In the world of the mind, silence can have at least the following significances:

1. Dialogue, as a form of movement of the mind, is an alternation of speech and silence. Not knowing how to keep silence means, in these conditions, holding your mind in one place, maintaining a foolish monologue, revolving within the finite circle of your own mind. It means verbal hemorrhage, logorrhea.

2. Silence is, in another sense, an autodidactic principle, a necessary step in every Bildung or paidee. It is the period of "delivery of goods," of spiritual regeneration, recharging of batteries, and so on. In any cultural biography there must be moments when you do not produce, but only consume culture, when you must keep silence. Failing to keep silence in this case means tautologizing, beating time on the spot, dying from the inability to renew your own substance.

3. Silence can also appear either as a form of recognition of powerlessness in the face of the task of speaking the essential, or as a recognition of the fact that you have nothing essential to say. Heidegger writes: "Before speaking, man must listen again to the voice of Being, at the risk that under the sign of this demanding call he may have little, and seldom anything at all to say. Only in this way is the priceless character of its essence restored to the word, and to man a place to live in the truth of being." So failing to keep silence in this case means remaining on the surface of things, speaking superfluously, introducing inflation into the verbal space.

4. Silence can be a form of dignity of the mind, a form of protest. You go into silence when those around you are speaking too much and unworthily. Failing to keep silence in this case means participating in the spread of the immorality of the word.

5. Finally, "learning to keep silence" may be understood as a behavioral corrective based on negative experience of the effects of speech. Silence thus becomes the expression of acquired wisdom translated into prudence.

THE PÄLTINIS DIARY
A Paideic Model in Humanist Culture
GABRIEL LIICEANU