Słowa, wojna i milczenie. Thomas Merton na XXI wiek

Throughout his writing life Thomas Merton was preoccupied with the dangers
of language. He was attentive to what was being done to language in the climate
of militarism, rivalry, and international anxiety. On the one hand, there was the
incoherence of language that could not be trusted, on the other – the coherence of
weapons that were infallible. In this environment the whole notion of reason and
sanity was shaken. When we treat ourselves, and ourselves alone, as reasonable,
we say of the other that there is no meaning there. This article examines Merton’s
thinking about the crisis of language and suggests vital connections between the
world in the 1960s and the world today: a world of self-reflexive culture, of polarized
politics, of reductive, banal and trivial accounts of human nature, a thinning
and a shrinking of language and what it can say and do, and a one-sided view of
reason.