Silence Divine, An Allegory
The question we are leading to: is there intrinsic normativity, does it extend [would this be better expressed as the experience of silence being an intrinsically valuable good? e.g. a question I never decided⁴] to the (default) right to silence? Dwell in that space’s inception, to appreciate the state of wonder that came first, before the world & its posturing, music scored with negative emotions dividing humanity against itself, the silent thought of creation before accidental tragedy, goodness belonging to that state which grounds the incident of its expression.
When you are at home to rest from work on your 7th day, appreciate the sadness that constructs the thought: a mistake, one that cannot be undone, to depart from the goodness of silence, that there be creation & freedom of expression, including expressions of social-cultural identities Then when dirt bikes are wrapped in clouds of each others exhaust & as you try to relax, or wave to pause in conversation with yourself, you will nonetheless marvel at it as a mere instance of a cosmic mistake.
Whether the divine silence is silenced upon creation, or the mundane silence you happen to have enjoyed is silenced by the heel to pedal revving of fools in their glut of personal expression.
Then you realize that, as the silence necessary for freedom of thought, so the goodness necessary for the freedom of creation…the delicate slips away⁵.
* Kingdom of Ends
Suppose there is a right to which all others have an inviolate obligation to uphold. What would explain the objective status of such a right/obligation pair except features of the intentional agents they encompass—that you are such that you must uphold your obligation and the other is such that that is their right. It seems so in case of the universal negative right to not be harmed w/o consent⁶. The very thought of harming so and so w/o consent seems charged with wrongness. If you are your thoughts, you are infused (or not) with righteousness. Then if the existence of such rights has been made out, the extension to silence as a default right is on par with other negative rights due to its being a necessary requirement of the right to freedom of thought, & indeed personal expression (whose claim presumably derives from freedom of thought) that ironically can serve to stifle it.
Kant once imagined a kingdom of ends, and while we could picture this kingdom of ends as legislated by gods, or ideal moral reasoners, saints or sages, lined in chorus or quorum on the showroom floor, we have to wonder about the silent pauses that would be needed to prevent, or at least to forestall, the cacophony each proclaiming to know the truth. If morality is a set of principles arrived at through a consensus of such beings, we must remember the silences that precipitated & were necessary for deliberations—why this ‘must’ unless we understood them intimately, in our own case, as intentional agents capable of legislating our own ends?
Hence the necessity for the absence of noise even in asking what should be done, what should be appreciated, and prior to feeling appreciation for anything.
Be grateful for it, as it is among the grounds of gratitude in the widest sense, for what is & what was & what will be.
Be grateful for it, as it is as necessary for the stars to exist as for you.
The ability to listen within silence is the ground for the broadest sense of gratitude.
4. Though, for those interested in technicalities, the relationship could be this: if R is a right for S, s.t. S* has the corresponding obligation, then R is a right…in virtue of the consequences of complying with the obligation being good, or conducive to the goods that are intrinsically valuable. Including the good of silence itself. Alternatively, someone might say that rights are rights, and including among them the right to personal expression and its entailment of silence-cancelling noise. But then if rights are rights, every instance where silence intervened upon noise, because it represented a possibility, the semblance of a thought, the break between stimulus and response as Nietzsche characterizes, would be wrong, in violation of a right, though it cannot be the right to exercise one’s intellect upon a text it required silence to compose.
5. What if you were to end up bookended one day by what Rilke called mutually protective solitudes, what might have assessed as mutually assertive silences? I’m talking about the ones from Solomé, Nietzsche when he turned his back to everyone in silence after witnessing the cracking whip against some poor horse…he intervened and was never the same afterwards. It is as if in spite of blaming the Wagner of his youth and fantasizing about the übermensch ready at hand to replicate its type, there was yet the placid brown horse’s eye, mirroring his own bearded reflection after it had endured those years of abuse. And he saw himself there, and understood instantly as Gabriel explaining to Mary, that goodness of silent suffering he alone had caused.
6. Choose your own qualified example if you don’t like this one; if you are e.g. a particularist and believe no such explanation is needed then skip to the section ‘meta-expressivism’.