One gift has been given me and in such a degree that I can call it genius it is the gift of conversation, of being able to talk with everyone.

This happy gift was given to me in order to conceal the undoubted fact that I am the most silent man of my day.

Silence hid in silence is suspicious, arouses mistrust, it is just as though one were to betray something; at least betrayed that one was keeping silence. But silence concealed by a decided talent for conversation as true as ever I live that is silence.

                    Soren Kierkegaard, Journals

Today the majority of us take it for granted that it is possible for us to hide our interior experience behind our public expressions, i.e. that our true self can be veiled behind what we do and how we act. However, such an idea was not always taken for granted.

It is perhaps Homer who first articulates the possibility of hiding ones true self behind ones public acts when he wrote of how Odysseus, while listening to stories of his own battles in the court of the Phaecian King Antinous, was overcome with grief. However, rather than showing this, Odysseus conceals it. Crying on the inside while remaining composed on the outside. This was not however described as a natural ability, rather it was presented as a unique gift, a supernatural feat in which he was able to divorce his true self from his external appearance.

Yet the very thing that Homer described as a miracle is what we take for granted today as normal. Hence we think that it is hard for us to see the truth of others motives because they have the ability lie to us (i.e. hide their true identity from us).

But what if the ’self’ is not hidden behind our public actions (idealism), nor simply the sum of our public actions (crude materialism), but rather is hidden within our public actions? This is what Freud described when he commented that, if one really pays heed to a person, one will find it hard to believe that humans can lie. For even if a persons lips spill forth lies their tapping fingers, subtle glances and bodily gestures will confess the truth.

When listening to the other, or to ourselves, the lesson here is that we must not get carried away with believing conscious descriptions of events (or manifest acts), but rather pay heed to what lies hidden within them.

Of course it is hard to see the truth of the others motives (and our own). But this is not because the other can fundamentally lie to us, but because we can so easily lie to ourselves. In other words, rather than being creatures who long after truth (Aristotle) we often cannot bear it and hide from it.

The double enigma of human subjectivity (see previous post) is not to be thought of as an enigma because the true self is somehow hidden behind our gestures (in our consciousness), but rather because who we are is hidden within them (one of the fundamental lessons of psychoanalysis).

So then, when Kierkegaard penned the deeply melancholic words above we should not jump to the conclusion that his silence was impossible to perceive (because it lay behind his words, in his consciousness). No. The point is that his silence was embedded within his words (and within his consciousness). There, for anyone who had ears, to hear it.

Of course there are very few who can truly touch our subjective world, who can touch the secret that we are to ourselves.

Perhaps, for Kierkegaard, there was only one who ever could hear the gentle silence in his speech: his beloved and beautiful Regina. A woman who he was separated from in life but with whom his body shares a space in death…

Tags: Freud, Kierkegaard, Peter Rollins, Regina Olsen, subjectivity

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 17th, 2009 at 6:02 am and is filed under Philosophy/Theology, Reflection. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.