We often think that when we are listening, we are perceiving the resonances out there in the world. It does make sense. Sound travels to us, after all.
But Jean-Luc Nancy offers another perspective: when we listen, we open ourselves to the world and let it resonate in us. We don’t really hear the world, so much as what echoes within us.
All that appears in our awareness is an echo of the world, shaped by the resonances in the subtle structures of our being.
To what extent are our thoughts simply automatic resonances captured from the world? Is there a boundary between internal and external resonances — or do we just call the more subtle resonances internal?
What if we are just very resonant matter and the awareness is out there, everywhere, in the world? This is a panpsychist perspective: perhaps consciousness is a property of space itself, and we are its instruments.
We experience our being as stable because our structure has a stable tuning. We catch the world’s winds like an aeolian harp, and resound with the chord that arises naturally from our form.
That resonance is our presence in the world. We sound it out until it becomes part of the space that created us.