11 Aug 2006 13:53
Silenceme and absential quantifier
Debaprasad Bandyopadhyay <anekanta01 <at> yahoo.com>
2006-08-11 11:53:44 GMT
2006-08-11 11:53:44 GMT
“Silence itself is defined in relationship to words, as the pause in music receives its meaning from the group of notes round it. The silence is a moment of language; being silent is not being dumb; it is refuse to speak, and therefore keep on speaking.” – Jean Paul Sartre. 1948. What is Literature?
Now I am trying to understand the ontology as well as phenomenology of silence as elaborated by cage by deploying an Indian philosophical tool called abhava or absence. In the Nyaya-Vaiseska (henceforth NV, Indian Logic) tradition, categories are distinguished based on their presence (bhava) and absence(abhava). They considered both the existence and non-existence as categories, which are subject to the knowledge or
cognition by means of generic perception.
Generally, in the English translations of the NV-literature, this category comes under the notion of negation and its subdivisions are translated as “relational absence” and “mutual absence” or “difference” (anyonyabhava). In the context of “silence”, I will mainly concentrate on the “relational absence” or simply absence rather than that of difference.
All relations are regarded in
Navyanyaya as dyadic relations between two terms: anuyogin (referend, qualificand, locus X) and pratiyogin (counterpositive, referent, qualifier, located Y). Relation (R) is always a property resident in the residence or referend. Thus, one can say X –(R-Y) where X is the locus of absence of Y where R is a relata.
In case of relational absence, a qualifier qualifies a qualificand and by negating it we get an “absence of that qualifier” (which is another qualifier) qualifying the same qualificand, “this silent-space X is qualified by speaking-absence Y”. On the other hand, difference referred to “this is not silence” type of negation. Thus, absence of non-speaking-ness and difference from a silence are two distinguishable sub-categories of abhava.
These blank spaces may be perceived /cognized as a category called “absence” (absence is always designated in relation to something). One could perceive absence by assigning the absential qualifier/ counterpositive to the locus of empty locus/ referend, qualificand. Thus, the absence of speaking means perceiving the dyadic relations between two constructs: speaking and non-speaking in a certain locus. There is no absolute non-speaking silent zone---all silent zones are pervaded by the non-silence and vise versa, however, when, speaking/listening subject is perceiving something as “silence” is actually cognizing “absence” of stipulated non-silence in a locus. Thus, in the terminologies of NV, the speaking/listening subject perceives the “absence” of couterpositive (stipulated non-silence) in the locus of supposed/stipulated silence. And it is a case of Absential relation.
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