Meaning & Analysis
No one is harder to reach than a person who chooses not to listen; deliberate refusal outstrips any natural deafness.
Insights
Willed Ignorance
When people reject evidence or counsel in advance, they create a stronger barrier than any sensory limit; stubborn will makes instruction impossible.
Moral Evasion
Selective deafness avoids responsibility—if one ‘doesn’t hear’ reproof or need, one needn’t change; the proverb indicts this dodge.
Identity-Protective Cognition
Hearing would threaten self-image or group loyalty, so the mind blocks uptake; the deafness is a shield for belonging and pride.
Futility of Preaching
Admonishes teachers and friends: some audiences are closed systems; rhetoric, proof, or pleas don’t penetrate a will set against hearing.
Hypocrisy Exposure
Feigning incapacity (‘I can’t hear’) conceals refusal (‘I won’t hear’); the saying strips pretense and names the defiance beneath.
Paired Proverb
Often twinned with ‘Who so blind as he that will not see,’ it forms a diagnostic couplet: perception fails not from lack of organs but from a locked will.
From Etiquette to Ethics
Polite inattentiveness (‘I cannot hear on that ear’) hardens into moral indictment here; the folk register escalates a social slight into a vice.
Ancient Rhetorical Wisdom
Classical orators distinguished hostile from teachable audiences; this maxim codifies that practical wisdom—don’t squander arguments on chosen deafness.
Psychology of Dissonance
Cognitive dissonance predicts motivated filtering: contrary messages generate discomfort, so the mind ‘turns down the volume’ to preserve coherence.
Power and Refusal
Refusing to hear is an assertion of control; gatekeepers maintain dominance by shutting out inconvenient testimony—an early critique of institutional stonewalling.
Rhetorical Devices
Rhetorical Question
Asks what it already asserts, inviting the hearer to supply the obvious answer—no one—thus sealing assent.
Paradox/Irony
The worst ‘deafness’ is a choice, not a disability; the twist sharpens blame and memorability.
Antithesis
Pits volitional ‘will not’ against sensory ‘deaf,’ converting a physical lack into a moral stance.
Alliteration
Echoes of ‘who,’ ‘will,’ and ‘hear’ add gentle chime, aiding oral transmission.
Synecdoche
‘Ear’/‘hearing’ stands for receptivity to truth or counsel, letting bodily sense carry ethical meaning.
Transcription
Quotations
Who is so deafe, or so blynde, as is hee, That wilfully will nother here nor see.
(Who is so).
The Mayde cooke .. That none is so deafe, as who wyll not heare.
(Thair is no man so).
(No man's worse deafe then).
(Who is so).
(Who is so).
(Who is more deaf then).
(There's no deaf man like him that).
(There's none so).
(Who is so).
(To seem not to hear, and that purposely: Who is so).
(There is na man so).
(as they that).
(None so deaf as they that).
(None so).
Shakespeare Citations
Boy, tell him I am deaf. -You must speak louder, my master is deaf. I am sure he is, to the hearing of anything good.
Cross References
Annotations
Related Proverbs
Original Scan
Used under CC BY-NC 3.0.