What can be said about quietness? The Alaska Quiet Rights Coalition certainly isn’t the first to have directed its attention to this subject. We’ve all seen how the world is becoming increasingly full of distractions and disruptions. It feels harder and harder to just “get away from it all”. Speaking for myself, as someone who grew up watching Looney Tunes, I can still hear Mel Blanc’s voice echoing in my head “Quiet!” The irony isn't lost. This has been called the ‘Age of Accelerationism’ in contrast to the less energy intensive (and generally slower) patterns that defined life in the not-too-distant past. But acceleration toward what and why, I do not know. It's a schizophrenic existence, and escaping from the hustle and bustle can seem like a small act of rebellion.
How did we get to this point? How have cultural perspectives on the role of quietness, of silence, shaped our culture and thought, and changed over time? As A.N. Whitehead noted, “the sort of ideas we attend to, and the sort of ideas which we push into the negligible background, govern our hopes, our fears, our control of behaviour. As we think, we live. This is why the assemblage of philosophic ideas is more than a specialist study. It moulds our type of civilization.” He also added, perhaps as a cautionary note, “the difficulty of philosophy is the expression of what is self-evident. Our understanding outruns the ordinary usage of words”. Wittgenstein concurred with the latter statement: “God grant the philosopher insight into what lies in front of everyone’s eyes”. Given how self-evident the value of quietness is, we are perhaps doomed from the outset to provide an adequate description! But there’s a lot that has been said about quietness and its virtues already.
One may give a simple physical description of how acoustic waves propagate through a medium. And for many people the presence or absence of such features would suffice when defining the opposing qualities of quietness and noise. But this leaves out how different sounds are interpreted, how they affect us and other meaning-making members of the environment, and what we think when we hear different sounds. Such higher order effects are impacted by the sensual quality of a place, making its measurement a complex calculation. These acoustic–environmental relationships have been studied by people concerned with semiotics (specifically biosemiotics or ecosemiotics), which are processes that involve signs and the communication of meaning. Signs can be received by any of the senses, whether visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory, or taste. When we step outside, and listen to an environment that is not dominated by human made sounds (anthrophony), we enter a world rich with meaning to the other organisms with whom we share the planet. In his talk "Opening the Doors of Creativity" (1990) Terence McKenna underscored this point, saying "Nature is not mute; it is man who is deaf". This was a response to Sartre, who said "Nature is mute".
According to cultural anthropologist and Indigenous rights activist Eduardo Kohn, author of "How Trees Think", what we share with nonhuman living creatures is not just our physical bodies (the evidence of common evolutionary descent) but also the fact that we all live with and through signs. Because we are not the only ones who think, human language is just one kind of sign system. This means that understanding other forms used by nonhuman living creatures (see Karen Bakker, author of The Sounds of Life) can open up an entire “semiosphere” of meaning where processes of combinatorial complexity form increasingly complex “semiotic webs” that are accessible to cognitive agents at the higher "integrative levels" (a term used by Stanley Salthe) typical of biological life. Kohn’s work with the Runa in Ecuador taught him that forests and the many beings that live in them –animals, plants, and perhaps even spirits– also think. (McKenna's statement clearly does not apply equally to people such as the Runa.) “Finding ways to allow the thoughts of the forest to think themselves through us changes our understanding and can open our thinking to that which lies beyond the human context.” Kohn believes it can “provide ethical guidance in these times of human-driven planetary ecological crisis, a crisis that can be characterized as an affliction of this larger ecology of mind.” But it’s not just the forest, it’s the tundra, the desert, the oceans, the planet. “We need to cultivate our attunement to the world."
If sounds are part of a semiosphere, then it’s clear that disruption of this web of meaning, through noises that do not communicate meaningful information to others, or otherwise prevent normal interactions, can have broader impacts on ecologies. This suggests a dual-aspect definition of "quiet" (via negativa and via positiva). According to this approach, it is both the absence of most forms of technophony, and a necessary precondition for enabling the presence of biophony/geophony of the sort that characterizes ecosemiosis, or a healthy ecosemiotic web. Could this be why quietness has been held a virtue across cultures? Although apparent quietness is the outward manifestation, what is really being selected for is optimization of experiential quality and wider resonance with the environmental milieu. Filmmakers also try to achieve a synchronization between the film and the audience, and understand that a soundtrack cannot convey too much information, but should strive for just enough. As Iain McGilchrist writes in The Matter with Things:
“The imagination thrives on the implicit, and is deadened by the explicit. The explicit is single: the implicit is a coming together of opposites, and requires the simultaneous presence and absence of whatever is being gestured towards. We may become more aware of something if it is partially eclipsed, while a pure manifestation would not have achieved its end. If you are making a film, and wish to evoke the stillness of a warm day in the country, do you leave the soundtrack completely blank? No, you introduce the faint and intermittent buzzing of a fly. In an interior scene of tranquillity, the faint, slow, deep tick-tock of a grandfather clock intensifies both the peace and, as may seem oddly, the sense that time has come to a standstill. When the top of a mountain is hidden in cloud we appreciate its full immensity better than when the whole is in view. Limitation can intensify the sense of infinity.”
The Japanese cultural aesthetic of 間 (ma), means 'betweenness', a gap, space, pause, or the perception of an interval in time or space where dissimilar things can freely co-exist. It is the opposite of empty, and more the place where a dynamic dance can occur. Isaac Stern described music as ‘that little bit between each note – silences which give the form’. It is the relations between things, the tension between sound and silence, that is of primary importance. The composer John Cage, who studied Zen Buddhism since the late 1940s, decided to visit an anechoic chamber. Though he expected to hear silence he could still hear the rush of his blood circulating through his body. His realization of the impossibility of silence led to the composition of 4′33″ three years later. This has been described as “four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence”, but what it really consists of are the sounds of the environment that the audience hears while it is performed. As Julius Lester would write much later, “Silence was not the absence of sound but was itself a sound that could be loud or soft, soothing or disturbing, complex or simple.” In his book, A Short History of Chinese Philosophy, Fung Yulan wrote “the combination of Taoism and Buddhism resulted in Ch’anism [Zen], which I should like to call a philosophy of silence. If one understands and realizes the meaning and significance of silence, one gains something of the object of metaphysics.” There are other philosophical movements which have been called quietist, and avoided metaphysical speculation, but this was not what Yulan referred to:
“There were Ch’an Masters who used silence to express the idea of Wu or the First Principle. It is said, for example, that when Hui-chung (died 775) was to debate with another monk, he simply mounted his chair and remained silent. The other monk then said: “Please propose your thesis so I can argue.” Hui-chung replied: “I have already proposed my thesis.” The monk asked: “What is it?” Hui-chung said: “I know it is beyond your understanding,” and with this left his chair. (Record of the Transmission of the Light, chüan 5.) The thesis Hui-chung proposed was that of silence. Since the First Principle or Wu is not something about which anything can be said, the best way to expound it is to remain silent.”
Chinese philosophical traditions refer to the “net of words.” And accordingly, the best statements do not “fall into the net of words.” Zhuangzi made this famous: “Nets are for catching fish; after one gets the fish, one forgets the net. Traps are for catching rabbits; after one gets the rabbit, one forgets the trap. Words are for getting meaning; after one gets the meaning, one forgets the words. Where can I find people who have forgotten words, and have a word with them?" Alan Watts, who decades ago provided many Westerners with their first introduction to Eastern philosophy, said “To be silent is not to lose your tongue. On the contrary, it is only through silence that one can discover something new to talk about.” There is an acute awareness of a tension that exists between what may be best described as opposites. Philosophical schools needed a solution to the paradox of describing the indescribable. Enough words to indirectly gesture toward their principles, while maintaining, as Wittgenstein later noted, that “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” Hegel held that antinomies appear in all conceptions, and that “every actual thing involves a coexistence of opposed elements. Consequently to know, or, in other words, to comprehend an object is equivalent to being conscious of it as a concrete unity of opposed determinations.” The title "Sandokai", one of the core texts of Zen, is translated as ‘the harmony of difference and sameness’. This unity of opposites was the cornerstone of philosophical Taoism, illustrated by the yin and yang of the taijitu symbol, and of central theme in Heraclitus’ thought, which he explained through the metaphor of the taunt strings on a lyre which are pulled in opposite directions. Other examples, such as hot and cold, light and dark, or sound and silence, are too numerous to list. As Alan Watts pointed out, we cannot “keep the mountains and get rid of the valleys”. Niels Bohr noted that contraria sunt complementa (contraries fulfil one another) described the fine structure of the cosmos. Iain McGilchrist explains the ‘Heraclitean tension’ between opposites:
For opposites to co-exist, they clearly cannot cancel or annul one another, but must rather give rise to something new: a form of harmoniē, as in Heraclitus’ lyre. But note that this harmony is not to be taken merely in the ordinary musical sense of concord, but in the sense of tonos, tautness, from which we get our word ‘tone’. If the opposing forces in lyre or bow simply annulled one another, the string would go slack – no tonus – and nothing, no flight of notes, no arrow’s flight – could come from either. This is also, by the way, what is intended by the Golden Mean: not a flabby compromise, but a position in which taut synergy produces a dynamic equipoise.
This insight has found expression in one form or another in most ancient cultures and may be described as a form of dual-aspect monism. Applied to the interactions within Eduardo Kohn’s semiosphere, it can serve as part of the foundation for a fully relational perspective, one that could eventually lead to a context sensitive attunement that supports ecological health and well-being. We’ve briefly looked at some physical, metaphysical, and phenomenal descriptions of quietness. We haven’t touched on the “Great Silence” however. This question has occupied anyone who has ever looked up at the night sky and wondered: “Are we alone?” Karl Schroeder provided one possible solution to the Fermi Paradox: advanced technology may simply be indistinguishable from Nature, and the corresponding alien civilizations would hence be indistinguishable from natural systems. He speculated “In the Great Silence, we see the future of technology, and it lies in achieving greater and greater efficiencies… After all, SETI is essentially a search for technological waste products: waste heat, waste light, waste electromagnetic signals. We merely have to posit that successful civilizations don't produce such waste, and the failure of SETI is explained." That's pure speculation. But one thing is certain: cultural values combined with contemporary levels of social stress and our desire for peace and quiet are all urging us to reconsider our relationship with excessive noise.
[See also "Ecology of Fear" subsection in this article.]
