Listening in aWaythat Recognizes/Realizes the World of ‘the Other’

Usually, in our talk with others, we listen for opportunities to express our own point of view, to add it to or to contrast it with theirs. Ethically and politically, we feel we have a right for our voice to be heard. While we can be satisfied that we have managed to “say what's on our mind,” there are reasons for thinking that even then, what we have managed to say and what the others have heard from us, may still not put those around us fully “in touch,” so to speak, with what our world is in fact like for us. Drawing on work from Bakhtin (1986) Bakhtin, M. M. 1986. Speech genres and other late essays, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. (Vern W. McGee, trans.) [Google Scholar], Voloshinov (1986 Voloshinov, V. N. 1986. Marxism and the philosophy of language, Edited by: Matejka, L. and Titunik, I. R. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, first pub. 1929. [Google Scholar]. 1987 Voloshinov, V. N. 1987. Freudianism: A critical sketch, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. [Google Scholar]), Wittgenstein (1953) Wittgenstein, L. 1953. Philosophical investigations, Oxford, UK: Blackwell. [Google Scholar], Merleau-Ponty (1962) Merleau-Ponty, M. 1962. Phenomenology of perception, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. (trans. C. Smith) [Google Scholar], and Todes (2001) Todes, S. 2001. Body and world, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. with introductions by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Piortr Hoffman[Crossref] , [Google Scholar], I want to explore a very different form of listening, a form of listening that not only goes with a particular way of responsive talking—a way of seeking in one's talk to afford one's interlocutors opportunities to tell of, and to explore further, events and experiences that have mattered to them in their lives—but which can arouse within them a distinctive and recognizable “feeling of being heard.” All these issues are fundamentally ethical issues in the sense that: If I need you in order to be me, if my appearance in the human world as another person of worth depends upon your responsiveness to my expressions, then, strange though it may seem, ethical values are prior to, not a consequence of, our knowledge of the others and othernesses around us. But what is it to respect the uniqueness of what can be heard in another's voice (as well as what can be heard in one's own voice)?