The Significance of Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy of Language

Abstract

When Merleau-Ponty presented himself as a candidate for a chair of philosophy to the body of professors of the Collège de France in February, 1952, he furnished them with a comprehensive plan for future research which would, by building on the works he had already published in the fields of the phenomenology of perception, art, and history, proceed to the investigation of the realms of speaking and writing (in a projected work to be called La Prose du monde), of thinking and knowing (in a book to be called L’Origine de la vérité) and which would, after having thus established a theory of truth, culminate in a metaphysical treatise, L’Homme transcendental. As we know, none of these works was completed during his lifetime. He abandoned La Prose du monde (less than half completed) that same year, 1952, and seems to have definitively lost interest in it after 1959.¹ The manuscripts which had been variously entitled “L’Origine de la vérité,” “Généalogie du vrai,” and “Être et monde,” were all put together, after 1959, under the new title, The Visible and the Invisible, the book Merleau-Ponty was working on at the time of his death and which we possess in the posthumous form of a half-completed treatise followed by an intriguing but unfinished.

This essay will appear in the Journal of the History of Philosophy, Vol. XIII (June, 1975).