ABSTRACT
This chapter provides some thought to the several stage, or centre, in our self-development as hearing beings. Even though hearing is more closely bound to feeling than our other perceptual capacities, the character of our society has encouraged the subordination of hearing to seeing and increasingly alienated listening from the body of feeling. Although, when ‘just listening’, hearing often turns playful – wild again, untamed again, it is also gehorsam: obedient to a law of difference that metaphysics has never heard. The Zen master’s Gelassenheit in relation to the future manifests, therefore, in hearing as the ability to hear the bell even before it has begun to ring. Melodious, and like a song, is the gift of primordial temporality to the field of our hearing. Hearkening has learned the wisdom of Periander of Corinth, one of the ‘seven sages’ of the West.
