OPM 218(9), September 20th (2004 & 2014) Meditation, Being and Learning, pp. 214-215

Back in Portland after a two-week stint down in NJ/Long Island to open the academic year 2014-15.  Often lonely, but awfully productive, the transition from the consciousness of summer was made.   The cooler early autumn air has greeted my return, so that no traces of summer remain.   Only the memories of the time spent in the forests, mountains, and on water, both fresh and salt. 

The writing this day continues the meditation under the banner of close listening.   And I was tempted to raise Augustine’s question about memory and ask about the sound of memories, and about the form of listening happening with memory.  How is it that we hear sounds, voices, music?  Perhaps remembering is a kind of listening, and recollection happens when we hear the past?  But that would reduce memory to a sonic event, which doesn’t seem to work.   So I’d limit myself only to the recollection of sounds, voices, music, even noises, and wonder about the hearing that happens when we remember them.   Of course, hearing sounds from the past, and listening to them are not the same.   Listening is the preferred term because it carries with it the quality of interpretation, of understanding, of perception.   If hearing is the unmediated reception of sound, listening is the intentional direction of hearing that anticipates the reception of meaningful sound.  We hear the sounds of instruments and voices, but we listen for harmony, melody, and rhythm.   Even the expression “listen to music” is slightly off target.  Better said that we “listen for music”.    Listening is hearing with intentionality.  It is directed hearing; purposive hearing; but not instrumental hearing.   And this is why listening is the fundamental or primary activity for thinking:  listening is anticipatory and preparatory because it gathers us into a modality of perception. (Latin perceptio(n-), from the verb percipere ‘seize, understand’).   If perception is a modality of being seized by a phenomenon, this state of captivity is anticipated and prepared by listening.

The meditation from this day begins with a fragment from Heidegger that is probably one of the project’s top ten: ‘What we can do in our present case,’ Heidegger says, ‘or anyway can learn, is to listen closely.’  This is from the first lecture in What is Called Thinking?

The fragment reveals the listening as primary, as originary, and is meant to begin from the place where the meditation from previous day ended: with the identification of Zarathustra as the one who “gets learning underway by enjoining others in close listening.’  Heidegger tells his students, at the beginning, that they can learn to listen closely, because they are not yet thinking.  Most thought provoking is that we are not yet thinking, he tells them.  And in the absence of thinking they can learn to listen closely.  It really isn’t a option, but a necessity:  they have to learn to listen closely because they are not yet thinking.   The absence of thinking demands the learning of close thinking.  Learning to listen closely is a preparation for thinking, or so it seems.  But how can they learn to listen closely?  This is the ‘educational’ question that calls for an experiment in teaching.  And Zarathustra is a model – a theoretical model – for an instructional experiment in music-making philosophy, which I spent most of last academic year articulating. [The writing of this in 2004 anticipated much of what I wrote last academic year: “To ‘know’ the truth of Being, then, is to be a devoted learner, or one who is devoted to the artistry of the poetic, to the freedom of creating together with others, to a dialogue identified in the improvisational give-and-take.”(9/20/04)]   Zarathustra’s speech making gets learning underway by enjoining others in close listening…he speaks, evocatively, provocatively, in a way that seizes our attention…we learn to listen closely.

Why are captivated and seized into listening?  First, ‘learning’ to listen closely implies that before we are listening in an anticipatory way, we experience a pre-intentional listening.  With this experience we might identify a threshold between the unmediated hearing and intentional listening.  Pre-intentional listening happens when our perception is seized.   This happens when we encounter what I call the evocative, or the sounds that call out to us: vocare, the voice that calls us.   And like the telephone call that arrives as an interruption…the phone rings!!...the evocative seizes our attention because it offers something ‘new’, or what I call the “not yet”:  “this whole dialogic project depends on painstaking listening that hears the excess of Being, the gift of the ‘not yet’…All learning depends on the reception of the ‘not yet’ that appears for the first time with the evocative speaking of…the ‘excess’ of the ‘not yet’ spoken.”  

What I would emphasize today, on this day when I revisit the meditation from this day in 2004, is the ongoing learning of close listening.   And this would imply a reticence, yes, the reticent of silence, a silence about the intentionality of listening.  A listening that prepares us for thinking, is always already preceded by a listening that is being learned.   Perhaps these are two sides of the same coin, the very same event of learning, so that when Heidegger says, ‘at present we can learn to listen closely,’ we can hear him as saying, ‘at present we can learn to prepare for thinking.’    This is why today’s meditation moves towards a conclusion with the following claims: “Listening…is the a priori condition for the actuality of poetic dwelling.  Listening is the readiness that receives the evocative, the openness that is ready to take the risk of welcoming, the risk of hearing the other who saying will effect a change, whose arrival will create a transformation….To learn to listen more closely is to become ready for the one who goes under and bears the disquiet of questioning.”