The Listening Self: Personal Growth, Social Change and the Closure of Metaphysics

This is one of a series of brilliant works by David Michael Levin that appropriate and develop Martin Heidegger's meditations on the nature of Being. The specific application that Mr. Levin makes of this volume is to explore the preeminence of seeing in Western society. He considers the distortion caused by emphasis on visual metaphors and bodily experience, especially with regard to the diminution and loss of listening. There is an approximate correspondence between the dimension of seeing and the "egological self," the self that is between the ears and closed off from the rest of the world by the skin...and the listening self, which is the whole-body corresponding to the "ecological self." Mr. Levin uses the work of Merleau-Ponty, specifically in meditation upon flesh as a dimension of Being, to further pursue and unfold the aural self as akin with the diminished feminine, the neglected and largely suppressed self that can listen-into-being the wholism denied by seeing, which is always from above, the head that surveys, to the detriment and loss of the rest of embodiment/I'm-body-meant. This is another very creative, original meditation by this author, and is more accessible than The Body's Recollection of Being, which I have separately reviewed. Both are eminently worthwhile, especially though not only if you have an interest in a Heideggerian approach to applied philosophy as a mode of social healing and reclamation of the healed self.