Tim Mobley’s Reviews > I See a Voice: Deafness, Language and the Senses--A Philosophical History > Status Update

"It is primarily through the voice that people make known their inwardness, for they put into it what they are."~paraphrasing Hegel

"For our voices are the radiant centre of our auditory world."~Speaking of the connection between hearing and vocalizing.

"If there are such things as natural symbols, then sounds are surely the natural symbol of transience and the lostness of past time."

"A sound can barely survive the moment of its creation."

"Without visual or tactile clues, it seems, we could not begin to frame an idea of space, so it would not occur to us that there might be a difference between our own bodies and a world of objects independent of it."

"We respond [to voices] as we do to faces: as immediate embodiments of personal character and sensitive indicators of fluctuating mood." ~One reason mere text cannot replace in-person relationships.

Four delusions shared by both friends and enemies of voice: 1. That voice is connected to the soul, 2. That experience must be analysed by senses, 3. That hearing=time & vision=space, 4. That language has two forms (audible speech and visible writing).

"Twentieth-century humanity, Spengler thought, having lost its voice and its sense of hearing, was destined to 'go downhill seeing'." ~The idea is that an overly "ocular" society too obsessed with "mechanical invention" to hear its own "voice."

Oswald Spengler traced the "decline of the West," to the defeat "of an auditory culture... and the victory of an ocular civilization focused on an impersonal external world." ~This summer I polled a group of students on their learning stlyes. The vast majority were visual with tactile a close second, but very few auditory learners.