By Corine Jansen
Silence is often praised as a sign of wisdom, restraint, and deep listening, and there are moments in which that praise is justified. In a conversation, silence can slow down the impulse to explain too quickly, to classify what is still fragile, or to reassure someone before their words have found their own direction. It can create a space in which the other person is not immediately absorbed into our interpretation, our experience, or our need to be helpful.
In that sense, silence can become a form of ethical restraint: a way of remaining present without taking over. It asks something of us. We have to loosen our own need for clarity, suspend the first interpretation that comes to mind, and allow the other person to appear without immediately being placed inside our categories. This is not passivity. It is a demanding form of attention.
But this is only one side of silence. The same silence that can protect an encounter can also withdraw from it. It can leave someone alone at the very moment presence is needed. It can look careful, reflective, or respectful, while in fact avoiding the responsibility to name what is happening, to ask a necessary question, or to take a small but clear step toward the other person.
That is why silence is never neutral. It always does something in a relationship. It may widen the other person’s space, or it may quietly narrow it. It may allow someone to breathe, or it may make someone disappear. Especially in relationships marked by power, dependency, vulnerability, or urgency, silence cannot be judged only by the intention of the one who remains silent. The more important question is what that silence makes possible for the other person.
This is where Emmanuel Levinas becomes important for me. The encounter with another person does not begin with my interpretation, but with being addressed by someone whose reality exceeds my understanding. The other person is never simply the image I form, the story I recognize, the case I can explain, or the category I can manage. There is always more, and that “more” calls me into responsibility.
Silence can help me remain faithful to that excess. It can prevent me from grasping too quickly, from turning the other person’s words into my own story, or from confusing recognition with acknowledgment. But silence can also become a refusal of that call. It can become the polished form of retreat: I stay quiet, not because I am available, but because I do not want to be disturbed.
So the ethical question is not simply whether we should speak or remain silent. The question is more precise: what does this silence do here, in this relationship, at this moment?
Does it create room, or does it create distance? Does it protect the other person from being overrun, or does it protect me from having to respond? Does it keep the encounter open, or does it close it without saying so?
Perhaps listening begins in that difficult discernment. It asks us to resist two temptations at once: the temptation to take over with our words, and the temptation to disappear behind our silence. Between those two lies a more careful practice: staying available, staying correctable, and allowing our silence or our speech to be shaped by the effect it has on the other person.
Silence, then, is not automatically kind. It becomes ethical only when it remains connected to responsibility. That is the test.
Not: did I mean well?
But: did my silence allow the other person to remain present?