Alphonso lingis pdf

I imagined an ancient spruce crashing to the forest floor in spectacular fashion. And if there's no people, there's no sound! That's philosophy," he added imperiously, "You're too young to get it. But that childhood riddle has returned to me frequently over the years, most often when on walking trails in old growth forests, and I meet an impressively large hemlock or birch on the forest floor.

Decaying, disappearing under a thick coat of moss, sprouting saplings, it lays immovable in the cool of shade and dappled light of the towering canopy. It would be many years before I would also come to understand the tacit claim at the heart of the riddle — a claim that the natural world is essentially socially constructed. Of unknown origin, the puzzle was posed as a thought experiment and came into popular discourse in the mid-nineteenth century.

In , Scientific American took up the question from a technical perspective. The falling of the tree or any other disturbance will produce vibration of the air. If there be no ears to hear, there will be no sound" Emphasis added, p. According to Scientific American, my brother was right. But for me, the childhood puzzle denied the independent existence of nature. The animals "don't count, it has to be a person. Nature becomes an artifact of language and reality; a product of the activity of our imagination.

The riddle separates me from the life of the tree; it confuses and unsettles. The fundamental understanding of the world at the heart of the puzzle creates a chasm; an extreme sociological and scientific reductionism that becomes distressingly apparent in characterizing how humans relate to the non-human world. Much later in life, I came to appreciate that the ways we perceive nature are deeply affected by culture. As humans, we are a part of nature and contribute to the way it functions, even on a planetary scale, but that is a long way from asserting that nature is socially constructed or that it does not exist in its own right outside the boundaries of our ability to recognize, name, and describe it.

Outside the human-built, industrial world, Barry Lopez notes, "language is not something man imposes on the land The very order of the landscape, the ecology of its sounds and thoughts, derives from the mind's intercourse with the landscape" as cited in Kidner, , p. Lopez points to what I tacitly knew as a child that our relationship with the non-human world is more akin to a dance, an interplay of separateness and interdependence.

As language -ing beings in an intelligent body we have tremendous potential to deepen our relationship with a world that also speaks.

I have also learned from First Nations peoples of states of being and ways of knowing that represent very different ontological orientations. And it is co- constituting the world through speaking and listening to the language of the world, the sounds, utterances, and expressive meanings that preoccupies me these days.

The poet Gary Snyder posits that the natural world creates texts that can be read. It was a dimension Wherein the body itself speaks - by the tonality and rhythm of its sounds, by its gestures A childhood puzzle, the noise created by a falling tree, the ecology of sounds, a language much older than words are all provocatively taken up by Alphonso Lingis in his essay The Murmur of the World. It is Lingis who best articulates for me the sonic abilities of both the animate and inanimate world and the expressive power to communicate.

Lingis describes an articulate environment, but also a receptive, listening landscape. In the human realm, Lingis, perhaps presciently, points to our current uneasiness with information and communication technologies and vexing questions of privacy.

He describes the ubiquity of billboards and screens "upon which messages are written in neon flashes The roads and paths to the furthest retreats in the country are lined with wires tense with stock exchange pandemonium; beams bounced off satellites in outer space penetrate all the walls" p.

One murmur to which Lingis points in his essay is "the noise internal to communication" p. And in doing so, he attributes an expressive capacity to all sensible phenomena. The "background noise" as it is described by Lingis is, in essence, a language by which things communicate something of themselves to the world. The background noise, or "the noise of life" as Lingis describes it, is The sonorous elements with which words are formed We resonate our earthly surroundings.

Lingis points to the capacity of all living things for speech and to the communicative power of objects in this way: To live is to echo with the vibrancy of things. To be, for material things is to resonate. There is sound in things like there is warmth and cold in things, and things resonate like they irradiate their warmth and cold.

The quail and albatross, the crows and the hummingbirds, the coyotes and the seals The crocodiles infrasonically and praying mantises ultrasonically continue and reverberate the branches, the fluttering of the leaves, the bubbling of the creeks, the hissing of the marsh gases, the whirring of the winds, the shifting of the rocks, the grinding of the earth's plates.

Experientially, it exists in the background, below my day-to-day awareness. Increasingly, we live in a visual world; we perceive the world visually. How do I make room for an articulate world, a world that speaks, for things to resonate? What is that like? Visuocentrism, says O'Callaghan , has shaped our understanding of perception and its role. An inordinate amount has been written about vision as a source of insight into perception.

As we are, purportedly, predominately visual beings, visual perception and the attention it receives dwarfs the other modalities by which we know the world. Lingis contends that the background noise is essential to communication. But in what ways is this so? Sounds as Individuals Moving Through As I sit writing, the house is silent; yet, a warm, heavy and steady rain thrums just perceptibly on the roof, the dog pants rhythmically under the table, car tires whir on the pavement through runnels of rainwater.

Mendes-Flohr reminds us silence presupposes the prior experience of sound. I know many people experience the absence of definable sound, or silence, as welcoming and as having a calming effect.

Others find the quiet threatening and dis- quieting. A quiet house begs to be filled with sound, with television, radio, music played through headphones on devices and computers. He tried to quell the clamour of the burgeoning city, the roosters, horses, hawking peddlers, and noisy neighbours by building a soundproof study.

While it blocked some sounds, others were more audible. In silence, I am immersed in a soundscape available to me in the now. What happens when we abandon visuocentrism to regard sounds not only for what they reveal about the world and about what is visible, but also as entities in their own right?

Visually my field is restricted to my computer screen and a narrow peripheral band to my left and right. In my soundscape, I am able to detect change and monitor multiple sources of information. Lingis explains seeing a figure standing out against adjacent objects is not due in large part to the power of our gaze and not solely the mechanism by which an image is flashed on our retinas.

In the absence of a background, actively separating a figure, there can be no figure. Psychologists have cleverly designed many demonstrations of just this phenomenon. So, too, then says Lingis, do we need the hum of the field the noise of life to communicate. Sound as this mysterious thing grounds us here in the now. I hear by way of hearing the sounds objects make. This would seem to be a rather innocuous statement.

Reflecting on the soundscape, the noise of life, being auditorily aware of anything requires being aware of a sound. Sounds have lifetimes and have similar and different relations to each other depending on the array of audible qualities they hold. Sounds have identity, individuation, and persistent conditions that require us to distinguish them from the properties of the sources that we understand to make or produce the sounds.

Reflecting on the experience of sound lifts the sound out and gives something more solid to what is mysterious and ethereal. It provides sound with a life independent of the object and the happening producing it. The eerie creak of tree trunks, the tremble of aspen leaves, the powerful shush of pine needles as wind plays across high tree tops all have complex and multi layered meanings as sound events in their own right.

Abram anticipates the reaction to the ludicrous notion of different dialects being attributed to trees since the sound is created not the by the tree but by the event of the wind blowing through the tree. Cries, Whistles, Hoots: Sound that Lives and Breathes Understanding sounds as having identity, a duration, a lifespan, and complex patterns of changes in pitch, timbre, and loudness enriches the listening subject.

Such an orientation toward sound facilitates an innovative listening and produces a world whereby the auditory self is part of a sonorous, reciprocal intersubjectivity. The world of objects and events becomes re-animated, in a way, with a vitality. What looks more beautiful after death? We sand and sand, but under stain, beyond pottery and books, our fallen hairs trapped in the varnish, something remains like memories of a buck rubbing its horns on bark.

Soaked in deeper than even the grain goes: cries, whistles, hoots. The wood holds the sounds, the expressive power of an animate earth. The table reflects a sonic life-world that is silent, yet compelling, drawing us into an auditory imagination. The pedagogical question is posed, How do we open our imaginations to become perceptually aware of a sentient world, to discern non-human vitality, to hear and to listen for an articulate world in which sound lives and breathes as an entity in its own right?

What happens when I become aware of a rich, diverse soundscape that surrounds me that grounds human communication in the wildness of life?

Certain political institutions exclude this. The ethical relationships involved in writing invoke a fundamental political ethic. There are, to be sure, also philosophical texts in the form of mathematical logic, meditation and autobiography. The encounter is grounded in life experiences that have affected you. The author of the text has learned; he has been affected; he is no longer the same as before. You seem to learn more than you're looking for.

What skills are needed to develop this ability at openness and at learning? What could social studies or science research, learn from this? And why do you rarely specify precisely what it is that you have learned? We do pick up and pass along what is said about implements and ornaments, about Society and Business Review people in other posts and in other lands, about neighborhood developments and political Vol. This circulation is interrupted by something strange, or by DOI Opening upon something new — learning — comes from these An interview outbreaks of surprise.

I hesitate to speak of skill, which implies a habitual pattern of with alphonso behavior. But if we assent to surprise, take pleasure in the outbreak of surprise, the pleasure can make us open to more surprises.

A writer should not supply the reader with ready-made insights or think for the reader. If I have been able to recount with precision and vigor the encounter in which an insight arose, the reader will formulate the insight in his or her own words. Or she can envision the things and events to which the statements refer.

Relatedness, here, does not pass via explanation. Speaking and writing about the given — what others, what encounters with other species, with monuments and omens, with rivers and caves gave one to see and to understand — moves naturally into listening. One speaks and writes because one hears voices that appeal to one and contest one; one speaks and writes in response. One becomes aware of multitudes who are not heard, who have no voice. Here, lucidity, honesty and tact are critical.

If I write of what another encounters and understands, I can submit my writing to him or her to validate. Failing that, I must invoke what I honestly believe he or she would validate. I want to write as precisely and vigorously as possible so that the reader grasps what was given to me and the insight that arose from the given. The reader will grasp it from the perspective and direction of the succession of his or her insights.

The thought the reader captures is not his, nor does he own it and is no longer mine; it is ours and opens upon further thought. They are texts of affect that touch the reader. You invoke complex philosophical positions with simple words. Many cognitive aspects of your thought remain implied and concealed. Do you aspire to textual unicity or hope that others will follow you? SBR Language does not simply record what we have seen; language reveals things and the 13,3 world. In seeking to share an encounter and an insight, ideally it should induce the appropriate vocabulary, rhetoric and means of explanation — narrative, exposition, inductive or deductive argument.

Often several versions get worked on until the right one becomes clear. Hopefully the topic of the next essay will induce the right way to write to share an insight.

Why write these texts? Thought is gratitude. Gratitude, giving thanks, is an action. Someone gives us a bottle of Downloaded by Something is given, an encounter, an event, an insight.

To write it is to hold it, deepen its contours and its vibrancy. To write well, with clarity and vigor, is to share it with others. Sometimes one writes simply to reveal and share wonder and a pleasure that were given.

Sometimes the understanding that comes has important practical consequences. She administers tests to determine the abilities and interests of students so that they can rationally determine their life work. But all the important events of our life [. These issues trouble behavior far beyond the events litigated in that court. Beyond what is said and what is not said, the text is made up of images, music, rhythms, intonations, clothing, cries, breathing, a living presence. It was gradually that I came to enlist more performative resources, each time as the text and the circumstances elicited them.

Intuition, distant memory of performances experienced, unformulated sense of what seems right and what seems impoverished and what excessive goes into a composition.