An ethics of listening

 One can develop an ethics of listening from Michael Ende’s novel Momo. Momo is characterized first of all by a wealth of time: ‘time was Momo’s only form of wealth’.8 Momo’s time is a special time. It is the time of the Other, the time that she gives Others by listening to them. Momo is admired for her ability to listen. She appears as a listener:

[…] what little Momo was better at than anyone else was listening.

Anyone can listen, you may say – what’s so special about that? – but you’d be wrong. Very few people know how to listen properly, and Momo’s way of listening was quite unique.9Momo just sits there and listens. But her listening works wonders. She gives people ideas that would never have occurred to them on their own. Her listening is actually reminiscent of Hermann Broch’s hospitable listening, which frees the Other for themselves:

She simply sat there and listened with the utmost attention and sympathy, fixing them with her big, dark eyes, and they suddenly became aware of ideas whose existence they had never suspected.

Momo could listen in such a way that worried and indecisive people knew their own minds from one moment to the next, or shy people felt suddenly confident and at ease, or downhearted people felt happy and hopeful. And if someone felt that his life had been an utter failure, and that he himself was only one among millions of wholly unimportant people who could be replaced as easily as broken windowpanes, he would go and pour out his heart to Momo. And, even as he spoke, he would come to realize by some mysterious means that he was absolutely wrong: that there was only one person like himself in the whole world, and that, consequently, he mattered to the world in his own particular way.

Such was Momo’s talent for listening.10

Listening gives everyone back what is theirs. Momo also resolves conflict merely through pure listening:

Another time, a little boy brought her his canary because it wouldn’t sing. Momo found that a far harder proposition. She had to sit and listen to the bird for a whole week before it finally started to trill and warble again.11

8 Michael Ende, , transl. J. Maxwell Brownjohn (London: Puffin, 1985), p. 19.

9 Ibid., p. 18.

The Expulsion of the Other

Society, Perception and Communication Today

Byung-Chul Han

10 Ibid., pp. 18f.

11 Ibid., p. 23.