Listening, Thinking, Being

Abstract

This article explores a perspective on listening, called listening being, which resides beyond the limitations of language, dualism, and conceptual thought. As a dwelling place for human being, listening being can reveal the ethical possibilities that arise when listening begins not from a speaking, but from the emptiness of awareness itself. This perhaps utopian vision of listening is not an actual state or principle, but a horizon toward which we might travel. Listening being is thus a philosophical challenge that invites us to rethink communication through the lens of listening and engage with/in a form of human communication and consciousness beyond discursive thought, to places of understanding that language cannot, as yet, reach.