Learning the Sounds of Love

I recently started wearing my first completely wireless pair of earbuds. At first I would leave them in my ear even when I talked with my wife or kids. But I began to wonder, with the help of modern science, Herman Bavinck, and the Thomistic tradition,^[1] should I be wearing something designed to cut me off, auditorily at least, from those I’m called to love? If Bonhoeffer is right when he says the first service that one owes to others consists in listening to them, do headphones impede this duty?

Correspondence of Sound and Knowledge

By week sixteen of pregnancy, babies can hear — ultrasounds show us their movement in response to sound. Researchers can test a female baby and see how she learns the voice of her mom and grows fond of it. The process begins in the mother’s lungs and throat as she reads a Dr. Seuss book to her baby. The auditory vibrations make their way to the baby girl’s ear drums, ossicles, and cochlea, causing upwards of 25,000 nerve endings to move.^[2]

The physical alteration in the auditory organ and the sending of nerve signals to the brain is not knowledge, according to Thomas Aquinas, but “a prior transitive activity” to knowledge.^[3] The vibrations of The Cat in The Hat are physical and in Thomistic terms would be considered the material cause. The mother is the efficient cause as her agency makes the words. Multiple causes occur in a single event as the material cause works together with other causes.

While sound is manifested materially, it has an immaterial form which corresponds to it. As Thomas Aquinas notes, “the object of every sensitive power is a form as existing in corporeal matter.” This form is not like that of a basketball player who positions their arm at ninety degrees and points their elbow toward the rim. No, the form here, within Thomistic studies (following Plato and Aristotle), is the answer to “what is this?” The whatness of something is not material and yet it still exists in the mind. Modern reductive materialism questions the existence of forms, but as soon as they go to make their argument, they use words, displaying their reliance on forms even as they argue against their existence.

The whatness and the what correspond. They have to in order for us to understand anything. As Herman Bavinck said, “Knowledge of truth is possible only if we begin with the fact that subject and object, and knowing and being, correspond to each other.”^[4] The phrase, “The sun did not shine, it was too wet to play, so we sat in the house all that cold, cold wet day,” cannot be reduced to the vibration of physical materials. Something else is going on. We’d be foolish to separate the sound from the form of a story.

Bavinck says modern science itself does not explain this correspondence, but that we find grounds for it in “the wisdom of the divine word, which sets on our lips the confession of God the Father, the Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth.”^[5] It is in this first line of the Apostles’ Creed that the immaterial God is the first and eternal cause to all material. While the Creator’s cause is significantly different from the material and efficient cause, it is necessary. As the Apostle Paul says, “in him all things hold together.”

There were skeptics of correspondence in Thomas Aquinas’ day as well, as he notes, “Some have asserted that our intellectual faculties know only the impression made on them,” and that, “according to this theory, the intellect understands only its own impression,” and not the thing itself.^[6] But Aquinas shows how silly this anti-correspondence theory is. Honey is sweet; it’s whatness includes sweetness. If someone had a poor sense of taste and thought in their intellect that honey wasn’t sweet, we’d all recognize their error. Therefore, knowledge and reality correspond. Errors in judgement may be made, but modern materialists demonstrate their incoherence as soon as they reject correspondence. 

In some ways, I am writing against the tendency of some philosophers to question everything. But in other ways, I am writing against my own sinful impulse as a skeptical person. Do other people really exist? Can we know anything, really? I remember first learning Presuppositional Apologetics and finding satisfaction in telling the atheist, "sure, I can't prove God, but you can't prove you're not a butterfly dreaming you're a person." But this kind of tactic has more in common with Descartes than Paul. Presuppositional arguments still have some place, but we need a more solid epistemology. I am learning, and Thomas and Bavinck are helping, to see the world as it is. Not as a mere appearance or sensation. But as real.

From Material Hearing To Immaterial Knowledge

The baby learns in the same instant that she hears. The learning is the effect of the cause (or the causes: including material cause, efficient cause, and God’s sovereign cause). But, contrary to popular belief, cause and effect are not separate events but occur together as two parts of the same act. To take another example from human experience, a knife does not first slice the apple and then some time later, the apple is sliced. They occur together, slicing and being sliced, hearing and learning, vibration and knowledge of a form.

The baby will not learn without the biological development of their ear. Aquinas notes the obvious fact that, “man must be endowed with senses as a prerequisite to understanding… a person born blind can have no knowledge of colours.”^[7] 

We must also note the unique nature of auditory-based knowledge: while cause and effect is instantaneous, it is nevertheless comprehended in relation to time. This is where a third step is involved as sounds are compared over time, or forms of the sound are re-presented and re-interpreted in the intellect. The process in the first two steps, of hearing and initial learning, is simultaneous in its happening, but the third is progressive. When we observe the brown fox, we recognize at once that it is brown and the brown form is presented and understood by the intellect. With sound, by nature of how sound itself is created via vibrations of varying degrees, our intellect processes the forms of sounds over time as a way of organizing them together coherently.

In the diversity of sounds comes auditory knowledge. As Thomas says, “they cannot be understood simultaneously in so far as a relation of distinctness exists between them, but they can be understood simultaneously in so far as they are united in one proposition.”^[8] All the mother’s intonation, articulation, rhythm, accent, emphasis, and other vocal aspects, are presented before the intellect as unique intellectual propositions, and in the intellect, the sounds become story. The baby has learned a comprehensive immaterial form.

From Immaterial Knowledge to Love

The baby girl, having heard The Cat in the Hat many times in the womb, will demonstrate her retention of the unique sensory-based propositions (sometimes called phantasms) in the intellect upon being born, as she has the ability to re-present forms when queued.^[9] In other words, she has memory. Despite no training outside the womb, she will, when given the option by a researcher of sucking a pacifier in different ways for different audio recordings to be played, choose to suck the pacifier in such a way as to hear the sound of her mother in which she is familiar.^[10]

This ability – of hearing, learning, and recalling – exists very early on in the life of all human persons, many months before birth.^[11] A baby girl’s progression through these three steps happens naturally.

As humans receive knowledge, they learn a kind of love. In C.S. Lewis’ The Four Loves, he describes storge as affection, especially that of parents to offspring and offspring to parents.^[12] It is a familial love, both in the way it relates to family and to the familiar. When the child above, much later in life as an adult, is asked when she first began to love her mother, she will be too dumbfounded at the question to answer it. Her affection for her mother began before she was born, in part, through the sounds of her mother.

To recap, the three-step phase of learning includes the material hearing, the immaterial receiving of knowledge in a form, and recollection as the memory of sound-stories are re-presented to the intellect. Finally, the familiar is naturally preferred and is a kind of love, inculcated as the fourth and final link in our chain.

A few observations can be made before we turn to the chain’s obstruction. We will see the significance of headphones only when we properly examine this epistemological-love-chain.

Notice how the baby hears without the choice to listen. Hearing happens by nature of her auditorial capacities.

Further, notice how learning is material and immaterial. Sound is always material; sound waves come through physical vibrations. But the learning has material and immaterial components. We are all familiar with the experience of an “earworm;” a tune which we cannot “get out of our head.” It requires no physical sensation, though it may be induced by one. The immaterial nature of songs and stories cannot be explained away by sheer material brain activity, unless we wish to remove them of all their meaning, succumbing to the materialist’s nihilism, rejecting the correspondence between thinking and being.

Some would see the affection or familial love gained through the chain as evidence of evolutionary development, and this may be true in some sense. But with the immaterial nature of the auditorial knowledge, we see the mother and daughter are linked not merely by material sound, but as immaterial souls.

Headphones and the Ear

Before considering modern earbuds, we can contrast them with a preceding technology – earplugs. In Homer’s The Odyssey, written around 750-650 BC, men on their voyage home are instructed to put beeswax in their ears in order to protect themselves from hearing the Sirens. So, even in ancient times, there was some human control over the auditory sense. Reducing or eliminating real sounds from entering our intellect is not new. (Real sounds are those which exist in reality before the human person rather than artificial sounds or re-created sounds which exist separate from the immediate physical space of the one hearing).  

Plugging your ears for the sake of silence is quite different than filling those ears with sounds, songs, or stories. Many have recognized the deep value of silence, from King David, to Blaise Pascal, to various so-called “Silent Retreaters” today. Thomas says, “it is by sitting and being quiet that the soul becomes wise and discerning.”^[13] While many ears have been blocked over the course of human history it is only in modernity that the blockage has been filled.

In a recent survey, a majority of people said they rely on some kind of background noise or audio to fall asleep.^[14] Rafael Pelayo, a clinical professor at Stanford University specializing in sleep medicine, says, “Some people, when they’re alone in bed at night, they’re kind of alone with their thoughts… thinking about this or that… They’ll listen to a podcast, or listen to music or something, or turn the TV on to block out their thoughts.”^[15]

Modern headphones are a technology of autonomy and distraction. Aquinas considered sight to be the most immaterial of the senses, and thus the highest, with hearing second. The sensation of hearing differs from sight in significant ways. The eye can be diverted or shut, whereas the ear, up until the invention of headphones in the 1890s, was predominately at the will of its surroundings.

With your eyes you can keep reading this paragraph, or go back to the one before it. You can look out the nearest window, up at the ceiling, or down to your phone. Your eyes provide an ongoing sensation of agency and autonomy. But in the ear, we lack control. Or, if not willing to be in such a state, we plug them and endure the pain of silence, or use headphones to distract ourselves from the immateriality of our being.

This is why Jacques Ellul says “The ear, unlike the eye, evokes mystery and renunciation; it is the center of anguish and anxiety. And radio fills this opening, protecting man against the silence and the mystery by amusing him.”^[16] 

Recall again the newborn girl. As she grows into a toddler, she will begin playfully testing her perception of sound. By cupping her hands on-and-off both ears, for example, she receives a sound like that of a rushing wind. For the first time in her life, she will control her own perception of the sound around her. And before long, she will be able to fully suppress the auditory world through not only a screaming slammed door in the midst of a temper-tantrum, but also in the wearing of noise-cancelling headphones. She controls the world. She controls her loves.

She once learned through the auditory sensations and the phantasms that come with them as they were presented and re-presented to her intellect. And as Frederick Wilhelmsen would say, she “understands nothing in this life without the use of phantasms because only phantasms are connected vitally with sensation and thus with things as they exist.”^[17] Blocking real sensations blocks their phantasms and so disrupts learning.^[18] As Bavinck says, “our knowledge is impacted by the extent to which our sense organs function effectively.”^[19]

And the girl, by nature a relational being who has learned affection for her mother through repeated sound-stories, will have the ability with headphones to mimic auditorial relationships while simultaneously isolating herself from the world. A teenaged boy carrying a loud boombox onto the public bus may be obnoxious, but at least his experience of sound is collective and associated with a natural relational appetite. He is an impolite teenager, but a communal one. The person with AirPods is autonomous and alone.

Headphones, Isolation, and Control

D.C. Schindler says the senses are like the five gateways through which reality enters into one’s soul.^[20] The distinguishing mark of modern culture is the effort to buffer this encounter.^[21] Charles Taylor says the older “enchanted” world, five hundred or so years ago, was one in which “forces could cross a porous boundary and shape our lives, psychic and physical,” but now there is a firmer sense of a boundary or buffer between the self and all outside.^[22] 

My argument here is that while the “buffered self” began in early modernity, it has been fully materialized with headphones.

Jacob Statzer, building on the work of James K.A. Smith, says modern technologies provide a “liturgy of control.”^[23] Because sound is one of the most immaterial, and the sense in which we have the least control, modernity has made headphones ubiquitous in response. Our autonomy-obsessed culture has led to music revenues hitting an all-time high.^[24] 

In Huxley’s Brave New World a pill called “soma” is the numbing agent used to maintain social order and ensure the people don’t feel suffering. But as Huxley shows, the problem with numbing pain is that you numb pleasure with it. While people have compared soma to alcohol, marijuana, pornography, video games, or social media, perhaps the answer is right beside us, on either side of us, in our ears.

Headphones shape our culture. They block our love. We grow more familiar with podcast hosts, band members, and white noise, while our next-door neighbor arriving home late is a mysterious enigma. We do not know our neighbor because we have not heard them. We do not love our neighbour because we have not grown familiar with their voice, the squishy steps of their damp shoes, or their sighs of anguish after a day of modern work. Our lack of love stems from a failure to listen, or, more precisely, a failure to direct our listening to reality, to the people around us.

In addition to shaping our relationship with our neighbor, headphones affect our love of God. There are those who have thorns impeding their growth: “worries of this life” alongside the “deceitfulness of riches,” according to Jesus in Matthew 13. Perhaps headphones are a modern equivalent — a rich-person response to anxiety, distracting us from the material words of our pastor and the immaterial Word in our intellect. He is not that far from any of us, Paul says.

This is not to say headphones and audio distractions are inherently wrong in every instance.^[25] Someone might distract their anxious mind with an audio version of the Psalms. Another might use noise-cancelling headphones to ensure they are as present as possible with the person they are speaking with over the phone rather than allowing exterior sounds to intrude. In this way, in certain non-physically-immediate interactions, headphones can help us connect to others.

Moderation and Headphones

In 2 John 12, while the author wanted to write a longer letter, he did not do so because he wanted to talk face to face, “so that our joy may be complete.” A letter is not the same as an auditory phone conversation today, but we should remember letters would often be read allowed to gathered churches (e.g. see 1 Thess. 5:27). There is some resemblance.

We agree with 2 John 12; we agree with the inadequacy of relying on letters read aloud to us. And yet, in 1 John 1:4, the author says, “We write this to make our joy complete.” A kind of complete joy is possible in letter writing, too. There is good in lesser relational bounds; a phone conversation is a lesser good than an in-person conversation, but it isn’t evil.  

Building on this, with the quality of headphones available today, we have more ability to resemble personal presence with those who are distant from us. But this artificial or re-presented interaction comes at a cost. In doing so, in listening to far off professors, politicians, and podcasters, we sacrifice opportunities to grow in physical presence and proximal love. We should prioritize those in front of us and beside us because they can provide something those far away cannot. As Proverbs 27:11 says, “do not go to your relative’s house when disaster strikes you – better a neighbour nearby than a relative far away.”

Headphones cannot be fit into a simple “good” or “bad” category. They have a mix of both. We are aided when we better understand human anthropology, such as that in Thomas Aquinas. And we are aided when we better understand how our modern technologies shape us.

One way we can grow is “by directly exposing ourselves more fully to the action” of what we hope to understand.^[26] Take off your headphones when you’re at your local grocery store, for example. Another way is to intellectually re-present the immaterial phantasms in our intellect; to remember. For example, we would all love our mothers more if we, like Augustine, recalled our dependence as babies. Journalling is an effective exercise if directed in a manner akin to his Confessions.

I’ve decided to never wear my Earbuds when I’m with my family, which has become much easier recently after losing one bud. My older wired headphones force me to be more intentional, and I think that’s for the best.

In the process of auditory learning, from the physical reception of sound to the immaterial re-presentation sound-stories in the intellect, the human person develops a relational understanding and a familial love. Headphones impede this with autonomy and distraction, creating a separation from others through the disruption of this epistemological chain.

In Matthew 15, Jesus says, “Listen and understand.” We must not ignore the negative effects of technology on our natural loves. If we have ears to hear, dear God, let us hear.

Footnotes