What immediate irony!  Reading about listening.  Indeed, we all tend to do far more reading, I suspect, than we do listening.  That often we read poorly does not take away from the fact that we read continually.  For a great many of us, the nature of work, study, and even distraction often involves a discernment of visual signs, and for most of that “great many”, the visual signs are written words.  We live primarily through our eyes—evidenced, even by the very fact of your reading this, and my announcing it to you in the written word, rather than my speaking and your listening.  As Aristotle writes in his Metaphysics, “even if we are not going to do anything else, we prefer, as one might say, seeing to the other sensations.” (980a 25-26).  He adds that sight, more so than the other senses, makes know “in the highest degree and makes clear many differences in things.”

But though sight truly is a wonderful gift, it may in a world of endless stimuli be greedily indulged.  We may see countless things, at truly mind-numbing speed.  In the words of Cardinal Sarah, “Images are drugs that we can no longer do without, because they are present everywhere and at every moment.”[1]  Rapacious addiction to visual novelty degrades our vision itself.

Simultaneously, I believe, it has atrophied our capacity for listening.

What is Listening?

Perhaps because we have adopted poor, mechanical metaphors, I believe we often misunderstand our senses: we tend to think of them as sensing or not; as “on” or “off”.  A little reflection, however, shows that our senses are, in fact, always active, so long as the organs are intact.  Right now, doubtless, you are touching several objects: clothing, the floor, your chair, your phone—and even if you were somehow to be suspended, floating naked in midair, you’d still be in contact with that air itself, even if the ambient temperature is so perfectly attuned to your own that you cannot detect it.  So too, you may shut your eyes, but even then, you have succeeded only in removing the object, light; you have not “turned off” the sense.

Hearing, too, is always present.  So common, in fact, are the ubiquitous noises of our world today that we remark mostly on their absence—“it’s so [too] quiet in here”.  But even in the quietest of rooms, in the quietest of homes, on the most noiseless property in all the world, one is very likely to hear something; even if naught else but one’s own breathing.  The volume of small noises (inhale-exhale; a ticking watch; a light breeze) grows conspicuous against the lack of anything louder.  It was just this point—the omnipresence of sound—that motivated John Cage’s (in)famous piece of “music”, 4’33”, during which a pianist sits at his piano and plays not a single note.  In the absence of music, one hears countless other sounds: creaks of chairs, rustling of clothes, passing vehicles, gusts of wind, yelling on the street—and so on.  We hear such things all the time.  Many, Cage included, have interpreted this to mean there is no such thing as silence.

Just as images have become drugs without which we cannot do, so too, for many, has sound: endlessly filling one’s ears with music as naught but background, or the dialogue of a television show, or a podcast, or anything which might keep our minds from roaming too far from whatever menial tasks we have before us.[2]  Oftener than not, such blasé auditory stimulation, rather than informing our minds of meaningful distinctions, provides us only an uncritical emotional response.  We listen to music to get into (or out of) moods.  The television show comforts us with its familiarity and lack of personal threat.  The podcast alleviates the boredom of a humdrum daily task.

That is, we do not listen because we do not attend to the objects signified through sound but acknowledge (or ignore) them only as received into (or rejected by) our own egotistical subjectivity.  And this egotism, I believe, reflects the noise of our own hearts and minds more than the ambient sounds of our environments.

Silence and Music

“Uncontrollable rivers flow through the heart,” says Cardinal Sarah, “and it is all a man can do to find interior silence.”[3]  We might believe these auditory stimuli, which “speak to us”, to calm the uncontrollable rivers.  In truth, they are naught but anesthetics, numbing us to the torrent.  We drown our ears and flood our hearts with noise: “Noise,” writes C.S. Lewis’ Screwtape, “the grand dynamism, the audible expression of all that is exultant, ruthless, and virile—Noise which alone defends us from silly qualms, despairing scruples and impossible desires.  We will make the whole universe a noise in the end.  We have already made great stride in this direction as regards the Earth.”[4]

Conversely, truly listening to anything requires that we first attain silence.  Indeed, the necessity of silence grows the more abundant noise has become.  In the words of Pope Benedict XVI:[5]

Silence is an integral element of communication; in its absence, words rich in content cannot exist… When messages and information are plentiful, silence becomes essential if we are to distinguish what is important from what is insignificant or secondary.  Deeper reflection helps us to discover the links between events that at first sight seem unconnected, to make evaluations, to analyze messages; this makes it possible to share thoughtful and relevant opinions, giving rise to an authentic body of shared knowledge.  For this to happen, it is necessary to develop an appropriate environment, a kind of ‘eco-system’ that maintains a just equilibrium between silence, words, images, and sounds.

How do we develop and maintain this “equilibrium”—that interior silence?  The corollary to the peace of silence is the joy of music—true music, that is, heard not as background but to which we listen and in which we move beyond and outside ourselves into something more.  It is a Scholastic adage that nihil est in intellectu quin prius fuerit in sensu: nothing is in the intellect that was not first in the senses.  Perhaps that our hearts have music and silence, we need first to unblock our ears.

Recovering the Art of Listening

That is, listening is a kind of work, an art, and one that we have lost.  We lack the cognitive endurance today, it seems, for the art of truly listening—as Christopher Blum and Joshua Hochschild note in their Mind at Peace: “The eye can take in a vast scene almost at once, but one must have patience to receive the fullness of a song or of a speech.”[6]  What then are the practical steps that we can take to recover this art?

I would challenge you all, before attending our Philosophical Happy Hour this Wednesday (1 May 2024) to listen to something—a symphony, an album, a lengthy speech—without other distraction.  Do naught but listen.  What do you find in the experience?  How did you attend differently to the songs or sounds, the words or thoughts?  What merit do you see in this focused listening?

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[1] 2016: The Power of Silence: Against the Dictatorship of Noise, §46.

[2] This accusation is not meant to be strictly universal, but to help us recognize a trend, whether one present in ourselves or those we know.

[3] 2016: Power of Silence, §48.

[4] 1942: Screwtape Letters, 120 (Letter 23).

[5] 20 May 2012: “Silence and Word: Path of Evangelization”.  The whole message is worth contemplation.

[6] 2017: A Mind at Peace: Reclaiming an Ordered Soul in the Age of Distraction, 72.