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Language and development: paradoxical trajectories in Merleau-Ponty, Simondon, and Bergson

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Notes

  1. In the phenomenal field, objects behind my back can have a visible significance, freedom is always situated, and experience is motivated but not “caused.” (Merleau-Ponty 2012, Introduction)

  2. Merleau-Ponty’s position here is inspired by Husserl’s discussion of language in “On the Origin of Geometry” fragment. I am arguing, however, that Merleau-Ponty’s intent is to show language as a moving trajectory of sense, not a region of ideal objectivities, as is primarily the case in Husserl’s analysis. (My thanks to an anonymous reviewer for suggesting that this connection be made explicit.)

  3. To foreshadow Simondon’s language, which will be discussed below, this “vague fever” is a way of understanding the concept of the “metastable equilibrium.”

  4. Due to space limitations, I offer merely a brief presentation of Simondon’s complex, and relatively unknown, philosophical contribution so as to identify its connection to the paradoxical logic of expression and its potential conceptual contribution to rethinking trajectories of development. For more extensive introductions to his work, see: Barthélémy 2008; Chabot 2013; Combes 2013; De Boever et al. 2012, and Landes 2013, 22–4. For some important connections between Merleau-Ponty and Simondon, see Guchet 2001a, b.

  5. This notion of “motivation” alludes to Merleau-Ponty’s (2012) phenomenological description of experience as resisting traditional structures of linear causality (50–51; see also, Landes 2013, 84).

  6. This notion of dephasing, by which the metastable pre-individual deploys itself into individual phases, bears a certain productive resonance with Evan Thompson’s (2007) use of Petitot’s term “symmetry-breaking” (71). For a discussion of this notion, see Moss Brender (2013).

  7. See, for instance, Bergson (2001), xix; or again 131.

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  1. Faculté de philosophie, Pavillon Félix-Antoine-Savard (540), Université Laval, 2325, rue des Bibliothèques, QC, Québec, G1V 0A6, Canada

    Donald A. Landes

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Landes, D.A. Language and development: paradoxical trajectories in Merleau-Ponty, Simondon, and Bergson. Phenom Cogn Sci 16, 597–607 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-017-9522-2

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