First, we must consult the Littré dictionary under the word to hear (entendre),1 restricting ourselves to establishing a little order in its entries:
To hear (entendre): to direct the ear toward, in order to receive sound impressions. To hear noise. I hear someone talking in the next room; I hear that you are giving me some news.
1. To hear–to listen (entendre-écouter): to hear is to be struck by sounds; to listen is to lend the ear to hear them. Sometimes we do not hear even though we are listening, and often we hear without listening.
2. To hear–to perceive aurally (entendre-ouïr): these two words, originally very different, are completely synonymous today. Ouïr was the correct word, gradually replaced by entendre, which is the figurative word. Ouïr is to perceive aurally; entendre is, properly speaking, to pay attention. Usage alone has given it the distorted meaning of ouïr. The only difference is that ouïr has become a defective verb with restricted usage. When the meaning may be doubtful, ouïr must definitely be used. Hence the saying of Pacuvius on astrologers: “It’s better to let what they say fall on your ears (ouïr) than to listen (écouter) to them.” To hear (entendre) would be wrong.
3. Etymologically: to hold out toward, hence to have an intention, a plan: “What’s your take on it?”
4. To hear–to conceive of–to understand (entendre-concevoir-comprendre): entendre and comprendre both mean to know the meaning of. This distinguishes them from concevoir, which means to comprehend by way of the mind. I know the meaning of (j’entends) or I understand (je comprends) that sentence, not I conceive of it (je la conçois). On the other hand, in Boileau’s line “What is clearly conceived of (se conçoit) is clearly expressed,” to know the meaning of (entendre) or to understand (comprendre) would not do. The distinction between to know the meaning of (entendre) and to understand (comprendre) is different; the idea behind to know the meaning of (entendre) is to pay attention to, to be skilled in, whereas for to understand (comprendre) it is: to take in. I know the meaning of (j’entends) German, I know it, I am skilled in it. “I understand (je comprends) German” would be to say less. However, I say I understand (je comprends) a proof.
Based on this initial description, and taking the liberty of stretching the sense of the terms a little in order to make their specialized meanings clearer, we would suggest four definitions:
1. To listen (écouter) is to lend the ear, be interested in. I move actively toward someone or something that describes or signals its presence through a sound.
2. To perceive aurally (ouïr) is in contrast to listening (écouter), which describes the more active attitude; what I perceive aurally is what is given to my perception.
3. With to hear (entendre), we will retain the etymological sense: “to have an intention.” What I hear, what is manifest to me, is a function of that intention.
4. To understand (comprendre), to take in, has a double relationship with listening (écouter) and hearing (entendre). I understand (je comprends) what I was aiming to listen to (mon écoute), thanks to what I chose to hear (entendre). But, reciprocally, what I have already understood (j’ai compris) directs my listening (mon écoute) and informs what I hear (j’entends).
We will look at this more closely.
Properly speaking, I never stop perceiving aurally. I live in a world that is always present to me, and this world is a world of sound, as well as of touch and of sight. I move in an “ambience” as in a landscape. The most profound silence is still a sound background like any other, and against it, the noise of my breathing and my heart stand out with unexpected solemnity.2 We can glimpse how strange a world suddenly deprived of this dimension would be when there is a technical hitch, when the sound tape of a film suddenly stops or in some of our dreams. It is like Baudelaire’s dream and its “moving marvels” over which “hovered—dreadful novelty—everything for the eye, nothing for the ear—a silence as of eternity.” As if the continuous hum that inhabits even our dreams were mingled with the sense of our own duration.
But for all that, to perceive aurally is not “to be struck by sounds” coming to my ear without reaching my consciousness. Rather it is because of my consciousness that the backdrop of sound has reality. I adapt to it instinctively, raising my voice without even thinking when its level increases. It is associated for me with the sight, the thoughts, the actions that went along with it without my knowing, and sometimes it alone is enough to recall these to my mind. The music of a film, to which, completely absorbed by the dramatic events, I had paid not the slightest attention, will, when I hear it on the radio, reawaken the emotions the film had aroused, even before I have properly identified it. Finally, I instantly notice any sudden or unusual change in this backdrop of sound that I was not even aware of: the example is well known of people living near a station who wake up when the train does not go by on time.
But it is true that I can only ever become aware of the backdrop of sound indirectly, by reflection or memory. I hear the clock strike. I know it has struck already. I hastily reconstruct in my mind the first two strokes, which I had perceived aurally, establish which one I heard as the third, even before the fourth strikes. If I had not wanted to know the time, I would not, in fact, have known that the first two strokes had reached my consciousness. . . . Someone speaks to me, I am thinking about something else. The person I was speaking to, annoyed, stops talking. I hear this ill-omened silence. I manage to dig the second half of his sentence out of the backdrop of sound before it is irretrievably swallowed up in it, and this, with a little luck, will allow me to answer him and persuade him that my loss of attention was only apparent.
But now suppose I listen to this person. This means, by the same token, that I do not listen to the sound of his voice. I turn toward him, obedient to his intention to communicate something to me, ready to hear, from all that is offered to my aural perception, only what has value as a semantic indicator. Perhaps he has a southern accent that amused me when I first met him, that I still notice when I meet him again after a long absence, that distracted me then from even his most serious conversations, but that at present I ignore. (However, when I think back to this conversation, not intellectually, to go over the remarks we exchanged or to draw conclusions from them, but spontaneously, for example on going back later to the place where they occurred, I remember not only what we said but that accent from a part of the South, that particular turn of phrase, that voice I can immediately distinguish from so many others by a number of characteristics I had not, after all, ceased to perceive aurally even if I am quite incapable of analyzing them.)
To listen, as we have just seen, is not necessarily to be interested in a sound. It is even only rarely to be interested in it but rather, through it, to focus on something else.
At a pinch we may even forget that it has passed through our hearing. Then, listening to someone becomes practically synonymous with obeying (“Listen to your father!”) or giving credence (thus Pacuvius advises never to listen to astrologers, even if we cannot prevent perceiving aurally what they say). Listening to what is said to me, I strive, through the words, but also beyond a formulation that may be flawed, toward ideas that I endeavor to understand.
I listen to a car. I locate it, estimate how far away it is, even possibly recognize its make. What do I know of the noise that gave me all this information? The more quickly and reliably it gave me information, the more impoverished would be the description I would give of it if anyone asked me.
Conversely, it is precisely the noise of the car I focus on if the car is mine and if it seems the engine is “making a funny noise.” But my listening is still utilitarian, for I am seeking to infer information about the state of my engine from it: in my uncertainty about causes, I am constrained first and foremost to analyze the effects.
Finally I can listen, as I had initially promised myself, with no other goal than to hear better. That analysis, which a moment ago was a necessary stage, becomes its own purpose. Concentrating on the event, I relied on my perception. I used it unawares. Now, I have taken a step back from my perception. I am no longer making use of it; I am disinterested. It can finally reveal itself to me, become an object. Here to listen is still to focus, beyond the immediate sound itself, on something else than it: a kind of “sound character,” which becomes present to the whole of my perception.
We can now better define to hear (entendre) in relation to the other two verbs.
(a) To perceive aurally–to hear (ouïr-entendre)
We will start by observing that it is practically impossible for me not to select from what I perceive aurally. Background noise is not the most important; this is only so in an organized structure where it actually has this function. As long as I am occupied with what I am watching, thinking, or doing, I am in fact living in undifferentiated surroundings, perceiving scarcely anything but general impressions. But if I stay still, with my eyes closed and my mind empty, it is highly probable that I will not continue to listen impartially for more than an instant. I locate noises; I separate them, for example, into close or distant noises, coming from outside or in the room, and, inevitably, I begin to prefer some to others. The ticking of the clock asserts itself, obsesses me, wipes out all the rest. In spite of myself, I impose a rhythm on it: stressed beat, unstressed beat. Powerless to destroy this rhythm, I try at least to substitute another. I am at the point of wondering how I could ever have slept in the same room as this infuriating clock . . . and yet it only needs a car in the road to brake sharply for me to forget it. Now, for all I know, the room I am in could be an oasis of calm, battered by noises from outside. But I hear someone knocking at the door; and all these changing structures instantly sink back into the background noise, while I open my eyes and get up to go and open the door.
At least, thanks to those changes, I have been able to make an inventory, little by little and, as it were, by surprise, of the backdrop against which they occurred and to realize that I was responsible for those endless variations. When my intention is firmer, the corresponding structure will be stronger, and it is then, paradoxically, that I will have the impression that it is imposed on me from outside. Thus it is that, joining in a familiar conversation with several people, I will go from one subject and from one person to another, without having the slightest inkling of the huge confusion of voices, noises, laughter, from which I am making an original composition, different from any that each of my companions is making on his own account. I need a sound recording to reveal it to me, but, as the tape recorder will have not selected anything, it will often be indecipherable.
(b) To listen–to hear (écouter-entendre)
What will happen if, on the contrary, I listen in order to hear, either because I do not know where the sound object is coming from, in which case I am obliged to go through the process of describing it, or because I want to ignore where it is coming from and concentrate exclusively on the object? It would be a great mistake to think that the object would reveal itself to me, with all its qualities, just because I have taken it out of the background into which I relegated it: I will continue to make a series of choices, consider various aspects of it, one after the other.
In the same way, when I look at a house, I locate it in the landscape. But if my interest in it continues, I will examine the color of the stone, its material, or the architecture, or the detail of a carving over the door; then I will go back to the landscape, in relation to the house, to observe that it has a “lovely view,” and I will once more see it as a whole, as I had done at first, but my perception will be enriched by my previous investigations. Moreover, it is almost impossible for me to see it in the same way as if it were a rock or a cloud. It is a house, a piece of human handiwork, made to shelter human beings. I see it and appreciate it in relation to this meaning. And my inquiry, like my appreciation, will also be different depending on whether I am looking at it through the eyes of a future owner, an archaeologist, someone walking by, or an Inuit expert in igloos.
In the next chapter we will find a more detailed approach to the process of qualified listening, the diversity of which arises from this fundamental law of perception, which is to proceed “by a series of sketches,” without ever exhausting the object, to all our knowledge and former experiences (which give the overall appearance of the object different meanings or significations), and to the variety of our listening intentions, toward what we are looking for. Here we will simply give a typical example taken from Max Frisch’s novel Homo Faber:
Every day, in the morning, I was awoken by a weird noise, half-industrial, half-musical, a hubbub that I could not explain, not at all loud, but frenetic like crickets, metallic, monotonous, it must be a piece of machinery, but I couldn’t tell which, and afterward, when we went to have breakfast in the village, it had stopped, nothing could be seen.
. . . We packed our bags on Sunday. . . . And the strange noise that had awoken me every morning turned out to be music, the din of an ancient marimba, a clattering noise devoid of timbre, a hideous music, absolutely chaotic. It was for some festival to do with the full moon. Every morning before going to work in the fields they had been practicing to accompany the dance, five Native South Americans beating furiously with little hammers on their instrument, a sort of xylophone as long as a table.3
The two descriptions are clearly related: frenzy, monotony and clattering, hubbub and absence of timbre, metallic noise and hammer blows on a xylophone. Every morning from his bed, then outside, as he was leaving, Walter Faber perceived, more or less, the same thing aurally (il a ouï).
We cannot say the same about what he heard. On the first occasion he heard a noise and tried to explain its cause; on the second, aware of the causes, he is judging a music. Immediately, what was only “weird” becomes “hideous.” The “frenzy” that at first appeared as a simple descriptive analogy (our hero not dreaming of blaming it literally on crickets) is more strongly perceived when it is shown to be the result of furious instrumental activity, and then it becomes “absolutely chaotic.” At the same time, however, the monotony of the clattering, which might have suggested a machine, became less noticeable. Having managed to describe what he was listening to, Walter Faber began to hear (entendre), then to understand (comprendre), by virtue of a precise signification.
In effect, informed, not directly by the sound object, which remained unclear, “half-industrial half-musical,” but with the help of sight, he understood that he was dealing with music.
Like Max Frisch’s hero, I can understand the exact cause of what I have heard by connecting it with other perceptions or by means of a more or less complex series of deductions. Or again, through what I am listening to, I can understand something that has only an indirect link with what I hear: I note simultaneously that the birds are silent, the sky is lowering, the heat is oppressive, and I understand that there will be a thunderstorm.
I understand as a result of brainwork, a conscious activity of the mind that is no longer happy just to accept a signification but abstracts, compares, deduces, links information from different sources and of different types; I clarify the initial meaning or work out an additional one.
That noise that came from the next room and made her jump is pregnant with meaning for the mistress of the house: it is the noise of something falling or breaking. She hears it as such. Furthermore, she notices that her son is no longer there, remembers that the Chinese vase has very unwisely been left on a table within his reach, and very quickly understands that the child has just broken the Chinese vase.
I listen to (j’écoute) and hear (j’entends) what people say to me, but picking up contradictions in what is said, and linking them with certain facts that I already knew, I also understand (je comprends) that the person I am talking to is lying. Immediately, the mistrust this arouses in me changes the focus of my listening, and I also understand hesitations, certain cracks in the voice, and “even looks that you would think were dumb.”
As this last example suggests, sometimes entendre (to listen) and comprendre (to understand) are used interchangeably, in the sense in which they are synonyms: to grasp the meaning of. This is the case, for example, when we say either “I understand you” (using comprendre) or “I understand you” (using entendre), or when we complain that we do not understand (comprendre or entendre) modern music. In both cases, in fact, the act of understanding precisely coincides with the activity of listening: the whole work of deduction, comparison, and abstraction is part of the process and goes far beyond the immediate content, “what can be heard.”