Loyola University Chicago Loyola eCommons Dissertations Theses and Dissertations 2014 Moral Philosophy and the Art of Silence Kristina Grob Loyola University Chicago Follow this and additional works at: https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss Part of the Ethics and Political Philosophy Commons Recommended Citation Grob, Kristina, "Moral Philosophy and the Art of Silence" (2014). Dissertations. 1263. https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss/1263 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses and Dissertations at Loyola eCommons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Loyola eCommons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. Copyright © 2014 Kristina Grob LOYOLA UNIVERSITY CHICAGO MORAL PHILOSOPHY AND THE ART OF SILENCE A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY PROGRAM IN PHILOSOPHY BY KRISTINA GROB CHICAGO, ILLINOIS DECEMBER 2014 Copyright by Kristina Grob, 2014 All rights reserved. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Everyone knows that writing the acknowledgments for one’s dissertation is the hardest writing one will do for the doctoral degree. I could be cute and point my reader to the first chapter of this dissertation where I mention the silence that arises from the inability of language to convey the proper magnitude of a moral feeling, the moral feeling in this case being gratitude. Can a few words on this page really convey my appreciation for all the persons and offices that have made it possible for me to finish this project? Absolutely not. Nevertheless, I shall offer a few words. I must remember first of all my very long-suffering dissertation director, Mark Waymack, who has endured me, silence, and even talk of Henry James for these many years. Without his gentle prodding, professional nagging, and unwavering confidence in the interestingness of this project, it surely would have fallen into silence. Jessica Horowitz, Associate Dean of the Graduate School, has been an excellent mentor these past five years. Indeed, the Graduate School in its entirety has been a source of constant support, and I am very grateful to the deans and staff of the Graduate School. My gratitude extends to all the friends and acquaintances who have traveled this road with me in some fashion, especially Merritt Rehn-Debraal, Rebecca Robinson-West, Kelly Pinter, Hannah Kushnick, Helen Davies, Margie Justice, and Liz Ledman. Thank you. To all the members, past and present, of the English Department’s madrigals group, thanks for enduring the melodramatic melancholy of a dissertating philosopher. For the iii generous guidance and support offered by Hugh Miller, James Murphy, Jennifer Parks, David Posner, and Jacqueline Scott, a simple thank you is insufficient, but it is all I can do in this space. My family has endured my absences and silences for the better part of a decade and I am grateful for the generous cushions of silence they permitted me during my graduate studies. In the acknowledgments for her Book of Silence, Sara Maitland offers especial thanks to her spiritual director—something I had not noticed until I reached the epilogue of this dissertation. Maitland’s writing is so smooth, even when it seems most naked, that it could be easy to miss the challenges silence poses to her. I only tasted the smallest portion of the difficulty of silence and it was enough. Here I offer special thanks to my spiritual director, James Murphy, whose guidance has been inexpressibly necessary. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS iii CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCING SILENCE 1 What Is Silence? 2 Silence and Philosophy 4 A Note on Method 13 Situating the Project 21 What I am Not Doing 24 Looking Ahead 26 CHAPTER TWO: A PARTICULAR, POSSIBLE HISTORY OF SILENCE 27 Purpose of This Chapter 27 Classifying the Scholarship 28 Ancient Greek Silence 31 Silence in Ancient Philosophy 40 Silence, Rhetoric, and Gender in Early Modern England 43 American Silence 58 From Abstract Silence to Actual Ethics 64 CHAPTER THREE: SILENCE AS LOVE AND SILENCE AS CREATION 69 To the Lighthouse: Silence as Love 71 The Maytrees: Silence as Moral Growth 93 What is Moral Silence (Like)? 107 Conclusions 120 CHAPTER FOUR: SILENCE AND SOLITUDE 129 Listening Below the Noise: Speechlessness and Silence 132 A Book of Silence: Romantic Silence and Ascetic Silence 134 Silence and Narrative 136 The Stations of Solitude: A Philosopher’s Hermitage 153 Silence and Solitude 155 CHAPTER FIVE: SILENCE AND MORAL SELF-CREATION 173 The Enkratic, or the Self-Controlled Person 179 Martha Nussbaum and The Golden Bowl: Silence in the Morally Salient Particular 191 Nussbaumian Moral Growth 206 CHAPTER SIX: SILENCE AND ATTENTION 213 Iris Murdoch and the Moral Life 215 Alice Koller and Self-Transformation 231 Achieving Clear Vision 250 Conclusions 257 v EPILOGUE 262 Relationships With Others 263 Relationship of Self to Self 266 Relationship of Self to God 270 Silence and Virtue 272 BIBLIOGRAPHY 275 VITA 284 vi CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCING SILENCE And are we happy with all this tameness? Are you? —Jeanette Winterson, Art Objects There is something just a little disorienting about a text devoted to silence. What can one say about silence that will not destroy the subject? And there is something almost surprising about the vast literature about silence. The novice who wishes to explore silence without a plan or a map could easily find herself swallowed up by such a teeming sea. The past decade has seen a surge of popular research and writing on silence. There have been memoirs about silence, articles in popular magazines, and chapters in best- selling books about experiences with silent spaces.1 There have been manifestos for silence and polemics against noise.2 These writings are more and less casual, more and 1. See, for example, Gordon Hempton and John Grossman, One Square Inch of Silence: One Man’s Quest to Preserve Quiet (New York: Free Press, 2009); Melanie Hoffert, Prairie Silence: A Memoir (Boston: Beacon Press, 2013); Anne LeClaire, Listening Below the Noise: The Transformative Power of Silence (New York: Harper Perennial, 2009); Sara Maitland, A Book of Silence (London, UK: Granta Books, 2008); “Be More Bored,” Whole Living (October, 2008); Rachel Held Evans, “Silence—I am Woman, Hear Me No More,” in A Year of Biblical Womanhood: How a Liberated Woman Found Herself Siting on Her Roof, Covering Her Head, and Calling Her Husband “Master” (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, Inc., 2012). 2. See, for example, Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking (New York: Random House, 2012); George M. Foy, Zero Decibels: The Quest for Absolute Silence (New York: Simon And Schuster, 2010); Garret Keizer, The Unwanted Sound of Everything We Want: A Book About Noise (New York: Public Affairs, 2010); George Prochnik, In Pursuit of Silence: Listening for Meaning in a World of Noise (New York: Random House, 2010); Stuart Sim, Manifesto for Silence: Confronting the Politics and Culture of Noise (Edinburgh University Press, 2007). 1 2 less careful. In academia, there is a longer history of multi-disciplinary treatments of silence that includes books and articles in such fields as education, communication, literary studies.3 Theology and religious studies are so saturated with discussions of and appeals to silence that I think it might be possible to fill a dissertation-length manuscript with just an annotated bibliography thereupon. Philosophy, too, is represented in range of studies about silence, and it is to and for philosophers that I write. What Is Silence? What is silence? What does it mean to be silent? Under “silent” in the Oxford English Dictionary the main definitions are as follows: refraining from speech or utterance; taciturn, reticent, reserved; omitting mention of or reference to; passing over or disregarding; containing no account or record; marked by silence or absence of speech; characterized by the absence of sound or noise; quiet, noiseless, still. The word “silence” is derived from the word “silent”; its main definitions follow: the abstaining or forbearing of speech or utterance (sometimes with reference to a particular matter); the state or condition when nothing is audible; absence of all sound or noise; complete quietness or stillness; omission of mention, remark, or notice in narration.4 3. See for example, Robin Patric Clair, Organizing Silence: A World of Possibilities (Albany: SUNY Press, 1998); William Franke, “Varieties and Valences of Unsayability,” Philosophy and Literature 29 (2005): 489–97; Cheryl Glenn Unspoken: A Rhetoric of Silence (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2004); George Kalamaras, Reclaiming the Tacit Dimension (SUNY Press, 1994); Dennis Kurzon, Discourse of Silence (Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Co, 1998); Karmen MacKendrick, Immemorial Silence (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001); George P. Rice “The Right to Be Silent” Quarterly Journal of Speech 47 (1961): 349-54; Roy Schwartzman, “The Mother of Sound: A Phenomenology of Silence in Wordsworth's Poetry” Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Western Speech Communication Association (Feb, 1987), 1; Michelle Boulous Walker Philosophy and the Maternal Body: Reading Silence (London: Routledge, 2001). 4. “Silent,” and “Silence,” OED online. 3 These definitions can be sorted into three main categories: There is first the silence of the forbearance of speech. This silence features prominently in the silence scholarship developed in fields like communication, education, and feminist thought, and it is taken up in one article about silence.5 Second, there is a quality of silence that marks narrative gaps and omissions. This silence is commonly explored in literary art and in literary studies, and it appears in trauma studies, feminist thought, and linguistic studies. Lastly, there is the quietness that is called silence.