Do not expect any groundbreaking insights from my essay, beyond those by acousticians, phoneticians, and musicians. I am hard of hearing and can only tell you about my hearing aid (Hörapparat). Please forgive me for shouting at you. I do this so that I may better hear myself. I submit that I can see better since I have had the hearing aid. Now sounds reach me and I look in their direction. For example, I’ve never paid attention to hydraulic drills as closely as I do now because I can hear them. Thinking that hearing and seeing are opposite modes of perception is a widespread error. It’s like thinking that the Greeks had worse hearing than the Jews because they saw more deeply, or the Jews had worse eyesight than the Greeks because they obeyed the call. Or that Homer was blind because he listened to the voice of the muse, and the great seers were deaf to the sounds of everyday life. Quite the contrary: the better your hearing, the better you see. Only those who hear the voice of the daemon can theorize.

Hearing aids are powered by batteries that go on strike from time to time. At those times, you hear only a hum. It is the voice of flowing blood (which the Nazis amplified). But batteries have the advantage that, unlike blood, they can be turned off. Hearing aids are not only glasses, but eyelids as well. They allow us to shut our ears, creating a private silence. Hearing, more so than eyesight (Gesicht), is political. Instead of political views (Ansicht), we need to speak of political aural obedience. Voting is political engagement, the harmonizing of the “voices of the people,” (the low spheres in harmony with the high spheres) thanks to polyphony or thanks to monotony (elimination of the higher spheres and elevation of the “basso continuo” as the carrying voice). All of this creates noise; “pianissimo” has no place in any political program, and if it did, it would be unheard of. Hearing aids that you can turn off are devices enabling periodic politicization and depoliticization. And switching off the apparatus is no head-in-the-sand politics; it is consciously antipolitical. Hearing aids are devices for freedom.

It is not true that we open and close our eyes volitionally. Some blinking is involuntary, and you never know for sure whether it is, in fact, a sign of conspiracy or just a tic. Our eyelids not only criticize the political scene, they are also involuntary reflexes of this scene. This is not the case with hearing aids. They are not “natural” like eyelids; they are cultural, “artificial.” Switching them off represents a devastating critique of proclamations. Here, the “nature/culture” dialectic comes into play. Hearing aids were produced as analogues of eyelids, but we can learn to manipulate our eyelids like hearing aids. Thanks to hearing aids, we can see better, we can switch our views (Ansichten) on and off. Hearing aids not only permit us to go about our vocations better than the Jews, but also to elaborate theories better than the Greeks. For example, they enable us to create cameras (Fotoapparate), that is, eyes that blink like hearing aids. We do not know whether Daguerre or Niépce were hard of hearing.

One further remark: if you listen closely to the world, you detect not white noise but an orchestral vibration. A programmed noise. It is as if a sound filter had been turned on between yourself and the world. A hearing aid, to be exact. The uncomfortable and intolerable aspect of this apparatus is its invisibility. You are, if I may say, blind to your own hearing aids. I, however, can see mine. Not only can I see them, I can see through them. I know who programmed them—a Japanese company. But you are blind to the programming apparatus (and therefore deaf). For this reason, you need to listen when others tell you something (like the aged Kant, who was probably also hard of hearing) about “forms of perception,” which are famously categorical like imperatives. Allow me to scream this at you: you are servile (hörig), equipped with nontransparent hearing aids.

I warned you not to expect too much from my views on hearing. I cannot offer you a method for political fine-tuning or private silence. I am just as shortsighted as you are because I am not deaf enough to see further. I am just as “dumb” as you, to the extent that “dumb” and “deaf” are synonyms. Among us “dumb dunces”: whenever we think to listen up (aufhorchen), we only obey (gehorchen) new, equally programmed provocations. This is how things are with our wrongly celebrated human freedom. Nonetheless, I hope I have made a small contribution to our symposium on “The World of Notes and Sounds.” As someone who is hard of hearing, I shout at you: “Please take a look at the hearing aids that you walk around with, so that you may see a bit further and listen a bit more closely. So that you may stop obeying.”