They Hear my Words
but Not my World
"They kept asking for ‘input’ like I was a statistic. But when I spoke about the mold in my daughter’s room and the fear of eviction, they didn’t hear the part of me that’s exhausted and scared. I wasn’t giving input. I was asking for dignity—for me and for my daughter. I was asking to be heard as a person, and not simply a source of information."
— Shauna, resident and caregiver
"They come with clipboards and cameras, nodding while I talk. They write down what I say about jobs and housing, but they don’t really hear the loneliness in my voice, the sense that my life and my town don’t matter anymore. They quote me in their reports, but I don’t feel seen. They hear my words, not my world."
— Janice, factory worker, Ohio
"The politician says he’s listening, but all he hears are my words, not the weight behind them. He nods, repeats my concerns in speeches, but he doesn’t feel the urgency in my voice, the years of frustration, the quiet desperation. He hears what I say, but not who I am in the saying. And that’s what makes me feel erased—not just as a voter, but as a human being."
— Leticia, community activist and single mother
From Logocentric Listening
to Relational Listening
A Note on Cavarero and Whitehead
- Logocentric Listening: A mode of listening that focuses primarily on extracting the semantic content—the logos—of what is said. The voice is treated as a transparent medium for meaning, and the listener attends mainly to ideas, arguments, and information, often neglecting the speaker’s emotional tone, embodiment, and uniqueness.
- Relational Listening: A mode of listening that attends not only to what is said, but to who is saying it and how. It is attuned to the vocalic presence of the speaker—their mood, subjectivity, vulnerability, and agency. Relational listening hears the voice as a living expression of the person’s becoming and values the speaker as a singular, feeling being in relationship with the listener.
Relational listening can, and often does, include a logocentric component—ideas and meaning matter. But it does not reduce the act of listening to semantic extraction. It is open to more than the informational content; it is vulnerable to the presence of the other. Without this vulnerability—this willingness to be affected—the listening relationship loses the very relationality at its heart. It becomes instrumental, a way of “taking in” the other as data, rather than meeting them as a living subject. In such cases, listening can slip into a subtle will to master the other, consuming their words without truly receiving their person.
A Note on Cavarero and Whitehead
“The sphere of the voice is constitutively broader than that of the speech: it exceeds it. To reduce this excess to mere meaningless – to whatever remains when the voice is not intentioned towards a meaning is one of the chief vices of logocentrism. The vice transform the excess into a lack.”
- Cavarero, Adriana. For More than One Voice toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford UP, 2005
The problem of logocentric listening lies in its reduction of communication to a transfer of information, as if language were merely a pipeline for propositions. In this mode of listening, the voice becomes mere background—only the meaning matters, not the manner of its expression. The body of the speaker is effectively silenced; the listener hears what is said, but not who is speaking. Adriana Cavarero, the Italian philosopher, invites us to resist this reduction. In her book For More Than One Voice, she urges us to recover a way of listening that attends not just to the logos—the semantic content—but to the phonē—the voice as the embodied presence of a unique self.
For Cavarero, the voice is not just a carrier of meaning but a revelation of the speaker’s singularity. Each voice is as unique as a fingerprint, resonating with the irreducible mystery of the person who speaks. To truly hear someone, then, is not only to understand their words but to be attuned to their vocal presence—their tone, rhythm, breath, and emotional texture. This kind of listening acknowledges the speaker as a who, not merely a what.
Such a shift in listening is not merely aesthetic; it is ethical. It opens space for a relational ethics grounded in vulnerability and presence. Cavarero’s critique of logocentrism echoes deeper concerns about modern subjectivity: its tendencies toward abstraction, disembodiment, and control. Against this, she calls for a listening that affirms the other in their sonic particularity, not to decipher or define them, but to receive them. In doing so, we begin to practice a different kind of relationship—one that values the unrepeatable timbre of a life.
In a Whiteheadian context, a person's voice can reveal that person's subjective aims, subjective forms, agency, and singularity. True, a person is an act of relational concrescence; a person's experience is an act by which the many of the world 'become one' in the immediacy of that person's life. But the experience is also unique and singular. It has a privacy to it that is not reducible to others, and we miss the singularity if we listen only for semantic content.
To listen Whiteheadianly is to attune ourselves not only to what a person says but to how their being sounds in the saying. The voice is not a neutral conduit for abstract propositions; it is a vibrational enactment of the soul's becoming in real time. Each voice carries with it the texture of subjective forms—emotions, valuations, intensities, hesitations, longings—and these are irreducibly personal. They are not simply part of an informational system but of an ontological event: a concrescing subject actualizing a moment of feeling.
This is what Adriana Cavarero invites us to hear when she calls us to incline the ear to the uniqueness of the human voice. In her terms, the voice is not merely linguistic—it is vocalic. And in Whitehead’s terms, the person speaking is not merely a conveyor of logical relations but a locus of self-creativity, of decision. The voice reveals not only that the speaker exists, but how they exist—in this moment, under these conditions, from this inheritance of feelings and memories.
If we listen only for logos, for meaning-as-content, we risk bypassing the very reality of the person. We abstract from the actual occasion of their becoming. But if we listen instead for the voice as an act of self-enjoyment and becoming—if we allow the sounds to disclose their subjective aim and tonal particularity—then we begin to honor what Whitehead calls "the privacy of the subject." In that privacy lies not isolation, but the mystery of singularity: a uniqueness that is of the world, but never fully for the world to grasp.
- Cavarero, Adriana. For More than One Voice toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford UP, 2005
The problem of logocentric listening lies in its reduction of communication to a transfer of information, as if language were merely a pipeline for propositions. In this mode of listening, the voice becomes mere background—only the meaning matters, not the manner of its expression. The body of the speaker is effectively silenced; the listener hears what is said, but not who is speaking. Adriana Cavarero, the Italian philosopher, invites us to resist this reduction. In her book For More Than One Voice, she urges us to recover a way of listening that attends not just to the logos—the semantic content—but to the phonē—the voice as the embodied presence of a unique self.
For Cavarero, the voice is not just a carrier of meaning but a revelation of the speaker’s singularity. Each voice is as unique as a fingerprint, resonating with the irreducible mystery of the person who speaks. To truly hear someone, then, is not only to understand their words but to be attuned to their vocal presence—their tone, rhythm, breath, and emotional texture. This kind of listening acknowledges the speaker as a who, not merely a what.
Such a shift in listening is not merely aesthetic; it is ethical. It opens space for a relational ethics grounded in vulnerability and presence. Cavarero’s critique of logocentrism echoes deeper concerns about modern subjectivity: its tendencies toward abstraction, disembodiment, and control. Against this, she calls for a listening that affirms the other in their sonic particularity, not to decipher or define them, but to receive them. In doing so, we begin to practice a different kind of relationship—one that values the unrepeatable timbre of a life.
In a Whiteheadian context, a person's voice can reveal that person's subjective aims, subjective forms, agency, and singularity. True, a person is an act of relational concrescence; a person's experience is an act by which the many of the world 'become one' in the immediacy of that person's life. But the experience is also unique and singular. It has a privacy to it that is not reducible to others, and we miss the singularity if we listen only for semantic content.
To listen Whiteheadianly is to attune ourselves not only to what a person says but to how their being sounds in the saying. The voice is not a neutral conduit for abstract propositions; it is a vibrational enactment of the soul's becoming in real time. Each voice carries with it the texture of subjective forms—emotions, valuations, intensities, hesitations, longings—and these are irreducibly personal. They are not simply part of an informational system but of an ontological event: a concrescing subject actualizing a moment of feeling.
This is what Adriana Cavarero invites us to hear when she calls us to incline the ear to the uniqueness of the human voice. In her terms, the voice is not merely linguistic—it is vocalic. And in Whitehead’s terms, the person speaking is not merely a conveyor of logical relations but a locus of self-creativity, of decision. The voice reveals not only that the speaker exists, but how they exist—in this moment, under these conditions, from this inheritance of feelings and memories.
If we listen only for logos, for meaning-as-content, we risk bypassing the very reality of the person. We abstract from the actual occasion of their becoming. But if we listen instead for the voice as an act of self-enjoyment and becoming—if we allow the sounds to disclose their subjective aim and tonal particularity—then we begin to honor what Whitehead calls "the privacy of the subject." In that privacy lies not isolation, but the mystery of singularity: a uniqueness that is of the world, but never fully for the world to grasp.