Mask of Silence as an Integral Part of Autocommunication

The article exposes the capacity of the silent mask as a philosophical model of autocommunication. The relevance of the article lies in the fact that silence, as a necessary part of internal communication – a pause of self-knowledge, a thoughtful conversation with oneself – is not reduced to a simple ordering of consciousness. Silence takes consciousness out of stillness, out of the situation of initial archaic experience or philosophical wonder. Therefore, silence is not simply an interruption of the message; it is written over the stillness as an imperative of inner consideration and speech. This article aims to identify the mask of silence as linking archaic practices of socialization and contemporary practices of consciousness. The archaic mask establishes patterns of cultural consciousness, whereas contemporary consciousness brings out the original constituents of ultimate experience in these patterns. Therefore, archaic concentration, which presents itself as a mythic-ritual transcending of the self, is reflected in contemporary consciousness as a prescription of the initial conditions of finding one’s identity. These initial conditions are the isolation of one’s own, authentic in consciousness, which cannot be conveyed either in words or in silence; the self-creation of identity as orienting not only among experience but also among the learned facts of consciousness; and the relation to the facticity of communication as produced over stillness as the original static of being, which does not distinguish between fact and word. Autocommunication involves the acquisition of a kind of consciousness that cannot be reduced to individual mental acts or to two separate facts of consciousness. The disclosure of the facticity of consciousness determined the objectives of the paper: to consider the archaic mask as a primary image of collective self-consciousness, to show the reflexive potential of mytho-ritual complexes, and to identify how the horizon of historical consciousness moves in autocommunicative reflection and how the possibility of developing one’s own system of historicization of lived experience arises. The conclusions reached in the article can apply to understanding the genres of philosophical work, its voice and questioning, as well as to criticizing the forms of individual and collective consciousness through a strict distinction between autocommunication and simple self-address or the use of communicative forms to organize the work of consciousness. Autocommunication as a tacit accounting of what is experienced and said is the alterity of the mask of silence.