ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with listening to the world: Hearing, the sense of understanding. Hearing is the unifying sense of the social bond in that it implies listening to the human voice and being receptive to the other's words. The chapter explains the sounds of the world, childhood immersion in sound, breaking the spell of Silence, noisemaking as a call to order and sound as transition and threshold. In many societies the creation of the world takes the form of an act of sound. When God expresses the desire to create heaven and earth, humans and animals, an auditory element brings these into the world. Hearing is not only essential to anchoring us in a world filled with sounds but also plays a decisive role in children's moral and intellectual development. Deaf children cannot hear their mother's or family's voices. For a long time, children born deaf became mute because they did not have the access to the mechanism of language.
