Abstract
This paper clarifies Merleau-Ponty’s distinction between speaking and spoken speech, and the relation between the two, in his Phenomenology of Perception. Against a common interpretation, I argue on exegetical and philosophical grounds that the distinction should not be understood as one between two kinds of speech, but rather between two internally related dimensions present in all speech. This suggests an interdependence between speaking and spoken aspects of speech, and some commentators have critiqued Merleau-Ponty for claiming a priority of speaking over spoken speech. However, there is a sense in which Merleau-Ponty is right to emphasize the priority, namely, in terms of the ontological priority of the speaking subject with respect to language understood as a constituted cultural ideality. The latter only maintains its ontological status insofar as it is taken up by a language community. I favorably contrast Merleau-Ponty’s views on this question to those of the late Heidegger and de Saussure, and suggest potential applications of this clarified position for contemporary discussions in philosophy of language.
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Notes
Restricting the focus to Phenomenology of Perception allows us best to see how this distinction interlocks with other central themes in Merleau-Ponty’s thought. The distinction established there is retained, with modifications, throughout later writings. Further, as we shall see, illuminating his position on this topic in Phenomenology of Perception has consequences for interpretive debates about precisely when the notion of expression comes to maturity in Merleau-Ponty’s thought.
A detailed discussion of Husserl’s influence on Merleau-Ponty and the latter’s appropriation of the former is beyond the scope of the present effort. The following brief comment must suffice. Merleau-Ponty saw himself as taking up the work of the later Husserl, and he was perhaps more familiar with the vast corpus of Husserl’s unpublished late manuscripts than anyone else working outside of Germany and Belgium in his generation. In the late works, especially the research in generative phenomenology, Husserl begins to develop an appreciation of how ideal meanings are constituted temporally through traditions that are founded by original acts of expression and institution (Stiftung). The ideal meanings correspond roughly and in part to what Merleau-Ponty will call “spoken speech,” the original acts to “speaking speech”. See especially “The Origin of Geometry,” in Husserl (1970). From a developmental and genetic phenomenological perspective (about which I will have more to say below), Husserl, in a late text from 1935, begins to approach the Merleau-Pontian insight into the primacy of bodily expression, writing that “the first and simplest expression [Ausdruck] is that of bodily appearance as human body [leiblichen Aussehens als Menschenleib]”. Human bodies are taken as “expressions of the existence [Dasein] of persons” (Husserl 1973: 665). See PhP 204/169: “We might say that the body is the ‘hidden form of self-being,’ or, reciprocally, that personal existence is the taking up and the manifestation of a being in a given situation. If we therefore say that the body continuously expresses existence, then this is intended in the sense that speech expresses thought. […] The body expresses total existence in this way, not that it is an external accompaniment of it, but because existence accomplishes itself in the body. This embodied sense is the central phenomenon of which body and mind, or sign and signification are abstract moments.” For an interpretation of Husserl’s views on speech and language that moves Husserl much closer to a genetic, Merleau-Pontian view, see Welton (1983). On Merleau-Ponty’s reading of Husserl, see the essay “The Philosopher and His Shadow” in Merleau-Ponty (1964), and the collection of essays on the topic gathered in Toadvine and Embree (2002).
Plato, Theaetetus, 189e.
This statement comes from a later work (Merleau-Ponty 1964b: 67). But, already in PhP, Merleau-Ponty asserts that we witness “the miracle of expression” in the natural thing—the object of perception—before we experience it in other people (PhP 375/333). He describes the way the thing bears its meaning in much the same way he describes how a word or a gesture bears its: “We understand the thing as we understand a new behavior, that is, not through an intellectual operation of subsumption, but rather by taking up for ourselves the mode of existence that the observable signs sketch out before us. […] The thing’s sense inhabits it as the soul inhabits the body: it is not behind appearances. The sense of the ashtray […] animates the ashtray, and it is quite evidently embodied in it. This is why we say that in perception the thing is given to us ‘in person,’ or ‘in flesh and blood’. Prior to other persons, the thing accomplishes this miracle of expression: an interior that is revealed on the outside, a signification that descends into the world and begins to exist there and that can only be fully understood by attempting to see it there, in its place” (PhP 375f./333f.). See also PhP 58/35ff. For discussion of the respect in which perception is primordial expression already in PhP, see Landes (2013), 80ff.
See PhP 163/131f., 175-183/141-148, 204/169, 213-241/179-205, 264/227, 448-453/406-413, 461-466/422-466.
PhP 238/202—translation modified.
PhP 217f./530—translation modified.
I will generally refer to speech, considered as isolable units of whatever size and structure (individual gestures, words, sentences, utterances, works, etc.), as speech events, rather than speech acts, to avoid any confusion with speech act theory, though much of what I have to say about approaches that begin with a fundamental distinction between types of speech event would apply to speech act theory as well.
At PhP 231/196 and 452/412, Merleau-Ponty uses the expression “parler sur la parole” in the context of discussions of reiteration and sedimentation in speech, i.e., speech on the basis of speech, not speech about speech.
I here borrow a notion from Merleau-Ponty’s later work, though one that is already implicit in PhP. See especially the essay “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence” (Merleau-Ponty 1964b, 54f.: 81).
We now know that children already begin to acquire the cadences and rhythms of their maternal tongue while still in the womb. We are spoken to before we enter into the world, just as we continue to speak from beyond the grave in writing and memory. Viewed phenomenologically, these would be the vague boundaries of the speaking subject’s career of expressive speech, in contrast to the much more narrowly defined “critical window” of neurological receptivity for language acquisition.
Merleau-Ponty would be pleased to see this insight confirmed in recent work on language that seeks to grasp a more intimate relation between language as a temporal phenomenon and language as a static system. Reacting against generativist dogmas, in much the same way that the later Merleau-Ponty can be seen as opposing structuralist dogmas, Christiansen and Chater maintain that “by considering the cascade of processes that led language to come to be, we can perhaps better understand what language is” (Christiansen and Chater 2016: xi). They contend that there is no strict distinction to be drawn between acquisition and processing, since acquisition is ongoing and consists of innumerable attempts at processing individual utterances (11). More generally, I believe that Merleau-Ponty would have been in favor of the usage-based approach that these authors champion (following, e.g., Tomasello 2003), seeing in it a plausible middle ground between intellectualist and behaviorist extremes.
Perhaps this is why Merleau-Ponty puts the verb “acquérir” in scare quotes when discussing word-learning (PhP 449/409). Later in the same chapter, he will stress that consciousness does not “constitute” language, but rather “assumes” it (PhP 464/424). The verb “assumer” is often rendered as “to take up” in Landes’ translation of PhP.
PhP 448/408. On the contextualism of word-learning, see PhP 219/184, 464f./425.
See PhP 468f./429f.: “In a sense, there are no more distinct acts of consciousness or of Erlebnisse in a life than there are isolated things in the world. Likewise, as we have seen, when I move around an object, I do not obtain a series of perspectival views that I subsequently coordinate through the idea of a unique geometrical plan (all I find is a bit of ‘indeterminacy’ [bougé] in the thing that crosses through time all by itself), so too am I not a series of psychical acts, nor for that matter a central I who gathers them together in a synthetic unity, but rather a single experience that is inseparable from itself, a single ‘cohesion of life,’ a single temporality that unfolds itself [s’explicite] from its birth and confirms this birth in each present.”
Indeed, he states that this is the structure of the world itself: “The structure ‘world,’ with its double moment of sedimentation and spontaneity, is at the center of consciousness” (PhP 163/132). Here we must not let the image of sedimentation mislead us into thinking that what is acquired has been fossilized, that spoken speech has been written in stone, as it were. Spoken speech continues to speak, dynamically interacting with and responding to speaking speech.
See PhP 222f./188, 453/413; Merleau-Ponty (2001): 44.
PhP 449/408f. The passage is from the chapter on the Cogito, in Part III of PhP. This understanding of the speaking and the spoken as intertwined structural moments of all speech, rather than as opposed kinds of speech, emerges much more clearly in the later parts of PhP than it does in the chapter from Part I that introduces the distinction. This could be because Merleau-Ponty was working out and clarifying his views on the topic as he was writing the book and left some inconsistencies in earlier chapter. Or it could belong to the book’s dialectical method of presentation. In any event, I believe the exegesis presented here lends support to Hass’ contention (2008: 148) that the notion of expression, if somewhat flawed in early chapters of PhP, is brought to fruition by Part III. This interpretation runs counter to Barbaras’ view (2004) that it is only in later works that Merleau-Ponty achieves an adequate grasp of expression, and that this constitutes a decisive break with his early work.
See PhP 229/194: “[I]f we push the research far enough, we find that language itself, in the end, says nothing other than itself, or that its sense is not separable from it. We must, then, seek the first hints of language in the emotional gesticulation by which man superimposes upon the given world the world according to man” (italics mine). However, in The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty writes that “it is the error of the semantic philosophies to close up language as if it spoke only of itself: language lives only from silence; everything we cast to the others has germinated in this great mute land which we never leave” (Merleau-Ponty 1969: 126). A comprehensive exposition might show the opposition between these passages to be merely apparent. See also Merleau-Ponty (1973b, 102f: 115, 2003: 87).
This formulation of Merleau-Ponty’s position recalls Levinas’ view on the centrality of language in ethics and our relation to the other. Indeed, Levinas’ distinction (1969, 1998) between saying (dire) and said (dit) appears to parallel, and was perhaps inspired by, Merleau-Ponty’s distinction between speaking and spoken speech. With his emphasis on the essentially intersubjective, intercorporeal dimension on language, it may be that the seeds of an ethics are germinating in Merleau-Ponty’s discussions of speech and acquisition—a further point of demarcation from Heidegger’s view on language.
Merleau-Ponty (1973b): 103. It may be that written language is responsible for instilling in us the prejudice that the meanings of language are imperishable. As Merleau-Ponty observers (commenting on Husserl’s “Origin of Geometry”), “It is writing which once and for all translates the meaning of spoken words into ideal being […] evoking a total speech” (Merleau-Ponty 1988: 187).
See Merleau-Ponty’s comment on the subsistence of language in the essay “The Metaphysical in Man”: “That general spirit which we all constitute by living our life in common, that intention already deposited in the given system of the language […] only subsists on the condition of being taken up or assumed by speaking subjects and lives on their desire for communication” (Merleau-Ponty 1964a: 88).
See PhP 239/203.
On Merleau-Ponty’s conception of language as a sort of metastable equilibrium, see Landes (2017).
Inkpin (2016: 109f.) identifies two arguments in Merleau-Ponty’s texts for the priority of speaking speech over spoken speech, an argument from genetic priority and an argument from new meaning, and finds neither convincing. I propose that the above argument from ontological dependency and the need for the ideal to be sustained is Merleau-Ponty’s strongest argument for the priority claim, and articulating it helps to clarify the proper sense of that claim.
It may be that, just as there can be a greater or lesser degree of creativity in any instance of speaking speech, so to the degree of re-creativity might be greater or lesser in any given speech act. For example, borrowing Husserl’s terminology, it could be that fulfilled instances of speech—such as “look at that dog!” accompanied by a pointing gesture and the perception of an actual dog—do more to sustain the domain of constituted significations for concrete terms such as “dog” than do unfulfilled acts of speech (“Has anyone seen my dog?”). Heidegger’s idle talk (Gerede) might serve as a minimal threshold, speech in which both the creative and re-creative aspects of speaking speech are at their absolute minima. Or perhaps in automatic speech, the re-creative value is truly zero, as Merleau-Ponty suggests is the case for aphasics who are capable only of the most routine and automated linguistic expression (Merleau-Ponty 2010: 363). In any event, we have here once again a rich continuum of cases rather than distinct kinds of speech act.
“Le préjugé du monde” (PhP 27/5).
Merleau-Ponty himself describes the process in such analogical terms in PhP, though he never explicitly draws attention to the parallel between the two cases. See, e.g., PhP 462/422: “The wonder of language is that it makes itself forgotten. […] The expression fades away in the face of the expressed, and this is why its role as mediator can pass by unnoticed[.]”
Further, parallel to the distinction between primary and secondary speech, Merleau-Ponty offers a distinction between primary and secondary perception (PhP 69/46). Here there is a parallel risk of understanding this as a distinction between types of perception rather than dimensions of perception. Unlike the case of speaking and spoken speech, in the case of perception, Merleau-Ponty is alert to and quick to dispel the deceptive interpretation: “[E]ach perception—and not merely perceptions of scenes that I discover for the first time—begins anew for itself the birth of intelligence and has something of an inspired invention to it” (PhP 69/47).
This is a view that has been taken up by Chomsky and his followers, but one that Merleau-Ponty and most of his contemporary enactivist and phenomenological successors would deny.
For more on this unfortunate assumption, see Stawarska (2015).
PhP 490/451. Cf. Hughes (2013).
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I am grateful to Jennifer Gosetti-Ferencei and an anonymous reviewer for Human Studies for comments on a previous draft.
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Kee, H. Phenomenology and Ontology of Language and Expression: Merleau-Ponty on Speaking and Spoken Speech. Hum Stud 41, 415–435 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-018-9456-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-018-9456-x