Society, Culture and the Auditory Imagination in Modern France

The Humanity of Hearing

I. Sykes

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137455352
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Science History
• Index: History

This book examines the striking way in which medical and scientific work on hearing in 18th and 19th-century France helped to shape modern French society and culture. The author argues that of all the senses hearing offered the greatest resources for remodelling the idea of the universal human condition within the modern French historical setting.

1

Medicine, Science and the Auditory Imagination

In the past, to hear was to undertake an important personal challenge. “Faith cometh by hearing”,¹ quoted Blaise Pascal famously in 1656. Such comments were not simply theological statements, however. Rather, they were the first step in a much more formal and extended process of integrating the human individual into a larger constructed space of an ethical social experience. Philosophers who commented on the meaning of human hearing were attempting to find practical ways of improving society. Individuals had the capacity to improve their role within the social setting by tuning their ears. By the late seventeenth century, French anatomists and scientists began to think about the human ear in entirely new ways. Scientists such as Claude Perrault described how the individual was caught in a complex relationship with sound by describing the environment solely in terms of sonic objects. The anatomist Joseph Duverney identified the physiological structure of the ear as a site transcending expected boundaries of space and time.

Human audition became an intensely debated domain of research amongst a wider circle of different medical and scientific practitioners. By the late seventeenth century, key developments had been made by Galileo and by Mersenne on the theory of sympathetic resonance, which also came to dominate the thinking of eighteenth-century French scientists and anatomists.² Such work was grounded in the imaginative idea of the relationship between the human self to a broader cosmic sphere of existence, an idea that had been present since the time of Pythagoras.³ Eighteenth-century French anatomists and scientists embedded the magical meaning of sympathetic resonance in their presentation of the human (and natural) auditory landscape. This realm maintained its transformative character not through any obvious reference to divine Creation. Rather, it was embedded in the imaginative construction of the complex mechanical processes of hearing and the hearing world itself.

The humane listening world

By the 1680s, Cartesian philosophy, with a few notable exceptions, had dominated discussion on hearing.⁴ The human body was blind and required sound to give it an ethical sense of its place in the world. Nicolas Malebranche had powerfully declared in 1674: “In short, it is of the greatest importance to make good use of our freedom by always refraining from consenting to things and loving them until forced to do so by the powerful voice of the Author of Nature, which till now I have called the reproaches of reason and the remorse of conscience.”⁵ Malebranche, like Fénelon, identified listening as a critical skill for potential leaders. He began his The Search after Truth with a warning of the serious political consequences that might result from faulty listening. Great leaders such as Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar had made the wrong decisions, he explained, simply because they had poor listening skills. Their ears were not functioning properly. They were attuned to the wrong sounds. Malebranche recounts how Caesar was constantly distracted by the “tumultuous din made by the crowd of flatterers surrounding him”.⁶ On arriving at the Rubicon River, he was so haunted by these horrible sounds that he sparked the famous civil war that ultimately damaged his people. Alexander too had been distracted. This time, not by a crowd, but by the strange language of the Scythians, which drowned out the “voice of truth”.⁷ Alexander had certainly been using his ears, but he had not been listening properly. For Malebranche, bad listening was demonstrated by an inability to strain out superfluous noise. This inability to engage in appropriate hearing was closely connected to erroneous judgments. The consequence of poor listening was not only the personal humiliation of individual error. More dramatically, it meant moral misery for the people: it was as a result of such poor listening, Malebranche explained, that Caesar sacrificed his country’s freedom for his own ambition.

Vision was a very different case. Like listening, it could mislead. Yet Malebranche explained that men often forgot that human vision had only a limited field of view and might therefore distort the size of objects in certain circumstances. This was of vital importance in assessing the truth of scientific evidence. Sound perception, however, was much more directly connected to the general state of the human condition. For Malebranche, words could either make or break people’s sense of humanity. Good listening had the power to liberate them from the often-abusive implications of much public speech: “But if men would learn to listen and to answer well, conversations would not only be very agreeable, but even very useful: whereas when everyone tries to appear learned, we only succeed in becoming swell-headed and in disputing without understanding: charity is sometimes offended, and truth nearly never discovered.”⁸ Observation itself required a form of elevated listening that went beyond the immediate action of seeing: “To submit to the false appearance of truth is to enslave oneself against the will of God, but to submit in good faith to these secret reproaches of our reason that accompany the refusal to yield to evidence is to obey the voice of eternal truth that speaks to us inwardly.”⁹

Malebranche even encouraged listening in darkness. Such a process required both patience and practice. It might cause a deep emotional and physical pain, remorse and reproach. But this was a sign that the listener had renounced immediate emotional responses for a more profound emotional state of being: “If only God spoke to us, and if we judged only according to what we heard, we could perhaps avail ourselves of the words of Christ: ‘I judge according to what I hear and the judgment is just and true. But we have a body which speaks louder than God himself and this body never tells the truth . . .’ ”¹⁰ Though it was difficult to cultivate, such listening was ultimately liberating, since it insured the listener against bodily entrapment. The body required soulful sounds to fully exist as a form of life. Internal noises were often the least appropriate for emotional stability. To listen was to gain control over such sonic chaos. It was the ability to distinguish “the cacophony with which the body fills the imagination from the pure voice of truth that speaks to the mind”.¹¹ Malebranche believed that with time and practice the listener was able to suspend judgment throughout their daily life and, in so doing, attain a kind of freedom.

Such freedom, of course, only occurred within the prescribed natural order. If the divine Being were silent, liberation would never take place. Human listening was considered essential in creating a connective zone of communication between the individual and the outside world. Through effective listening, individuals could actively participate in constructing a social domain, which forced them to improve their thoughts and behaviour. This kind of listening etiquette, Malebranche explained, should permeate every human action, even the philosophical writings of his own: “We would be very unjust and vain, then, to wish to be listened to like doctors or masters.”¹² Other philosophers also drew attention to proper listening as a critical aspect of improving the human condition. Pascal was even more furious than Malebranche at the general state of social listening and also warned of its consequences for society as a whole. Poor hearing was again cited as a consistent characteristic of rulers:

The mind of this supreme judge of the world is not so independent as to be impervious to whatever din may be going on nearby. It does not take a cannon’s roar to arrest his thoughts: the noise of a weathercock or a pulley will do. Do not be surprised if his reasoning is not too sound at the moment, there is a fly buzzing round his ears; that is enough to render him incapable of giving good advice.¹³

Poor use of the ear was, for Pascal, a sign of man’s folly. Kings surrounded themselves in loud and triumphant noises simply to scare people into submission. Intellectuals relied on a pompous tone of voice to overpromote reason. Parents gave their children bad advice in their career choices. Simple conversations were reduced to farce simply because people heard wrongly: “It is better to say nothing”,¹⁴ he advised, than to create the conditions for poor listening practice.

For Pascal, an elevated form of listening provided the perfect counterfoil to such pointlessness in life. It was the only act that might force the listener into an informed state of submission: “Know then, proud man, what a paradox you are to yourself. Be humble, impotent reason! Be silent, feeble nature! Learn that man infinitely transcends man, hear from your master your true condition which is unknown to you. Listen to God.”¹⁵ Proper listening stripped man of all his artificial power. It made man weak and taught him humility. For late seventeenth-century French philosophers and their scientific contemporaries alike, it was the natural, rather than the human, world of sound and voice that emerged as superior models of listening practice. Man might become beast through poor listening. Yet, more often than not, it was the sound world of nature that contained the sophistication and depth to match Enlightenment philosophical ideals.

Pascal advocated listening to sounds resonating around the natural world. One could only hear “all the conceivable immensity of nature”¹⁶ if one listened properly. Man might remain fearful during this process but he was still able to separate the act of listening from the darkness of the unknown. Once he was really listening, he began to discover his own soul, and could only then begin to be happy. Fénelon also advocated listening to the natural world but referred to it as an intricate and harmonized system of social experience. His description of listening in his Traité de l’Existence de Dieu (1712 and 1718) is less concerned with the fear and noise of nature than the curious experience of nature’s sonic language that drew man seamlessly into its web.¹⁷ This approach led him to dispute the hierarchy outlined by Malebranche between the Creator and the natural world.¹⁸ Nature, Fénelon believed, was the Creator. It supported man throughout his life, guiding him throughout his daily routine:

The day is the time for social experience and work: night time shrouding the earth in its shades ends all weariness and soothes all troubles; it suspends; it calms everything; it spreads silence and sleep; while relaxing the body, it renews the spirit. Soon, day returns to call man back to work, and to reawaken all nature.¹⁹

Nature had its own spiritual voice.

Nature’s voice, “a supreme and all-powerful voice”,²⁰ belonged, according to Fénelon, to that of a higher Being. It transformed natural materials into wondrous things. But it could only be heard by man if he took the time to listen, he explained. If man truly listened to nature he would realize that intellectual reasoning alone could never make natural structures work. He would instead perceive “superior wisdom”, a kind of white noise, a background spectrum of sound guiding natural beasts. This “instinct” enabled animals to defend themselves, sustain themselves and evolve.²¹ Human bodies also contained such a noise. This hum ensured man’s survival and protection. Humans could listen to the voice and direct their judgments:

It is an interior master who makes me be silent, who makes me speak, who makes me believe, who makes me doubt, who makes me admit my mistakes or confirm my judgments: by listening to him, I learn; by listening to myself, I lose my way . . . The master who constantly teaches us, makes us all think in the same way. When we are quick to judge, without listening to his voice with self-distrust, we think and we talk of dreams full of extravagance.²²

Proper listening was for Fénelon the perception of a universal voice permeating and uniting the globe: “While he is correcting me in France, he is correcting other men in China, Japan, Mexico and Peru, using the same principles.”²³

Humans listened, Fénelon explained, in order to survive their physical and social environment. The openness of the auditory conduit, Fénelon reminded his readers, was specifically designed for the preservation of life. Whilst the eyes were closed and at rest, the ears remained open, attentive to genuine warning signals.²⁴ The Epicurean doctor, Guillaume Lamy (1644–1683), also believed that nature provided the solution to an idealized socializing experience.²⁵ But he saw the human physical form as equal to nature in constructing this socializing discourse. In his Discours Anatomiques (1675) he went so far as to suggest that man “be respected by the other Bodies like the King of the Universe”,²⁶ arguing that the Universe was not a hierarchical system of intelligence but a “proud strike”²⁷ which resounded through the very material of its physical parts. The human body itself was a series of interlinking acoustical forces, not a mechanical machine “moved” independently by a higher spirit. God or the “Author” was “a workman who did everything for himself, having no nobler purpose to consider. He produced the materials with movements without its different particles, and through this, all the bodies and an infinite number of unknown others that we see, have been formed.”²⁸

Through the human hearing process, natural systems and now even the anatomical parts of the human body itself, were revealed as soundworlds of considerable sophistication. There was now little distinction between the effect of artificial and natural materials in the landscape when the proper listening process was called upon to make them sound in their very different ways. In 1680, Claude Perrault demonstrated in his treatise, “Du Bruit”, that auditory physiology contained the material structure on which such sophisticated soundworlds depended: “I call Noise the effect of a particular agitation that meets in surrounding air and almost at the same time, in more distant air and as far as the ear.”²⁹ Erlmann, in his brilliant analysis of Du Bruit, has drawn attention to Perrault’s reliance on air implantus in order to make the connection between external sounds and the auditory system work.³⁰ For Perrault, listening occurred when external sound sources grafted themselves onto the mechanisms of the human ear, not in the form of a simple wave, but in mechanical meeting:

The material in which the impression of the form of the sound is made. This material consists of two types of parts: the first type involves the dilated nerves mixed with a substance proper and particular to each sense organ: the other type includes those parts which are essential for the function of the closest organ.³¹

Erlmann explains: “Basically, what Perrault argued for was a qualitative link between the physics of sounding bodies and the ear, the result being an anatomy in which only those components mattered that maintained a specific physiological relation to the object perceived.”³² But Perrault’s w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Medicine, Science and the Auditory Imagination
• 2. The Juge-Auditeur and Hearing the People
• 3. Hearing and Spaces of Medical Care
• 4. The Blind and the Communication-Object
• 5. Sound, Health and the Auditory Body-Politic
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index