The Other Side of Language

A Philosophy of Listening

Gemma Corradi Fiumara

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135630478
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

First published in 1990. Our philosophy is grounded in only half a language, in which the power of discourse is deployed and the strength of listening ignored. We are inhabitants of a culture that knows how to speak but not how to listen, so we constantly mistake warring monologues for genuine dialogue. In this remarkable book, Gemma Corradi Fiumara seeks to redress that balance by examining the other side of language - listening. Synthesising the insights of Wittgenstein, Heidegger and Gadamer, among many others, she puts forward a powerful argument for the replacement of the `silent' silence of traditional Western thought with the rich openness of an authentic listening.

Chapter 1

Towards a fuller understanding of logos

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‘SAYING’ AND ‘LISTENING’ IN WESTERN TRADITION

Among the widespread meanings of the Greek term logos¹ there do not appear to be recognizable references to the notion and capacity of listening; in the tradition of western thought we are thus faced with a system of knowledge that tends to ignore listening processes. On the other hand, among the possible meanings of the verb legein² (besides the prevalent ones related to saying) there are meanings of a different nature, such as to ‘shelter’, ‘gather’, ‘keep’, ‘receive’, which would surely be more conducive to a cognitive attitude based on ‘proper hearing’.³

Within the realm of practical activity that can be associated with a ‘doing’ word – the verb legein – we can identify relational propensities which seem to disappear entirely at the level of the substantive noun logos. As is well known, abstract nouns such as logos imply a level of linguistic achievement which surpasses practical matters; such terms require in fact a further stage in the skill for conceptual development.

We could therefore better render the meaning of the term logos if we also refer to the verb legein. Of course this verb means ‘say’, ‘speak’, ‘enunciate’, and if we begin from this wellknown rendering and follow the same semantic path we come upon similar meanings, such as ‘reason’, ‘account’, ‘expression’, etc. There is a need, however, to look further into the possible ways of understanding such a pivotal word in the west as logos. Perhaps we could start out by admitting that there could be no saying without hearing, no speaking which is not also an integral part of listening, no speech which is not somehow received. In view of the problems and contentions which can be encountered in research into the phylogenesis and ontogenesis of language we are inclined to believe that an individual can speak only if he is listened to, rather than there being something he might say that one would subsequently attend to ‘by means of’ listening.⁴

The meaning the Greeks assigned to the word logos has gradually gained worldwide acceptance, and whatever might have been passed down through the action word legein has been disregarded. This moulding, ordering sense of ‘saying’, in fact, has become drastically detached from the semantic richness of legein. Elevated to an essential principle of our culture, such a ruling set of meanings appears to control and shape all of our rational pursuits, and it is amazing that our culture can develop in association with such a limited, reduced-by-half concept of language.

The tendency to constantly invoke dialogue in conjunction with this blind-spot on the issue of listening thus appears as a puzzling feature of our culture. As Heidegger points out:

Language came to be represented – indeed first of all with the Greeks – as vocalisation, as sound and voice, hence phonetically… Language is a vocalisation which signifies something. This suggests that language attains at the outset that preponderant character which we designate with the name ‘expression’. This correct but externally contrived representation of language as ‘expression’, remains definitive from now on, It is still so today. Language is taken to be expression, and vice versa.⁵

The search for a listening perspective would not require us to devise some way of drawing out our knowledge claims, starting from some hypothetical centre, or conceptual frame, and then seeing how far it unfolds, or is reproduced, in the details of our understanding. It would be perhaps more fruitful to tackle an upward-directed analysis of our rational pursuits starting from the original mechanisms, from the basic premises. At any moment in which reality is constructed we can identify an attitude which is able to say and not to listen – at that moment, in fact, a halved and overwhelming logos manifests itself. If we start out from this basic concern we can then perhaps go back into the cultural wire-netting and discover how the mechanism of ‘saying without listening’ has multiplied and spread, to finally constitute itself as a generalized form of domination and control.⁶

It is not merely a question of understanding the power shifts from one epistemology to another: the unavoidable philosophical problem lies in clarifying the preliminary interactions behind the functioning of control mechanisms. ‘Logic, as the doctrine of logos, considers thinking to be the assertion of something about something. According to logic, such speech is the basic characteristic of thinking’.⁷ A thinking primarily anchored to sayingwithout-listening.

Following this line of argument one should refer to Heidegger's etymological-philosophical study in which he attempts to reveal a more fundamental sense of logos. Starting out with Heraclitus' famous fragment – ‘When you have listened, not to me but to the… Logos, it is wise to agree that all things are one’⁸ – Heidegger goes on to remark:

No-one would want to deny that in the language of the Greeks from early on legein means to talk, say or tell. However, just as early and even more originally, legein means what is expressed in the similar German word legen: to lay down, to lay before. In legen a ‘bringing together’ prevails, the Latin legere understood as lesen, in the sense of collecting and bringing together. Legein properly means the laying-down and laying-before which gathers itself and others.⁹

Perhaps this gathering of itself epitomizes the sort of concentrated listening that is required in intellectual midwifery – the maieutic method. It may be worth noticing that in another Heraclitean fragment the two terms ‘listen’ and ‘speak’ are, indeed, used together and, significantly enough, the first term precedes the other: ‘Men who do not know how to listen or to speak.’¹⁰

In any case, the fact that in our western mother tongue legein mainly, though not exclusively, means ‘say’, ‘speak’, ‘tell’, is beyond question. At the same time we believe that it is essential for us not to neglect, or relinquish, our concern for any ‘lesser’ significance and not to be satisfied with the accepted, predominant meaning ascribed to legein. This is a tentative pursuit which keeps us linked with the complexity of humans; an effort to retrieve subordinate, minor dimensions and to explore those areas which provoke indifference or even repugnance in the clear logic of ‘normal’, established thinking.

A wider circulation of meanings which may safeguard the lesser elements can only enhance our respect for the inexhaustible complexity of rationality.¹¹ It is difficult to imagine how we could possibly claim the right to neglect one of the possible thought formulations winding along the path towards hominization. Neither is there any reason for letting go, or allowing ourselves to lose, the sense of legein as laying down or keeping. As Heidegger puts it: ‘Is it not finally time to engage ourselves with a question which probably decides many things? The question asks: How does the proper sense of legein, to lay, come to mean saying and talking?’¹² To carry forth this unavoidable question rather than attempt to devise any kind of acceptable answer to it, it may be fit time to follow Heidegger in his investigation into the meaning of legein. He eloquently says:

To lay means to bring to lie. Thus to lay is at the same time to place one thing beside another, to lay them together. To lay is to gather (lesen). The lesen better known to us, namely, the reading of something written, remains but one sort of gathering, in the sense of bringing-together-into-lying-before, although it is indeed the predominant sort. The gleaning at harvest time gathers fruit from the soil. The gathering of the vintage involves picking grapes from the vine. Picking and gleaning are followed by the bringing together of the fruit. So long as we persist in the usual appearance we are inclined to take this bringing together as the gathering itself or even its termination. But gathering is more than mere amassing. To gathering belongs a collecting which brings under shelter. Accommodation governs the sheltering; accommodation is in turn governed by safekeeping. That ‘something extra’ which makes gathering more than a jumbling together that snatches things up is not something only added afterward. Even less is it the conclusion of the gathering, coming last. The safekeeping that brings something in has already determined the first steps of the gathering and arranged everything that follows. If we are blind to everything but the sequence of steps, then the collecting follows the picking and gleaning, the bringing under shelter follows the collecting, until finally everything is accommodated in bins and storage rooms. This gives rise to the illusion that preservation and safekeeping have nothing to do with gathering. Yet what would become of a vintage which has not been gathered with an eye to the fundamental matter of its being sheltered? The sheltering comes first in the essential formation of the vintage.¹³

Here we have a vivid description of the basic doing engendered by listening; as such it brings forth into full bloom a logos no longer understood as mere ‘saying’ but also, and perhaps above all, as a capacity for cultivating proper hearing.

Heidegger further suggests that:

Lesen (to gather) thought in this way does not simply stand near legen (to lay). Nor does the former simply accompany the latter. Rather, gathering is already included in laying. Every gathering is already a laying. Every laying is of itself gathering. Then what does ‘to lay’ mean? Laying brings to lie, in that it lets things lie together before us. All too readily we take this ‘letting’ in the sense of omitting or letting go. To lay, to bring to lie, to let lie, would then mean to concern ourselves no longer with what is laid down and lies before us – to ignore it. However, legein… means just this, that whatever lies before us involves us and therefore concerns us.¹⁴

Legein, therefore, is to lay: ‘Laying is the letting-lie-before – which is gathered into itself – of that which comes together into presence.’¹⁵ At this point, however, the question could once again be raised: ‘How do we shift from the proper sense of legein, to lay, to its official meaning, to say, and to talk?’ We believe that it is no longer a matter of elegant question-and-answer subtleties. A wider perspective would no longer justify the usual kind of investigation; through the concern for listening we are engaged in a pursuit of such scope that it can not simply be reduced to the question of how this Greek word, legein, shifts in meaning from ‘lay’ to ‘say’. And its relevance lies not in the etymological vicissitudes of certain basic terms in our western mother tongue, but in recognizing that meanings may be other than mutually exclusive and that, in any case, legein in the sense of ‘to lay’ allows itself to be placed in a subordinate position by its more assertive meanings which thus acquire semantic predominance. No one would deny that talking necessarily implies listening, and yet no one bothers to point out, for example, that in our culture there has always been a vast profusion of scholarly works focussing on expressive activity and very few, almost none in comparison, devoted to the study of listening. And if cultural concerns lose the ‘powerful eros’¹⁶ of true philo-sophy then we may find ourselves within a culture that is increasingly separated from the cultivation of rational life.

THE ‘SECONDARY’ ISSUE OF LISTENING

‘The vulgar tongues’, suggests Vico, ‘should be the most weighty witnesses concerning the ancient customs of the people that were in use at the time the languages were formed.’¹⁷ The practical sense of legein could perhaps be construed as the most ‘weighty’, reliable witness to the ancient customs of western civilization, when the term was able to unfold in its fuller meaning. With the advent and rule of concepts, the fullness of the word was reduced to mere ‘saying’ and it almost lost its sense of ‘gathering’. This ‘second’ sense is fully borne out by the ‘doing word’ legein understood as an activity expressed in the germinal productivity of traditions, and i...