1
MICHAEL JHON M. TAMAYAO
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
March 22, 2006
Prof. Florentino Hornedo, Ph.D.
MERLEAU-PONTY’S PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE
Merleau-Ponty’s works exhibit extreme profundity in its ideas but is notoriously
complex and multifaceted. One could really say that he is “the philosopher of ambiguity”
and there is no more convincing justification of his claim to that title than his excursions
into philosophy of language. In his major work, The Phenomenology of Perception, he
begins to develop the richly suggestive but always naggingly elusive philosophy of
speech. Rather than presenting a straightforward theoretical presentation, Merleau-Ponty
offers us in his philosophy of speech something open-ended and enigmatic.
The second phase of the phenomenology of language could be attributed to the
work of Merleau-Ponty (with Husserl’s work being the first). His published works
reflected a growing preoccupation with language and meaning as a central problem of
philosophy. This preoccupation was part of his larger project, the reconstruction of
western philosophical thought on a truly phenomenological foundation.
What is obvious is Merleau-Ponty’s effort to overcome the dichotomy in the
western philosophical tradition, i.e., the dichotomy of the matter/body and form/mind. He
integrates the body and mind in the lived experience through the perceptual event. His
major work, The Phenomenology of Perception, would attest to this claim as it gives an
extended analysis of the importance of embodied consciousness and of the primacy of
perception for understanding the meaningful character of human experience in all of its
dimensions. By means of his phenomenology of speech and the specific act of meaning
he paved the way in giving us the opportunity to leave behind us the traditional subjectobject dichotomy.1 Moreover, Merleau-Ponty seems to present a pragmatic philosophy of
language2 rather than the dominant syntax and semantic trend in the study of the
philosophy of language. Furthermore, instead of solipsistic mentalism in the theory of
meaning, which is also predominant during his time, he holds the idea of intersubjectivity
and shared world as a background in his works.
The report will not, however, try to defend the above mentioned claims but
instead will try to have an exposition or at least a critical interpretation of MerleauPonty’s attempt at founding a “gestural” theory of linguistic expression.
Speech as Act and Event
The open-endedness and puzzling qualities of the works of “the philosopher of
ambiguity” seems to reflect his idea of what genuine speech really is. Genuine speech
according to Merleau-Ponty is not in the nature of equation in which stable known
quantities make possible the discovery of the unknown. The reflections of Merleau-Ponty
on Language offer a puzzle which has pieces that cannot be solved definitely in advance.
In the opening paragraph of his Chapter 6, The Body as Expression and Speech, in
his The Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty specified his objective: “…to
describe the phenomenology of speech and the specific act of meaning in order to leave
behind the traditional subject-object dichotomy.”3 What he wants therefore to put
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emphasis is on the speech “as a phenomenon” and meaning “as an act.” It is from this
starting point that Merleau-Ponty wanted to push forward the phenomenological point of
view of a “speaking subject who makes use of his language as a means of communicating
with the living community.” There is a return therefore to the phenomenon of speech as
lived and as originating event.
Critique on Empiricism and Intellectualism
In The Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty identifies his opponents
more simply as two great and mutually hostile camps of empiricists and intellectualists.4
For the empiricists, (PP, pp. 174-5) speech is not a genuine action. It is just a
depersonalized phenomenon which consists of traces left (in the mind) by words heard or
read. The words do not bear meaning, it functions as a psychological or physical lever.
For the intellectualists (PP, pp. 175-6), words are merely external signs for what is of real
importance, the intellectual operation. Again, meaning lies not in and with the word but
“behind” the word, in the thought. Though seemingly irreconcilable, both the empiricists
and intellectualists share the same assumption that “the word has no significance.” In
Empiricism there is nobody to speak; in intellectualism there is certainly a subject, but a
thinking one, not a speaking one.5
Merleau-Ponty refuted both by positing that “the word has a meaning.” His
refutation is not really in the form of an argument but more of a description and
recollection, lucidly done, of the actual facts on act of speaking. He has not presented a
new or an unusual explanation but has rather made an exhortation to remember to pay
attention to something very familiar—what it is like to express ourselves verbally.
Thought seeks out to be verbalized and it is only through this crystallization into speech
that we can possibly lay hold of thought. Merleau-Ponty wants to posit the indivisibility
of the movement of the “meant” into the “said.”6 Speech cannot presuppose thought
precisely because it is speech that actualizes and accomplishes thought.
Words have meaning. In our actual denomination of objects, we do not have in
mind a concept under which we would subsume them; instead, the names themselves
bear the meaning and we are aware of reaching the objects in imposing their names. So
we take up someone else’s thought “in” and “through” his speech. Conversation is not a
mutual action at a distance of two self-enclosed subjects operating through a medium
distinct from both but “making the other speak, think, and become what he never could
have been by himself.”7
Originary Language
How do we articulate, speak of, write, or bring into presence for ourselves or for
another something that has never been articulated before? How do we express the as-yetto-be expressed? According to Merleau-Ponty, it is through the originary language.
Language, as Merleau-Ponty thinks of it, is unquestionably “an originating
realm,” a dimension of the meaning-forming process in which new configurations of
meaning can be brought into being.8 In discussing language, he distinguished between the
“authentic” use of language, where original meaning-formation takes place, and a use of
language involving “ready-made formations.” Originary language is the “authentic
speech,” “the first-hand speech.”9 Merleau-Ponty differentiates this type of language
from “second-order expression” which is for him inauthentic “speech about speech.”10
3
The all important former category (also referred to as “literary”, “productive”,
“operative”, or “creative” speech) finds its most dramatic instances in the speech of the
child, the lover, the poet or philosopher. According to The phenomenology of Perception:
Anterior to conventional means of expression, which reveal my thoughts to others only because
already, for both myself and them, meanings are provided for each sign, and which in this sense
does not give rise to communication at all, we must recognize a primary process of signification,
in which the thing expressed does not exist apart from the expression, and in which the signs
themselves induce their significance externally. 11
It is only in the operative, creative or authentic speech that there is no real
separation of thought and language. This is because authentic speech is the presence of
thought in the world- not as garment but its body. Thought and meaning is in the speech
so a listener can learn and grasp what the speaker says. Just as the singer brings into
significance the being of a song so is a speaker bringing into significance the being of his
thought.
However, authentic language is not dialectically opposed to inauthentic linguistic
expressions, but they are rather dependent to one another. What is at one point authentic
speech that formulates for the first time will become sedimented into habituated, secondorder language.12 Second-order language, on the other hand, provides the foundation for
new and creative forms of linguistic expressions. Originary language, therefore, also
emerges from second-order language. Furthermore, all types of expressions are rooted in
the cognitive-linguistic structures that belong to the “body-subject.”13
The originary language is a bodily language. “Anything that may be thought must
be ‘speakable’.”14 It says something by secreting its own meaning, it is a gesture, an
action, it has an emotional content, it is existential, its meaning inhabits the world, and it
is contingent.15 It is the body that points out and speaks.
Speech as Gesture
The subtitle suggests the apparent antipathy of Merleau-Ponty to the conception
of the speaking subject as a disembodied consciousness. For him, the human speaker is a
body. Speaking is a bodily activity which is analogous to other uses of body in certain
fundamental ways. The body in general is the best analogue for the speaking body.16
In Merleau-Ponty’s “The Child’s Relations with Others,” he again presented
speech in the context of action, as it is used, and as it is acquired. The acquisition of
language takes place not by an intellectual operation, but by a sort of “habituation”, a use
of language as tool or instrument.17 A language learned is in relation to our power to
speak, as limbs are to the power to move. Speech therefore is a spontaneous act of the
body and not the dominant idea of the thought/language parallelism.
In order to see how the act of speaking is able to capture and convey a sense of
meaning we must first look to the power of speech as a power of gesture. Gesture is
understood here in its broadest sense which includes physical movements, signals and
even pantomimes which are essentially “communicative.” Gesture’s meanings are not
cognitively understood or intellectually deciphered. Rather, the gestures I witness
“outlines an intentional object,” brings “certain perceptible bits of the world to my notice
inviting my concurrence.”18 The meaning of the gesture is not alongside or behind it, but
“intermingled with the structure of the world outlined by the gesture.”19 The meaning of
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the gesture could be grasped in the reciprocity of embodied beings. In seizing the
meaning of a gesture it is “as if the other person’s intention inhabited my body and mine
his.”20 There is a sort of synchronization of one’s existence with the other which in effect
draws one into the other’s world and the other’s into him. So behind the possibility of our
“deliberate” collaborations is our unconstructed intuitive capacity for “reading” and
“following” other’s mute behavior.21
In The Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty emphatically declares that
“the spoken word is a genuine gesture and it contains its meaning in the same way as the
gesture contains its.”22 Like the gesture, the word bears within itself its meaning; a
meaning which is not of a disembodied subject. Like gesture, speech is the subject’s
taking up of a position in the world and brings about, for both the speakers and hearers a
structural co-ordination of experience.23
Furthermore, language discloses not only to the listeners, but to the speaker as
well. The harnessing of a signification in language endows both the listener and the
speaker with “a new sense organ,”24 and opens for both new fields of experience. Thus,
“my spoken words surprise me myself and teach me my thought.”25
Language expresses one’s ways of being-in-the-world. Going beyond the
conceptual connotation of the meaning of a word, one will discover the gestural meaning
of the words which possesses immanent significance. Different languages, having its own
nuances, have their own respective ways of expressing their ways of being-in-the-world.
Speech as Figure on a Ground
There are problems posited by Merleau-Ponty himself on the above mentioned
description of the relationship of linguistic gestures and its meaning. By tackling his own
posited problems, he was able to further develop his theory of speech as a gesture. The
problems he asked are: (1) what is the common ground in terms of which speech can be
understood?, (2) whether the relation between word and meaning is not merely
conventional.
Merleau-Ponty answered the first by offering the established cultural background
of already constituted and hence publicly available meanings and structures of language
as solution.26 The linguistic convention is the shared backcloth for the linguistic gesture.
As was seen before, authentic or creative speech is founded upon and requires the
established linguistic system as its necessary condition.
Speech as a figure on the ground of silence speaks to problem (2). Merleau-Ponty
dealt with the insistent problem of the origin of language in here. Given the idea that
authentic speech is founded in the already established system of signification, the next
problem to be dealt with is how did this established structure come to be constituted? We
must find “beneath the chatter of words, the primordial silence… and describe the action
which breaks the silence.”27 According to Merleau-Ponty, as long as we are mesmerized
by the chatter, the second-order expression, the “speech about speech,” the “meanings”
we are bound to think of are sedimented, conceptual meanings of the lexicon or
dictionary. The relation of word and meaning in this order is only external and
conventional.
Merleau-Ponty suggests that conceptual meanings and all the structures of a
particular language have a history; and histories have beginnings. These beginnings lie in
the “primary processes of signification” which is seen in the spontaneous eloquence of
5
the living body as the non-conventional ground of the development of conventional
meanings. The “action which breaks the silence” is, originally, the mute but
spontaneously expressive comportment of the living body to signify. 28 Out of this
capacity grows a conventionalized system which is a language. However, the significance
of mute gestures is neither arbitrary nor conventional.
Silence
The theme of silence is perhaps the most arresting feature of Merleau-Ponty’s
philosophy of speech. In “The Body as Expression, and Speech,” Merleau-Ponty wants to
address the problems of (1) how can language start? And (2) how can language grow?
His single answer is the theory of speech as gesture. But this answer of his remained
incomplete before the notion of silence is further articulated.
Silence for Merleau-Ponty is not just the prehistory of speech but is the empty
which awaits saturation. This silence is “alive” so to say. It is an absence whose presence
weighs almost tangibly upon us who speak, which at once generates, propels and
magnetizes discourse.29 Signification arouses speech as the world arouses our body, by a
mute presence which awakens our intentions without deploying itself before them.30 It is
signification or meaning itself.
Merleau-Ponty refers to silence in many ways: as “speech before it is spoken,” a
“mute presence,” “lack asking to be made good,” “a determinate gap.” Though silence is
a gap, something felt to be missing, it is a determinate emptiness, its boundaries
described by all that is already expressed or said. Silence, then, is the lurking
signification that has not found its voice; it is an “idea.” This idea is not arrived at but
some sort of static or contemplative mental state or a finished performance; it is a power
to organize discourse in a coherent way.31 Silence, therefore, is always incomplete. So in
authentic speech, there is an inauguration of a continuing dialogue rather than an
accomplishment. Without the background of silence which surrounds speech, it would
“say nothing.”
There is always silence not only antecedent to language but behind the already
formed calculus of language, beneath the usual chatter, between the words of the lexicon
and all the structures of language; there is always the yet-unmeant, yet-unthought and the
yet-unsaid. The “insistent problem” of the origin of language is no matter of discovering
some obscure historical fact, but it is the immense and ponderous task of understanding
this one particular case of our always present and open-ended possibility of creating new
meanings and conveying them, which Merleau-Ponty calls an “irrational power.”32
Although language wants to lay claim of the things themselves, the effort still
remains idealistic. Speech surges out toward what it signifies, toward reality. But in
understanding reality what we grasp are meanings, and meanings are never entirely
extricable from the intercourse of signs. And for this, Merleau-Ponty states that language
is uncommunicative of anything other than itself.33
Conclusion
Marleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Language was used as an apology for
Husserl’s “Crisis of European Thought.” It was basically a response against the rampant
way of thinking during their time which was characterized as a reductive way of making
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humans as mere external forces. Humans were merely seen as response-based agents who
do not have any personhood.
Merleau-Ponty’s study of language acquisition of the children for example
presented counter paradigmatic claims against the kind of thought Europe has then. For
him, though external forces were received by children, they converted it in ways that
were sensible to them, even very surprising for adults.
The point Merleau-Ponty wanted to drive at was that there was something original
in each and every one of us. Language was a proof of our personhood though at times
contested.
ENDNOTES
1
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans by Colin Smith (New Jersey: The Humanities Press, 1962) p. 174.
henceforth, PP.
2
The orientation toward speech as an individual act or performance in a concrete text, and toward the speaker-audience
relation. See Margareta Urban Coyne, “Merleau-Ponty on Language: an interrupted journey toward a phenomenology of speaking,”
International Philosophical Quarterly 20/3 (1980), p. 308. Henceforth, Coyne.
3
PP, p. 174.
4
Cf. PP, pp. 174-176.
5
Ibid., p. 177.
6
The usual theoretical accounts holds the dichotomy between the mind and the expressed words. There is only the
sequential processes—meaning/expression, thinking/saying, stimulus/response, etc. See Coyne, p. 311.
7
Merleau-Ponty, “Introduction to that Collection” included in the Primacy of Perception, ed. James M. Edie (Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 1964), p. 19.
8
Ibid.
9
Cf. Ibid., p. 178-179.
10
Ibid. p. 178. See also Samuel Mallin, “Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy” (London: Yale University Press, 1979), p. 183.
henceforth, Mallin.
11
PP, p. 166.
12
Cf. Ibid.
13
Mallin., p. 183.
14
PP., p. 183.
15
Cf. Ibid., pp. 184-193.
16
Coyne, p. 313.
17
Merleau-Ponty, “The Child’s Relations with Others” included in the Primacy of Perception, ed. James M. Edie
(Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), p. 99.
18
PP, p. 186.
19
Ibid.
20
Ibid., p. 185.
21
Coyne, p. 315.
22
PP, p. 183.
23
Ibid., p. 193.
24
Ibid., p. 182.
25
Merleau-Ponty, “On the Phenomenology of Language,” included in Signs, trans Richard C. McClearly (Evanston, III,
Norwestern University Press, 1964), p. 87. Henceforth, PL.
26
Coyne, p. 318.
27
PP, p. 184.
28
Coyne, p. 319.
29
Ibid., p. 320.
30
PL, p. 89.
31
Coyne, p. 320.
32
PP, p. 189.
33
PP, p. 188.