Becoming porous listening bodies: On Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological experience of dialogical encounters in philosophical counselling

Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological description of the authentic dialogue serves as an ideal framework for the embodied experience of listening, especially in philosophical counselling. Even though philosophical counsellors such as Gerd Achenbach and Anders Lindseth provide their own phenomenological accounts of listening in their practices, I argue that these descriptions lack corporeal grounding. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s concepts of reversibility, encroachment and the chiasm, I provide what I call the porous listening body, a framework that positions listening not as a skill to be mastered, but as a mastery of vulnerability – a continuous state of porosity. This embodied condition and ethical stance of radical receptivity allows both philosophical counsellor and the guest to be genuinely transformed by this encounter. Through three theoretical reframings, I translate Merleau-Ponty’s principles into a lived practice: encroachment becomes permeability, reversibility becomes a dynamic reception and the chiasm becomes the very structure of porosity itself. The porous listening body emerges as an active chiastic site where both participants dwell in the productive silences of the écart – the irreducible gap between the self and the other. By placing the framework of the porous listening body in dialogue with Achenbach’s and Lindseth’s work, I demonstrate how a Merleau-Pontian perspective not only deepens our understanding of philosophical counselling, but offers a concrete, embodied model for practitioners seeking to heed the call of truly listening.