Listening: an interdisciplinary path toward letting things be
Listening: an interdisciplinary path toward letting things be

Summary/Abstract: The Western philosophical and scientific tradition was and still is based on rationalism, objectivity,truths that are all sought from the ocularcentric paradigm. Many thinkers, however, have been recog nising this perspective to be exclusive towards the other senses, and therefore insufficient. Listening, asenabled by the auditory sense, has a potential for revealing a deeper sense of being in the world. In thisarticle listening is presented as a possible way towards inhabiting our life-world and nonetheless “to letthings be.” In order to do so, an interdisciplinary approach of research is adopted. First, the author offerssome perspectives from the field of the ethics of listening, where the thoughts of Lisbeth Lipari, LuceIrigaray and others expose listening as an intersubjective gesture of encounter with the other in accept ance. Through his philosophy of listening, Jean-Luc Nancy, one of the crucial voices in this study, offersan explication of how listening can be the force of liberating sense and senses. Further on, an account onauditory phenomenology is offered, combining it with and stressing the importance of Husserl’s under standing of intersubjectivity. These perspectives are then enriched with echoes from acoustic ecologyand its experiences of listening to the environment. The reverberations of multiple voices presented inthis text allow for an understanding of listening as an intersubjective and mutually constitutive activity.As such, it involves a liberation of sense and allows for an openness to being and beings.

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