Abstract
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>The practice of musical listening opens the closed self to a wider sense of participation in the world. Musical listening is thus taken to exemplify a mode of aesthetic attentiveness which affords a sense of exceeding our habitual self-identities. In this way it offers a counterweight to the self-referring and enclosed subjectivity of modern life (Cartesian, capitalist, consumerist). It does so through a mode of cognition rooted in an embodied perception of material particularity rather than through the abstract terms of instrumental language. This conclusion is supported by a convergence of evidence from a diverse field of interdisciplinary research, ranging from neuroscience, psychology, and cognitive science to art, music, and philosophy. Such a view challenges the idea of everyday music listening as a form of consumption and sets out an alternative account of listening as an enactive and dialogical mode of sense-making, determined wholly neither by the object nor the subject. This has profound social and political consequences. Displacing the dominance of habitual linguistic discourse, aesthetic experience is proposed as an alternative mode of knowing the world and thus of being in the world. Aesthetic attention, as a lived practice, shapes a more empathic and ethical comportment towards other people and the natural world. Drawing on a resurgence of interest in ideas of wonder and enchantment, this perspective finds common ground with notions of posthumanism and the overcoming of the human exceptionalism that lies at the heart of our contemporary ecological crisis.</jats:p>