The Listening Self: Personal Growth, Social Change and the Closure of Metaphysics [Paperback]

David Michael Levin (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0415025834 | ISBN-13: 978-0415025836 | Publication Date: May 1989 | Edition: 1

In a study that goes beyond the ego affirmed by Freudian psychology, David Levin offers an account of personal growth and self-fulfillment based on the development of our capacity for listening. Drawing on the work of Dewey, Piaget, Erikson, and Kohlberg, he uses the vocabulary of phenomenological psychology to distinguish four stages in this developmental process and brings us the significance of these stages for music, psychotherapy, ethics, politics, and ecology. This analysis substantiates his claim that the development of our listening capacity is a process that fits Foucault's conception of a practice of the self, forming our character as social beings and moral agents. David Levin contends that our self- development as auditory beings is necessary for the achievement of a just and democratic society.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Levin's condensed essay is a passionate effort to once more unite science with values by revealing their origins in human speech and human listening." -- Contemporary Psychology

"This is a very rich book . . .." -- Canadian Philosophical Books - 1991

About the Author

David Michael Levin teaches at Northwestern University. He is the author of The Body's Recollection of Being (1985), and The Opening of Vision (1988), both published by Routledge.

Product Details

• Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: Routledge; 1 edition (May 1989)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0415025834
• ISBN-13: 978-0415025836
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.4 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #427,143 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

I am Dr. David Kleinberg-Levin (known, in earlier years as David Michael Levin) graduated from Phillips Academy, Andover and went on to study philosophy at Harvard University, graduated in 1961. I spent a year as Fulbright Exchange Fellow at the Sorbonne in Paris and undertook research, mostly on Fichte and Schelling, at the university in Freiburg im Breisgau. In 1967, I received his Ph.D. from Columbia University, writing a dissertation on Husserl's phenomenology under the guidance of Aron Gurwitsch of the New School for Social Research. He taught in the Humanities Department at MIT (1968-1972), and then joined the Philosophy Department at Northwestern University, from which I retired in 2005. I presently enjoy living in New York City, partaking of its rich intellectual and cultural life, going the rounds of the art galleries and the art museums, and enjoying concerts, modern dance, and performances at the Metropolitan Opera. I love hiking in the mountains and wilderness, love feeling a part of nature; but I am equally drawn to the cultural life of the city. Since retirement in 2005, I have written two books that touch on matters dear to my heart, one published in 2008 (Before the Voice of Reason), one (Redeeming Words) just delivered to a publisher.The first of these two is a contribution to the ongoing critique of reason, retrieving the voices of nature and of other people, voices to which I am indebted, and which accordingly make a claim on my responsibility to care for them, by virtue of the fact that those voices helped me to acquire the voice I call "my own". The second book is a contribution to the philosophy of language, drawing on critical social theory (especially Benjamin & Adorno) as well as on the earlier nineteenth-century movements of German idealism and German romanticism, the transcendentalism of Emerson, and twentieth-century phenomenology (especially the thought of Heidegger, Rosenzweig and Levinas) to reflect on various works of literature. The book has chapters on Virginia Woolf, Wallace Stevens, Vladimir Nabokov, W. G. Sebald, Alfred Döblin, and Samuel Beckett. Since returning to New York City, the city where I was born, I have also written some brochures for gallery exhibitions--one on oil paintings and one on photography. Before I left New York to begin teaching at Northwestern, I was doing a good deal of writing on art gallery exhibits, dance and opera. I am now resuming such occasional writing, eager to do more.