Book Review: The Other Side of Language: A Philosophy of Listening

Subscribers to this Journal, and indeed all philosophers with a theoretical interest in psychotherapeutic practice and therapists with a background in the phenomenology of linguistics, will find this recent book by Gemma Corradi Fiumara on the 'Philosophy of Listening' very informative and stimulating reading. Exhibiting broad and deep familiarity with the work of the many contemporary philosophers who have contributed to linguistics — Heidegger, Buber and Wittgenstein among others — Corradi Fiumara applies scholarly criteria to her choice of the ideas and of the relevant quotations that illustrate throughout twelve well integrated chapters (or 'Lezioni': the author is a professor of theoretical philosophy at Rome University) the trajectory of her enquiry.

Some might feel burdened by arguments sidetracking their attention from the main thrust of the text; yet, if they apply selective faculties to their reading — in itself a creative exercise in listening — this important book will be rewarding in conveying its message: the significance of listening as the forgotten 'other side of language' — or, as the English title suggests — or, more precisely, the other half of the logos. It is from the first chapter, 'Towards a fuller understanding of the logos', that we are provided with the crucial historical and conceptual clarifications setting the philosophical tone of the whole book; epistemology depends upon an understanding of legein that included a radical reciprocal openness to listening. "Without this kind of openness to one another," as Gadamer points out in Truth and Method, "there is no genuine human relationship. Belonging together always means being able to listen to one another."

Psychoanalysis is often half-jokingly referred to as the talking cure, since Breuer's patient Anna O called it so; but one has to wonder whether the curative factor is the patient's talking, or rather the analyst's listening; in which case it might be more accurate to describe it as a listening cure. Indeed, whether the essence of psychoanalysis is not cure at all, but a logos that synthetically embraces the dialectical combination of both without real listening, there cannot be real talking — or, for that matter, real silence. In this respect, Corradi Fiumara while insisting that silence is a form of communication, as all analysts well know, cleverly turns the argument inside out and quotes Heidegger's On the Way to Language: "He who never says anything cannot keep silent at any given moment. Keeping silent authentically is possible only in genuine discourse."

Apart from a footnote, there is only one direct reference to psychoanalysis in the book: "The psychoanalytic 'revolution' ... derives less from the systematic focussing on unconscious motivation than from the determination to establish a methodology of individual listening as the essential basis for all interpretive relationships" (p. 50). However, Corradi Fiumara's text is undoubtedly the result of an analytically oriented mind, as well as of a practising therapist, insofar as the hallmark of Freudian hermeneutics is the capacity for active and attentive listening to the other person's discourse and suffering. "The ability to listen," the author writes in relation to what she calls 'the philosophical problem of benumbment', "which allows us to hold firm and remain 'vigilant' at the borders of obscurity, might be the condition that makes it possible for us to remain open to further linguistic and theoretical fields of concern" (p. 91).

With Plato's Phaedra firmly in her mind, Corradi Fiumara proposes in the excellent essay on 'Midwifery and philosophy' a "shifting of the attention from a cult of speech to a culture of maieutics as the process which supports the birth and rebirth of our thinking" (p. 165) and suggests that the listening attitude may "be regarded as a genuinely interactive dialettica (in the original propensity, in the sense that it determines what the speaker will say" (p. 145). What the speaker will say — and how, in turns, it will be received by the other — ultimately constitutes his personal and social self; this goes beyond his capacity to communicate, towards his capacity to exist as a human being. Corradi Fiumara's philosophy transcends the field of linguistics to approach with ontology.

The author is a stern critic of a logocentric system of culture that arrogantly dominates thinking in Western society; "the logos that knows how to speak but not how to listen represents the model of power in its primordial form ... The arts are forced into believing that a technical civilization is the way in which the non-listening language dominates unopposed" (p. 54). Within a tradition of questioning (to use the title of one of her chapters) Corradi Fiumara is a champion of a more tolerant, open attitude — in the best humanistic tradition — that considers culture as a process actively involving its recipient; a dialogue and never a monologue. "As far as language is concerned ... knowing how to listen does not represent a 'further stage' that must be attained. In our view listening belongs to the very 'essence' of language. It represents an uncompromising potentiality that prevents the adoption of a defensive position based on insufficient conditions" (p. 30).

The authentic power of discourse — to paraphrase the title of another chapter — derives from the strength of the listening it evokes. However, it seems to me that such a recommendation may fail to take into account our culture's tendency to bombard us with a plethora of useless, if not dangerous, superficial messages — propaganda in the widest meaning of the word. In this context, listening should include a capacity to select what to listen and what to shut our sense and minds to. This, of course, involves the paradox of having to listen to something before knowing whether we want to listen to it or not; without exposing ourselves to such a paradox, however, we may end up feeling overwhelmed by a flood of verbal and visual input. This may finally result in paralyzing our critical faculties; what might have otherwise improved the quality of our experience and existence will go unrecognized, diluted in an ocean of white noise.

Andrea Sabbadini