The silence of obedience, in other words, is that form of silence which brings our speech to an end. The silence of expectation, on the other hand, is just the opposite: it is the silence that makes speech possible. The intuitive idea behind the latter form of silence is a simple one: unless we have someone to speak to we cannot speak, and unless someone is listening there is no one to whom we can speak.

This is a familiar theme in the contemporary philosophy of language. We cannot actually speak to ourselves. I cannot speak to myself any more than I can steal from myself, or make myself richer by placing the dollar I have in one hand into the other. If I had no one to talk to I would quite literally have to give up talking-except perhaps to continue in the sort of meaningless babble we call "talking to ourselves," a characteristic of insanity-and what is much worse, I would eventually cease having anything to say.

Therefore, unless someone offers me a silence in the form of their listening I cannot speak. I am quite dependent on their silence to be able to say anything at all. I refer to this as the silence of expectation because it is a silence in which I am expected to speak. Another person has stopped speaking, has turned toward me with an invitation to speak, and is waiting for my words.

This is a matter of great human importance. Imagine what would happen if all the persons about you ceased to listen. Your own speech could be addressed to no one. You would have nothing to say. You may resort to violence or conspicuous and bizarre behavior with the intention of making others take notice of you and listen. If they continue to be deaf to you even those actions become meaningless. You become so isolated that even your own thinking will be useless. It is by no means difficult to see how one can effectively vanish into such a silence, ceasing actually to exist at all. To offer something of a variation on Descartes's famous formula, it is not because I think, but because I am heard, that I am.

Circumstances in which a person is sealed off into such a silence is not so rare as one might think. Indeed, it may even be a most common condition. It occurs wherever a person must relate only to those who consider themselves winners of some kind, who speak as holders of an office to an audience of losers. How common it is in families for parents not to speak to their children, but to speak for them without the merest regard for what the children might want to say for themselves. The same phenomenon occurs in the relations between employer and workers, between teacher and students, between one race or culture and another.

The implication here is that the person who does listen, who does turn toward me in the silence of expectation, has given up any claim to superiority and has in fact emptied himself or herself of any sort of office I must stand before in silent obedience. A genuine silence of expectation can occur only when one person listens to another in a circumstance of equal and shared humanity.