Philosophy of Language and Corporeity

Abstract

The fundamental request of contemporary philosophy of language is “the appeal to clarity and critical rigor both in problem solving and formulation”.1 Philosophy of language appeals to our taste for criticality, with the extremely important intention of setting us free of the naive belief in our language’s neutrality.2 According to Husserl, this naive belief cages itself in false consciousness. The appeal of his philosophy of language is, therefore, addressed towards the a-critical way of formulating and analyzing problems, the way logic (the instrument of thinking inside language (logos)) is used to apply those organizing, classifying and rationalistic procedures upon which Greek Philosophy was built, just as so-called exact science also is. From Galileo onwards, and to be more precise from Galileoism onwards, this science has further rationalized and formalized thought. Galileo inaugurated the mathematization of Aristotle’s physics.3 Galileoism, however, consists of a naive utilization of the mathematical procedures of physics so ingeniously inaugurated by Galileo. Their naive use—Husserl explains—coincides with a kind of psychologism which insists on ignoring the linguistic dimension of otherness. Otherness means care for dialogicality. Furthermore, dialogical otherness implies, according to Husserl, starting at zero, “before everything”. It is corporeity (Leiblichkeit), the central element of the transformation of objects and of material phenomena into linguistic signs.