Good Listening

Educational Theory

Volumn 49, Issue 3, 1999, Pages 281-298

  Beatty, Joseph ^a  

^a RANDOLPH MACON COLLEGE   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 77954111570     PISSN: 00132004     EISSN: 17415446     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1741-5446.1999.00281.x     Document Type: Article

References (39)

1. Eugene T. Gendlin, In several articles as well as in his book, Focusing (New York: Bantam Books, 1981.
2. David Michael Levin in The Listening Self: Personal Grouth, Social Change and the Closure of Metaphysics (New York: Routledge) have given extensive philosophical and practical attention to listening. My account is deeply indebted to the work of both Cendlin nd Levin. More recently1989.
3. "The screen-making habit", Virginia Woolf notes, which protects us from some of the disturbing complexity of the other "probably preserves our sanity. ""If we had not this device for shutting people off from our sympathies we might probably dissolve utterly; separateness would be impossible. But the screens are in the excess; not the sympathy." Virginia Woolf, A Writer's Diary, ed. Leonard Woolf (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 981), 96.
4. Here I follow the accounts of Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (New York: Harper and Row, 1962) and Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Crossroad) in their claims that understanding is always interpretation, that this interpretation is necessarily rooted in our own "fore-meanings", prior understandings or prejudgments. and that these fore-meanings and prejudgments are evisahle.1985.
5. Iemploy Jürgcn Habermas's reconstruction of Freud's technique in jürgen Habermas, "On Systematjcaliy Distorted Communication," Inquiry 13 (1970): 208.
6. What I call "circumspective" understanding, Habermas, following Alfred Lorenzer, Symbol und Verstehen in psychoanalytischen Prozess: Vorarbeiten zu einer Metatheorie der Psychoanalyse (Frankfort: Suhrkamp), refers to as "scenic understandig."1970.
7. Harry Stack Sullivan, The Psychiatric Interview (New York: W.W. Norton, 954), 93.
8. Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary (Paris: Société Des Beaux-Arts, 218.
9. An extraordinarily valuable picture of this process is provided by Eugene Gendlin in his account of a session with a silent and unresponsive schizophrenic patient. See Eugene Gendlin, "Therapeutic Procedures in Dealing with Schizophrenics", in The Therapeutic Relationship and Its Impact, ed. Carl R. Rogers (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1967 379-81.
10. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 239-40.
11. Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Pres, 1986).
12. Herbert Fingarctte, The Self in Transformation: Psychoanalysis, Philosophy and the Life of the Spirit (New York: Harper and Row, 163), 261.
13. Fingarette, The Self in Transformation 245.
14. This theme is persuasively developed by David M. Levin, The Listening Self, 181: "I want to emphasize just how crucial being listened to and really well heard can be in facilitating the formation, recognition, and interpretation of our feelings, our thoughts, our needs, our motivations. When listening really echoes and resonates, when it allows the communication to reverberate between the communicants, and to constitute, there, a space free of pressure and constraint, it actively contributes, quite apart from the speaking, to the intersubjective constellation of new meanings." Carl Rogers has also elaborated this theme, emphasizing the importance of what he calls "psychological safety," Carl Rogers, On Becoming a Person(Boston: Houghton Muffln, 1961).
15. Herbert Fingarette, On Responsibility (New York: Basic Books, 1967) 23-78.
16. Anton Chekhov, The Ponable Chekhov, ed. AvrahmYarmolinsky (New York: Viking Press, 1947) 118-25.
17. David Hume, Treatise on Human Nature, ed. L.A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), Book 3, 494.
18. C.H. von Wright, The Varieties of Goodness (New York: Humanities Press, 1963), 136-54.
19. Philippa Foot, Virtues and Vices (Berkeley: University of California Press, 198), 1-18.
20. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 109a 18-22.
21. Jane Austen, Emma (New York: Bantam Books, 181), 378.
22. Amélie Rorty's felicitous phrase in Amélie Rorty, Mind in Action (Boston: Beacon Press, 188), 316.
23. See, for example, the account of tolerance by D.D. Raphael, "The Intolerable," injustifying Toleration, ed. Susan Mendus (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1881, 139.
24. John Dewey, Democracy and Education (New York: Macmillan, 144), 175.
25. Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry(NewYork: Oxford University Pres, 1979).
26. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 238. Gadamer associates openness, in this sense, with hermeneutical consciousness as such which always involves what he calls a "fusion of [different] horizons,"Gadamer, Truth and Method, 35, 273ff.
27. One reservation, hdwever, is in order. Good listening, as 1 conceive it, especially in its openness, seems to devalue the more aggressive demand for clarification and justification preeminent in a Socratic model. Socratic questioning may go further toward the clarification and improvement of beliefs than good listening. Good listening might be accommodated as a precondition of the Socratic enterprise. But Socratic challenge may awaken defensiveness by its exacting, logical rigor. Feelings and meanings may often be more easily attended to and articulated in an atmosphere of psychological safety than in one of logically exacting hallenge.
28. 53 (1970): 225-45,For this term, I am indebted to Rosalyn Sherman, "Is It Possible To Teach Socratically?" Soundings although she employs it in a broader sense than I do here. See also Gregory Vlastos, whose description of the Socratic quality that "psychic leisure" refers to is elaborated in several of his essays. Among them: Gregory Vlastos, "The Paradox of Socrstes," inThe Philosophy of Socrates, ed. Gregory Vlastos (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1971) and Gregory Vlastos, "Introduction" to Plato, Protagoras (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merril, 1956).
29. Sec Aristotle, esp. 1140a2-1140b30., Nicomachean Ethics,.
30. While openness, for instance, may employ techniques of various sorts, the attitude or disposition of openness is not a technique. This argument is suggested by James Wallace, Virtues and Vices (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978), 44-45.
31. For an argument critical of the absolute disjunction between virtues and skills.
32. see Robert C. Roberts, "Will Power and the Virtues," in The Virtues: Contemporary Essays on Moral Character, ed. R.B. Kruschwitz and R.C. Roberts (Bclmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 1987), es. 128-35.
33. Abraham Edel has noted that a "Martian social psychologist... witnessing the scramble for grades in our colleges, might conclude that the objective of learning was the accumulation of high grades" in Abraham Edel, Interpreting Education: Science, Ideology, and Value (New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 985), 23.
34. Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 196J, 80ff.
35. Such experiments in discussion as the following one suggested by Carl Rogers are promising: "Each person can speak up for himself only after he has first restated the ideas and feelings of the previous speaker accurately, and to that speaker's satisfaction," See Rogers, On Becoming a Person (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 161), 332.
36. A student recently told me that when a teacher says to him in class, "Please see me after class," he thinks "What have I done wrong?".
37. Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good (New York: Schocken Books, 1971),32.
38. warns against "thesiege. of the individual by concepts." Careful attention she claims, can he a successful counter-attack to tis siege.
39. See Jean-Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and few, trans. G.J. Becker (New York: Schocken Books, 196), 53-54.