Communication and the Prose of the World: The Question of Language in Merleau-Ponty and Gadamer

Abstract

In the course of his writings from the Phenomenology of Perception to his working notes of 1961, one could justifiably say that Merleau-Ponty was concerned with the theme of language.’ Of course one does not find this concern expressed by a systematic development of the theme. In fact, it would appear that quite the opposite is true: the work on language in The Prose of the World, for example, is abandoned for a yet to be thought more encompassing work on truth, or — to look at the same matter from a different perspective — an account of communication in literary experience is replaced by an account of the structure of being in which language now receives its determination. Nevertheless, one can still detect within the horizon of the theme a certain continuity, especially from 1947 on.’ Already in the lecture course on Language and Communication given at the University of Lyon in 1947, Merleau-Ponty makes it clear that the question of language is not about fixed structures, as if language functions merely as a technique for deciphering ready-made significations. The question of language, in other words, is not captured by a scientistic linguistics, for it fails to take into consideration what language is for a speaking subject. In The Prose of the World, written in the early 1950s, Merleau-Ponty extends this critique, pointing directly at those who would attempt to find in language a field of pure signification. The field of pure signification stands outside experience and the sphere of expression, and thus stands outside the real foundation of language found in the order of speaking. For Merleau-Ponty language arises in the order of speaking as such in which we “rediscover the concrete universality of a given language, which can be different from itself without openly denying itself.”3 No matter what other turns in thought occur for Merleau-Ponty on the question of language, he never abandons this essential insight. The question of language remains for Merleau-Ponty a question of what I want to call the vibrancy of speaking.