This ought not be an injunction, or a maxim for the conducting of philosophic inquiry, which would discuss the things we cannot talk about so as to establish a fact about them that they are beyond our talking. If one cannot speak of something--one cannot speak of it. There is nothing to be done with such a statement, or at least nothing to be done differently.
Rather, it shows both the contradiction that is the heart of the word. That is, speaking of what cannot be spoken of. Would language be an infinite chain of symbols that never touches the world, but refers to itself the purity of a language that owns itself? Would language become a sui generis, saying itself out of itself? The experience of Wittgenstein's thinking shows that such a language could not simultaneously reach in a purity inside itself, and have anything to say in the world. Not even as a structure of world or event, but as the structure of structure, which never can show up in the world and is never completed, but is always structure striving after itself, building over itself. And this purity, where language strays out of the world and cannot be heard, is just the silence from hence it came.
For the world is not coextensive with structure, and having within it a structure of structure would annihilate that which is not coextensive with structure, because this structure of structure would offer an absolute point of reference, collapsed to completion in itself, to which all else would have to be related in a structure. There is no structure of structure. Nor is there a chaos of chaos. Always--the chaos of structure, the structure of chaos. Language game and form of life.
We know that it is always the silence, and then words. All the din of words and meaning is just noise, first, and just like the tree falling in the woods with no one round to hear, this noise is brought to question in its essence as anything over and above silence. But this silence is also brought to question. For if silence can speak; if noises can speak themselves out of silence and into the word, then it gives itself over it with any hearing. and the bustling noise of the world, even, speaks the word of God:
"And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day.
So we see it is hearing that transforms noise into word. It is hearing that founds language. That the god's voice was on the wind to the ears of people, and then to carry our voice. And this hearing..what can be said about it?
"He that hath ears to hear, let him hear.
But whereunto shall I liken this generation? It is like unto children sitting in the markets, and calling unto their fellows,
And saying, We have piped unto you, and ye have not danced; we have mourned unto you, and ye have not lamented."
This reminds me of something modern:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvsX03LOMhI
Hearing is of God. I say again, hearing is of God. What is this silence that the thinker tells us we must be? Could it be dumb silence, or could it be the silence of hearing?
"“Let there be light,” and there was light."
Why does the singer sing of a neon god? Is it not because this light, which is the light of Christ, could be bent and shaped and sent on a circuit that spells out words for us to hear? But these words boom out of the emptied spaces, the marginal spaces of our planet; they echo off the cold, built environment. And they return as the warnings of the prophets, that in our ways we could repent in sackcloth and ashes. They return as a picture of themselves as a beast; the devouring earth, that will devour itself like the hated Babylon.
Except this light that would be channeled still, as the light of Amida, shines out of all. What could channel it, contain it? It shines already in everything, with full intensity.
The word is, assuredly, of God and saying is divine.
So is sight, which gives of light and night.
And so is the bread and wine, which sates the beast.
Some day the lion will lie with the lamb.
