Literature Review - Charles Peirce on Phenomenology & Listening

Bodie, G. D., & Crick, N. (2014). Listening, Hearing, Sensing: Three Modes of Being and the Phenomenology of Charles Sanders Peirce. Communication Theory, 24(2), 105-123. doi:10.1111/comt.12032

Most valuable find to base my personal practice on and eventually add to my ‘building facilitators’ toolkit. The authors propose building a strong listening practice which is based on the phenomenologist Charles Sanders Pierce, whose seminal work on listening is timeless and relevant today. The premise of breaking it down to three different modes helps in going deeper into each layer of listening - from the singular which allows for nothing other than to hearing which builds the day to day engagement and the need to be present to listening which fulfils the need to co-create, learn and build cognition.

Verbatim:

Charles Sanders Peirce

defines phenomenology as “the description of the phaneron ... [or] the collective total of all that is in any way or in any sense present to the mind, quite regardless of whether it corresponds to any real thing or not”

What Peirce offers is less an account of listening per se but rather an account of the categories of experience that provide the underpinnings of the practice of lis- tening. Peirce’s categories effectively correspond to the traditional tripartite division of listening into affective, cognitive, and behavioral processes

Firstness (Quality), Secondness (Rela- tion), and Thirdness (Mediation). Listening, in short, is the capacity to discern the underlying habitual char- acter and attitudes of people with whom we communicate, including ourselves, in such a way that, at its best, brings about a sense of shared experience and mutual understanding.

Sensing, hearing, and listening thus all are contributing parts to a coherent practice that we can develop through conscious training and habit.

Evaluative:

Meyer (2007) described it as an activity that “does not anticipate or expect, but waits for the revelation of new possibilities for understanding through listening” (p. 65).

Schneider’s (2007) response to Meyer exemplifies the pragmatic maxim at work: “What does this type of listening look like, and how do we know we have listened properly?”

How to:

cognitive tools to help us identify what we are doing when we are doing it so that we can better anticipate the effects of our overall communication practices and, through reflection and experimentation, improve upon them.

consider 1st, 2nd and 3rd as a posteriori abstractions that we can distin- guish and identify only after a filtering and separation process, much as white light is broken into a spectrum after passing through a prism

first-ness - quality - single mode without parts - not sense perception says pierce. As Mayorga (2007, p. 117) explains it, Quality “is a kind of half-way between nothingness and existence.” as hovering in a realm unto itself and only occasionally being glimpsed through rare moments that are the same for everyone.

Second-ness - relation - comes first as first-ness cannot happen without relation.It is the combination of “an action and reaction, between our soul and the stimulus” . they are acting and experiencing a reaction from others; they are, in essence, struggling to fit themselves into the experience of another who also is an active participant in the experience. there is both playing and feedback. it is the “experience of effort without regard for any purpose” (Houser, 1983, p. 339).

Third-ness - Mediation - therefore opens up the realm of meaning, the realm by which we categorize an event as a type of thing that behaves in a particular way and that makes it possible for us to mold our future. thoughts and actions in accordance with our expectations. In the realm of pure Rela- tion, we might experience the shock of someone taking something we desire from our hands; Mediation alters our attitudes with the proposition:

Mediation makes learning, and therefore, listening possible. Whereas Quality stimulates Feeling and Relation prods our Will, Mediation is contingent upon the actions of Cognition, by which Peirce means “the faculty of learning, acquisition, memory and inference, synthesis”

Peirce’s triadic approach to consciousness (or “being in the world”) encourages not just a distinction between hearing and listening, but between hear- ing, listening and sensing, corresponding to dual, plural, and single consciousness respectively.

Hearing; Dual - Hearing therefore emphasizes Secondness, or Relation, because it stresses the sphere of action in which two or more “wills” strive with or against each other within a recalcitrant environment.

Listening - listening when the development of new meanings, attitudes, and habits itself becomes the goal of our communication. I must encounter someone or something that stimu- lates my interest and need to listen. “listens” in such situations strives to bring about a sense of shared experience and mutual understanding through the cocreation of rules based on sharing of meaningful and conscientious dialogue. Listening is that which seeks to form bridges between disparate parts by generating a rule that binds them together into a unity—it is that which “connects and bridges”. listening “is a profoundly difficult way of being in the world because it by necessity disrupts the sameness and familiarity of the always already known” (Lipari, 2009, p. 45).

Sensing - “taken beyond ourselves” . We see this mode of consciousness (Sensing) within Lipari’s listening being described as a “dwelling place” from which we are removed when engaged in thinking about our experience.