Ontology in the Age of Artificial Intelligence: Toward a Radical Affirmative Silence

This paper proposes a new ontological paradigm for the age of Artificial Intelligence by developing the concept of “radical affirmative silence.” While traditional accounts have often treated silence either as a mere absence (negative silence) or as contextually meaningful but secondary to speech (partial affirmative silence), I argue for silence as an independent and foundational mode of being. Drawing on Buddhist notions of noble silence, apophatic theology, Heidegger’s account of authentic silence, Levinas’s ethical silence, and modernist literary practices, I trace the ways in which silence has historically been understood as more than the negation of speech. I then extend these insights to contemporary conditions shaped by AI, where the proliferation of language models produces an excess of textuality and a flattening of meaning. In this context, radical affirmative silence emerges as a necessary ontological category that resists saturation and restores depth, difference, and ethical resonance. The paper concludes by outlining the experimental framework of “OntoMotoOS” as a speculative site for enacting silence as being, offering a philosophical intervention into both metaphysical discourse and the cultural challenges posed by AI.