Silence is not a tool

I’ve already written two articles on silence: one on silence as an ethical act, and one on the shadow side of silence. Still, there is one point I want to state more explicitly here: what happens to silence the moment we try to make it “work”? The moment silence becomes an intervention that is supposed to produce a predictable effect.

We all recognize the idea: if I stay quiet, the other person will calm down. If I hold the silence, depth will appear. Connection will follow. Silence as technique.

In a recent correspondence with Roger Burggraeve (moral theologian, emeritus professor at KU Leuven, and one of the most significant Levinas readers in the Dutch-speaking world), that reflex was put under a clear ethical warning. He wrote to me about Levinas’ notion of “small goodness”, and especially about what goes wrong when we try to organize it.

His point is straightforward: small goodness cannot be recuperated by a system. You cannot turn it into rules, a method, or an implementable framework. A system is necessary, but never final. Small goodness appears in concrete encounters, arising from the unique person, and it disappears again. That is why, he says, we can mainly tell stories about it, but we cannot make it into a tool.

He also shared a line from Levinas that I immediately placed next to silence: the worst thing that could happen to Mother Teresa is that her goodness would be “preached” as a method, as a regime, as something to be imposed.

The same applies to silence.

Silence as ethics requires something different than silence as technique

In my work, silence is not “holding the floor” so that something happens. It is silence as restraint: a brief interruption of my impulse to interpret, reduce, categorize, or conclude too quickly. Silence can be a form of responsibility: I remain present, but I do not immediately make the other person manageable within my frame.

The problem begins when silence becomes part of a logic of production: “do silence and you’ll get result.” At that point, silence shifts toward instrumentality.

And that is where the shadow side becomes close. Silence can just as easily function as:

• avoidance (I don’t have to take a position)
• control (I let you speak without offering anything in return)
• moral posing (look how mature I am for staying quiet)
• distance (I call it “giving space”, but I’m not truly there)

On the surface it still looks like silence. Relationally, it is something else.

What does this mean in practice?

For me, the core is this: ethical silence is not programmable. It is not a guarantee, not a fixed step, not a trick. It requires repeated attunement to the situation: with this person, in this moment, with this history.

That’s why it helps to keep one simple question close, without turning it into a method:

Does my silence serve the other, or does it serve my position?

Sometimes silence is exactly what prevents appropriation. Sometimes speaking is necessary, because silence would become abandonment or even harm. The difference is not the form (silent or speaking), but the direction: am I carrying the relationship, or protecting myself?

Burggraeve’s email helped me formulate this more sharply: the moment we start preaching silence as technique, we lose what can make silence ethical in the first place.

Art: De aandacht van Hans Leijerzapf