Abstract

The main question with which this dissertation concerns itself is: "What does one do when he or she arrives at a truth, and the nature of this truth is such that telling it will make it not a truth?" This is not simply a concern with difficult descriptions--an intelligent and tactful rhetorician can overcome these obstacles. The concern is the phenomenon that something actually will be different when it is talked about than when it is not--that is, it is ineffable. Part I is a discourse over several chapters on the question of "Where did we get our Western notions of silence?" It considers the work of sophists and philosophers in ancient Greece, including Gorgias, Plato, Isocrates and Aristotle. One finds here that the ancient notions of silence were developed alongside notions of language, and this language was a language designed and practiced to facilitate dialectic philosophy and science. Part II is a discourse over several chapters on the question of "How does our historically-situated understanding of silence work in our thoroughly prose-languaged world?" The work of Wittgenstein and Kenneth Burke addresses this question. Part III is a discourse over several chapters on the question "What alternatives are there to the use and understanding that we have of prose and silence?" This question is addressed by the work of Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, and Goethe. By analogy, one may reflect upon the notion of idiom. Unlike idiom, however, solutions to the limitations of prose cannot be tested by traveling to a prose was also spoken. What then, might be the practices which facilitate alternative worldviews to prose worldviews? The most obvious and common answer is poetry. Yet poetry does not provide this alternative, for as Heidegger points out, poetry has been relegated to the position of linguistic decoration. The dissertation presents silence as an alternative worldview to prose