Speech, Chatter, Life, and Death

“What can be said at all can be said clearly; and whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent.” - Ludwig Wittgenstein

This was quoted in Richard Neuhaus' essay, Born Toward Dying. It is ironic that I have spent much of the most recent weeks with a chip on my shoulder against unclear speech, but I have continued to mindlessly chatter about it. This essay really opened another chasm behind this unethical concept of unclear speech: the sheer fragility and delicacy of life which allows speech to exist in the first place. For many years now, I have been under a progressive conviction that the proper end, the telos, of all things is the nurturing of life. If I ever found myself at a question of direction or what to do or what to say, I often obligated myself to the reflection, "does this give life?" Yet, it is sadly the case that much of our criticisms and satire are oriented in an unconscious direction toward death. Our own worlds are tied up with our frustrations. Our picture of current affairs, of the religious world, the non-religious world, or the public square, is drawn by a self mostly preoccupied with its own petty concerns. Instead of seeking what to do, we look for something to chatter about. And why do we chatter? Because it is inarticulate, and what is inarticulate is not obligated to follow an articulate train of thought. Chatter kills things. It treats life trivially to avoid treating life delicately. I am reminded of Merton's reflection on solitude; sometimes silence is the most potent language. In a dialogue between the self and the world, the self can appropriate silence when nothing can properly be said. Hence, silence is apart of language, because it is a gesture. It is a gesture that does not resort to the short-sighted killing of a concept to ease one's frustrations. Silence is when the self waits until it sees an opportunity for life. Here, the self can finally choose to speak. It can finally choose to speak ethically and clearly, because it has reflected sufficiently beyond the simplistic divisions of reality that are hammered out by mindless chatter. This is the essence of a philosophical vocation.

Given the similarities between Heidegger and Wittgenstein, I would not be surprised if this stance on clarity, maybe translated as "a way toward Being" (in Heideggerian speech), was some where in the background when Wittgenstein wrote this. Wittgenstein was concerned about the whirlwinds philosophers get themselves in by irresponsible categorizations and philosophical dilemmas with no clear way out of them. Saying something, for both Wittgenstein and Heidegger, was tied in with a concept of showing. That is, when someone said something, their presupposed intent was to present a relatable image to their audience. When the image was not articulated in a relatable enough way, the image was no longer being shown; it was only hiding under the pretense of being shown. That is what we do when we chatter. We pretend, even to ourselves, that we are somehow drawing a relatable picture of life. In reality, we are saying nothing, only perpetuating a problem and busying ourselves with misrepresentations of what life is. It's an ironic way of how we preoccupy ourselves with something other than the respectable and conscious reality of life and death.