solomon, Maynard, p. 487. Mozart: A Life. New York: Harper Collins, 1995. _________________ "[[Derrida]] first plays on the "silence" of the a in différance as being like a silent tomb, like a pyramid, like the pyramid to which Hegel compares the body of the sign. "Tomb" in Greek is oikesis, which is akin to the Greek _oikos_ (house) from which the word "economy" derives (oikos) house and nemein--to manage). Thus Derrida speaks of the "economy of death" as the "familial residence and tomb of the proper." Further, and more elliptically still, Derrida speaks of the tomb, which always bears an inscription in stone, announcing the death of the tyrant. This seems to refer to Hegel's treatment of the Antigone story in the Phenomenology. It will be recalled that Antigone defies the tyrant Creon by burying her brother Polynices. Creon retaliates by having Antigone entombed. There she cheats the slow death that awaits her by hanging herself. The tyrant Creon has a change of heart too late, and (after the suicides of his son and wife, his family) kills himself. Thus family, death, inscription, tomb, law, economy. In a later work, Glas, Derrida analyzes Hegel's treatment of the Antigone. .... ...Or to anyone. Reserving itself, not exposing itself, in regular fashion it exceeds the order of truth at a certain precise point, but without dissimulating itself-as something, as a mysterious being, in the occult of a nonknowledge or in a hole with indeterminable borders (for example, in a topology of castration).5 In every exposition it would be exposed to disappearing as disappearance. It would risk appearing: disappearing." http://web.stanford.edu/class/history34q/readings/Derrida/Differance.html %% ### Footnotes