Bernhard Pörksen: Listen Up!

Mr. Pörksen, your new book is titled “Listening: The Art of Opening Yourself Up to the World”. Why are listening and being open so important?

I have thought a lot recently about why people are so argumentative and angry these days. The communication climate has become loud, heated and emotionally charged. That is what led me to write this book. To diagnose our collective irritability. I wanted to find out what we can do about it. And in the end, by talking with people, I came to the conclusion that we should be listening more. I realized that listening is the most fundamental and perhaps most underestimated form of communication. Nothing is possible without listening. There can be no constructive or destructive debate, no functional interaction, no reconciliation, no coming together and no exchanging of ideas. We tend to focus on the charismatic speaker, but we neglect the figure of the listener. That’s a mistake.

So only by listening can we open ourselves up?

That’s right. For me, listening is a metaphor. It represents being receptive to the world. It stands for intellectual openness, for the attempt to let in what is foreign, perhaps even disturbing, terrible, but also beautiful – but in any case, what is different. That’s why I call listening “the art of opening up to the world”. Not because it is something aesthetic, but because I see it as a heuristic process, as an art of discovery.

Listening is often considered to be a passive act. But you see it is an active process. Why is that?

Listening is a highly active process. One that always requires freedom. You can silence people, but you can never force them to listen. It’s impossible to define and to determine what someone really hears or understands. What the other person really lets in only takes place in the inner regions of their brain. I distinguish between two fundamentally different ways of listening: listening with the “me” ear and listening with the “you” ear.

What exactly is the difference?

The “me” ear asks: Do I agree with what the other person is saying? This kind of listening is affected by the fact that we usually want to believe certain things, for whatever reasons, good or bad. Our own ego, filters, judgments and prejudices determine how we listen. If the other person says exactly what we expect and desire, the result is a sort of cognitive harmony. In truth, you’re not really listening at all. You’re mainly hearing yourself, shaped by your own filters. Listening with the “you” ear, on the other hand, is a form of non-egocentric attention. The “you” ear asks in which world the things that the other person is saying are plausible. When we listen with the “you” ear, we try to completely take on the other person’s perspective. We try to detach ourselves from our own filters, our own matrix, our own perception of the world.

Is that even possible?

It’s difficult and hard work – and often in vain. The aim is to try and understand the other person in their otherness. There’s the imperative that people should listen to others – the categorical imperative of “you”-ear listening. That we should remove ourselves completely and see what happens.

And how do you open yourself up completely unbiased?

I don’t have a magic formula for that – not even a piece of advice. In fact, I even caution against the idea that there is such a formula, because it creates the illusion that it could be done quickly and easily. Since 2015 I have repeatedly spoken to people and listened to them for my new book. I asked them how they had achieved this or that, reconstructed their story and tried to find out how they experienced this kind of mental openness. In other words, how they were able to switch from the “me” ear of egocentric attention to the “you” ear of active listening.

So your book is the result of these conversations?

My book is an attempt to listen closely, sometimes painfully so. And that’s where I find the answer. Slowing down, relearning how to hesitate. Not jumping to conclusions. Freeing myself from labels, abstractions, as the philosopher Hegel calls them in his critique of abstract thinking. That means you don’t see people within categories like the “old white man”, the “hysterical feminist”, the “woke virtue terrorist”, or the “climate Nazi”. You free yourself from all that. You free yourself from the entire vocabulary of snap judgments and instant categorizations and allow yourself to listen and look as closely as possible. That also includes the realization that you may never really understand the other person. Buddhists would talk about the importance of the beginner’s mind, to free yourself from everything you think you know, everything that you consider to be right and true.

What role does the digital world play in our inability to listen?

We are getting closer and closer to a strangely enigmatic sort of digital feudalism. On the one hand, we are seeing this enormous opening of the communicative space, which is great because so many people are being given a voice who didn’t have one before. On the other hand, (…)

→ Read the full interview in rampstyle #34 “On Any Sunday”.

Bernhard Pörksen was born in 1969 in Freiburg im Breisgau. He studied German language and literature, journalism and biology in Hamburg and worked as a freelance journalist during and after his studies. Since 2008 he has been professor of media studies at the University of Tübingen. That same year he was voted Professor of the Year by the journal Unicum Beruf. Pörksen has published over two hundred essays, commentaries and articles in various media outlets. His latest book, Zuhören: Die Kunst, sich der Welt zu öffnen [Listening: The Art of Opening Yourself Up to the World], was published by Carl Hanser Verlag.