based on discourse, acoustic perception is based on listening. Listening to ... is the existential being-open of Dasein as being-with for the other. Listening even constitutes the primary and authentic openness of Dasein for its ownmost possibility of being, as in hearing the voice of the friend whom every Dasein carries with it. Dasein hears because it understands. As understandingly being-in-the-world with others, Dasein "listens to" ["hörig"] itself and to Dasein-with, and in this listening belongs [Hörigkeit zugehörig] to these. Listening to each other, in which being-with is developed, has the possible ways of following, going along with, and the privative modes of not hearing, opposition, defying, turning away.
On the basis of this existentially primary potentiality for hearing, something like hearkening becomes possible. Hearkening is itself phenomenally more primordial than what the psychologist "initially" defines as hearing, the sensing of tones and the perception of sounds. Hearkening, too, has the mode of being of a hearing that understands. "Initially" we never hear noises and complexes of sound, but the creaking wagon, the motorcycle. We hear the column on the march, the north wind, the woodpecker tapping, the crackling fire. [164]
It requires a very artificial and complicated attitude in order to "hear" a "pure noise." The fact that we initially hear motorcycles and cars is, however, the phenomenal proof that Dasein, as being-in-theworld, always already maintains itself together with innerworldly things at hand and initially not at all with "sensations" whose chaos would first have to be formed to provide the springboard, from which the subject jumps off finally to land in a "world." Essentially understanding, Dasein is initially together with what is understood.
Likewise, in the explicit listening to the discourse of the other we initially understand what is said; more precisely, we are already together with the other beforehand, with the being which the discourse is about. We do not, on the contrary, first hear what is expressed in the utterance. Even when speaking is unclear or the language is foreign, we initially hear unintelligible words, and not a multiplicity of tone data.
When what the discourse is about is heard "naturally," however, we can at the same time hear the way in which it is said, the "diction," but this, too, only by previously understanding what is spoken. Only thus is there a possibility of estimating whether the way in which it is said is appropriate to what the discourse that replies is about thematically.
Similarly, a counter-discourse that replies initially arises directly from understand.mg what the discourse is about, which has already been "shared" in being-with.
Only when the existential possibility of discourse and listening are given, can someone hearken [horchen]. He who "cannot hear"