Abstract
Now that we have established that the body is involved in a rudimentary meaning-constitution, the question becomes, what is “meaning”? The chapter begins with a brief look at the traditional view of meaning, moving quickly into the texts of Merleau-Ponty that have to do with language and expression (Signs, Prose of the World, Consciousness and the Acquisition of Language) in order to explicate an entirely new way of understanding “meaning”, not simply as a way of designating thoughts and things, but rather, as the very bringing of thoughts and things into presence. The relationship between perception and language and the origin of meaning is in focus in these texts. Finally, the notion of “expression” finds its ultimate form in the ontology of the late Merleau-Ponty in his description of the meeting between man and world as “flesh” which will be the subject matter of the following chapter (4).
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Notes
- 1.
I will not be going into all the finer points of his thinking on language, as it would take us to far from the focus of this book, which is an application of some Merleau-Pontian philosophy on the phenomenon of psychosomatics.
- 2.
See Taylor (1985) for an introduction to meaning theory. Other writers of interest in this area are Davidson, D., Dennet, D., Dummet, M., Fodor, J., Grice, H.P., Strawson, P.F., Quine, W., Wittgenstein, L.
- 3.
Other scholars have pointed out that bipedality changed the position of the skull, allowing for the larynx to make specifically human sounds, especially the vowels. On a social level, it has been hypothesized that as soon as man started to use more tools, his hands were occupied and could no longer gesture with his hands. For that reason, making sounds replaced making motor gestures in order to communicate. Communication in the dark would also be a situation requiring sound.
- 4.
See especially Signs (1960/1964a, b), The Prose of the World (1969/1973), Consciousness and the Acquisition of Language (1964/1973).
- 5.
The first working titles of this book were The Origin of Truth (L’Origine de la vérité), The Geneology of the True/Real (Généalogie du vrai), Being and world (Être et monde), indicating the move from phenomenology to ontology.
- 6.
This ambiguity will be explicated in his notion of reversibility, from his last work The Visible and the Invisible.
- 7.
Merleau-Ponty had read Saussure, whose writings exerted an influence in The Prose of the World, which was to be his treatise on the philosophy of language. However, he seemed to have lost interest in this project after 1952, abandoning it entirely in 1959. The book has been published as a posthumous, unfinished work, and according to Claude Lefort’s introduction, it is not likely that Merleau-Ponty would have finished it if he had lived, at least not in the form we have today. I will not go into Saussure’s influence on Merleau-Ponty’s thought as it would stray too far from the focus of the chapter, for those interested see Hass (2008) and Barbaras (2004).
References
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Hass, L. (2008). Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1945/1962). Phenomenology of perception. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1960/1964). Signs. Evanston Illinois: Northwestern University Press.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1964/1973). Consciousness and the acquisition of language. Evanston Illinois: Northwestern University Press.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1964/1968). The visible and the invisible. Evanston Illinois: Northwestern University Press.
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Taylor, C. (1985). Theories of meaning in human Agency and language, Philosophical papers I. Cambridge: Cambridge University press.
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Bullington, J. (2013). The Meaning of Meaning. In: The Expression of the Psychosomatic Body from a Phenomenological Perspective. SpringerBriefs in Philosophy. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6498-9_3
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