Language and Phenomenology 9780367231712, 9780429278600

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
List of Tables
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Language of Experience
Part I: Language and Experience
1 Language and Experience: Phenomenological Dimensions
2 Merleau-Ponty on Expression and Meaning
3 On Husserl’s Concept of the Pre-predicative: Genealogy of Logic and Regressive Method
4 Husserlian Phenomenology, Rule-Following, and Primitive Normativity
5 The Place of Language in the Early Heidegger’s Development of Hermeneutic Phenomenology
6 Logos, Perception, and the Ontological Function of Discourse in Phenomenology: A Theme from Heidegger’s Reading of Aristotle
7 We are a Conversation: Heidegger on How Language Uncovers
8 The Phenomenology of Poetry
Part II: Language and Joint Experience
9 Complex Community: Toward a Phenomenology of Language Sharing
10 The Scaffolding Role of a Natural Language in the Formation of Thought: Edmund Husserl’s Contribution
11 Widening the World through Speech: Husserl on the Phenomenon of Linguistic Appropriation
12 The Priority of Language in World-Disclosure: Back to the Beginnings in Childhood
13 Play in Conversation: The Cognitive Import of Gadamer’s Theory of Play
14 Translating Hospitality: A Narrative Task
15 Inflecting “Presence” and “Absence”: On Sharing the Phenomenological Conversation
Notes on Contributors
Index

Citation preview

Language and Phenomenology

At first blush, phenomenology seems to be concerned preeminently with questions of knowledge, truth, and perception, and yet closer inspection reveals that the analyses of these phenomena remain bound up with language and that consequently phenomenology is, inextricably, a philosophy of language. Drawing on the insights of a variety of phenomenological authors, including Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Gadamer, and Ricoeur, this collection of essays by leading scholars articulates the distinctively phenomenological contribution to language by examining two sets of questions. The first set of questions concerns the relatedness of language to experience. Studies exhibit the first-person character of the philosophy of language by focusing on lived experience, the issue of reference, and disclosive speech. The second set of questions concerns the relatedness of language to intersubjective experience. Studies exhibit the second-person character of the philosophy of language by focusing on language acquisition, culture, and conversation. This book will be of interest to scholars of phenomenology and philosophy of language. Chad Engelland is Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Philosophy Department at the University of Dallas. He is the author of several books, including Ostension: Word Learning and the Embodied Mind (2014), Heidegger’s Shadow: Kant, Husserl, and the Transcendental Turn (Routledge, 2017), and Phenomenology (2020).

Routledge Studies in Contemporary Philosophy

Logics of Genocide The Structures of Violence and the Contemporary World Edited by Anne O’Byrne and Martin Shuster Revising Fiction, Fact, and Faith A Philosophical Account Nathaniel Goldberg and Chris Gavaler The Indexical Point of View On Cognitive Significance and Cognitive Dynamics Vojislav Bozickovic Toleration and the Challenges of Liberalism Edited by Johannes Drerup and Gottfried Schweiger The Philosophy of Reenchantment Edited by Michiel Meijer and Herbert De Vriese Caring for Liberalism Dependency and Liberal Political Theory Edited by Asha Bhandary and Amy R. Baehr Language and Phenomenology Edited by Chad Engelland The Philosophy and Psychology of Ambivalence Being of Two Minds Edited by Berit Brogaard and Dimitria Electra Gatzia

For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge. com/Routledge-Studies-in-Contemporary-Philosophy/book-series/SE0720

Language and Phenomenology

Edited by Chad Engelland

First published 2021 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Taylor & Francis The right of Chad Engelland to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this title has been requested ISBN: 978-0-367-23171-2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-27860-0 (ebk) Typeset in Adobe Garamond by codeMantra

Contents

List of Tables Acknowledgments Introduction: The Language of Experience

vii ix 1

C H A D E NGE L L A N D

PART I

Language and Experience 1 Language and Experience: Phenomenological Dimensions

19 21

DA N I E L O. DA H L S T ROM

2 Merleau-Ponty on Expression and Meaning

43

TAY L OR C A R M A N

3 On Husserl’s Concept of the Pre-predicative: Genealogy of Logic and Regressive Method

56

D OM I N IQU E PR A DE L L E

4 Husserlian Phenomenology, Rule-Following, and Primitive Normativity

74

JACOB RU M P

5 The Place of Language in the Early Heidegger’s Development of Hermeneutic Phenomenology

92

S CO T T C A M PBE L L

6 Logos, Perception, and the Ontological Function of Discourse in Phenomenology: A Theme from Heidegger’s Reading of Aristotle L E S L I E M AC AVOY

115

vi

Contents



Tables

4.1 4.2 4.3 15.1 15.2

Two views of meaning Three views of meaning Four views of meaning Two features of inflection Stages of phenomenological initiation

78 81 87 290 292

Acknowledgments

We learn to see for ourselves due to the witness of experts in phenomenological elucidation and the essential motivations that their efforts make available to us. In this way, the things themselves come to be expressed as they are only from within a philosophical community of apprentices and collaborators. Among collaborators, I owe thanks to Daniel O. Dahlstrom for his illuminating paper on performatives in Austin and Heidegger, delivered in Dallas, which gave me the idea for the collection, and for his early enthusiasm for the project, which got it off the ground. Andrew Weckenmann, my editor at Routledge, was likewise instrumental. I am also glad to acknowledge the assistance of University of Dallas colleagues Dennis Sepper and Cynthia Nielsen, who provided comments on the introduction, Josh Parens, who provided important material support, and my graduate assistant, Megan Furman, who dedicated many hours to the preparation of the volume. Though two decades have gone by, I still count myself as an apprentice of my teacher, Robert Sokolowski, whose course marking the 100th anniversary of the Logical Investigations inspired in me an abiding interest in the phenomenology of language. What recompense can one give one’s teacher other than to endeavor to say the same about the same and thereby renew the truth of the matter? It is indeed right and just that I dedicate my editorial work on this collection to him.

Introduction The Language of Experience Chad Engelland

Sprache macht offenbar. —Heidegger

The phrase, “philosophy of language,” immediately conjures up a variety of topics—reference, meaning, speech acts, etc.—and a variety of authors—Wittgenstein, Quine, Kripke, Davidson, and the like. By contrast, “phenomenology of language” initially appears empty. What does it entail? Who are its voices? While philosophy as conceptual analysis obviously involves a close interaction with language and problems of language, it is not at all clear that the same holds for philosophy as description of the structure of experience. What is the specifically phenomenological contribution to language? Now the term “phenomenology” does express the rootedness of logos in the phenomena, of speech in the givenness of experience. The major contributions that inaugurate the phenomenological movement do so through contextualizing language. Husserl’s breakthrough work, Logical Investigations, discloses the logic of truth by exhibiting the interplay of language and our experience of things: that which we speak about can be given to experience in the very same way in which it is said. Heidegger situates the Husserlian interplay of language and experience within the domain of world, and he relentlessly grapples with the problem of bringing that domain to adequate expression. Merleau-Ponty, working from Husserl’s later manuscripts, develops the intersubjective significance of the body in enabling the interplay of language and experience. Language leads us to recover the wealth of experience, the place of experience, and the embodied agency of experience. In its origins, phenomenology is not only a philosophy of truth and of perception; it is a philosophy of language. Etymologically and genealogically, then, the phrase “phenomenology of language” appears to be as pleonastic as the phrase “botany of plants.”1 Despite this evident linkage of phenomenology and the philosophy of language, the character of the relation remains far from clear. There is in the first place a question of relative silence; as Gadamer observes, “It is astounding how little the problem of language is attended to at all in phenomenology— by Husserl or by Scheler” (Gadamer 1963/1976, 172).2 Husserl, it is true,

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regularly sets language as such aside in order to simplify his genealogy of logic (Husserl 1969, §§2, 5; 1973, §47). In this way, language seems to be of merely peripheral concern to phenomenology. There is in the second place the puzzling character of the remarks one does find phenomenologists making on the subject. Witness Heidegger’s bold assertion in Being and Time: “Philosophical research will have to dispense with the ‘philosophy of language’ if it is to inquire into the ‘things themselves’ and attain the status of a problematic which has been cleared up conceptually” (Heidegger 1962, 210). The aversion goes beyond the philosophy of language to concern language itself. That is, phenomenology fulfills its ambition to return to the things themselves only by resisting “the drift of ordinary language,” which all too easily inappropriately reifies: “Before words, before expressions, always the phenomena first, and then the concepts!” (Heidegger 1985, 248). What are we to make of phenomenology’s relative silence and noted aversion regarding language? Merleau-Ponty suggests that Husserl’s reticence is the fruit of his giving language a priority heretofore unprecedented in the philosophical tradition; the tradition does not oblige him to be as explicit concerning language as he must be concerning epistemological and logical questions. Nonetheless, Husserl “moves it into a central position, and what little he says about it is both original and enigmatic” (Merleau-Ponty 1964, 84). Derrida focuses his considerable intellectual energy on just this ambiguity between ordinary language and phenomenological language: Husserl remains narrowly focused only on those aspects of language relevant for the genealogy of logic, and he leaves unexplored ordinary language as a whole as well as the specific possibility of phenomenological language, which he employs but does not explain (Derrida 1973, 7–8). Behind the relative silence and indeed aversion to the problem of language, we find, inscribed into the heart of the phenomenological project, an implicit but unjustified commitment to the language of phenomenology. Language and phenomenology: the conjunction hides a question mark in search of a unifying principle. Henry observes there is not so much a phenomenology of language (alongside a range of other possible objects of investigation) but rather a language of phenomenology insofar as “language belongs . . . to the internal conditions of this process of elucidation” (Henry 1999, 345).3 Phenomenology needs language in order to disclose the phenomena. Given this constitutive role of language in phenomenology, there remains a possibility of return, of going back from the language of phenomenology to the language of the everyday, and of thereby enriching the language of the everyday. Heidegger’s provisional characterization of the phenomenological method in section seven of Being and Time expresses the phenomenological rejuvenation of language as such: once again the Greek sense of logos as a matter of letting something be seen has come to light. The disclosive character of phenomenological language reveals the disclosive character of ordinary speech. As Derrida points out, “The unity of ordinary language (or the language of traditional metaphysics) and the language of phenomenology is never broken in spite of the

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precautions, the ‘brackets,’ the renovations or innovations” (Derrida 1973, 8). Perhaps the unity Derrida identifies is in fact an asset, inscribed into the nature of experience, that affords the possibility of a back and forth movement between ordinary and phenomenological language. As Sokolowski puts it, “The phenomenological attitude is the rigorous, systematic execution of what is already germinating in natural experience and discourse” (Sokolowski 1974, 254). We can experience and speak of things and we can experience and speak of the presence of things; language performs overlapping roles in helping to constitute the duality of experience. The term “phenomenology of language” would therefore name both a subjective and objective genitive: a manner of philosophizing opened up by language and an understanding of language opened up by that manner of research. Husserl’s discovery of categorial intuition in the Sixth Investigation recalibrates experience to match the structure resident in our speech about things. If I can say, “The apple is tart,” then it is possible to experience the being-tart of the apple. Language enriches experience; it challenges us to widen experience beyond the perception of sensible qualities (e.g., red) to include perception of categorial relations (e.g., the being-sunburned of our skin). Experience enriches language by rooting its structures in the robust structures of perceived things (perceiving the skin as sunburned fills out the meaning of “My skin is sunburned”). Heidegger praises Husserl for subordinating thought to givenness, for transcending modern rationalism and recovering the Greek sense of logos as gathering. Experience takes the lead but it is an experience widened by speech. One can thereby identify a basic tension within the phenomenological treatment of language: on the one hand, phenomenology subordinates speech to experience; on the other hand, phenomenology identifies the reciprocity of speech and experience. Heidegger’s signature if enigmatic formula, “Language is the house of being,” expresses just this reciprocity (Heidegger 1998a, 39). This collection of essays by leading and emerging scholars articulates the distinctively phenomenological contribution to language by examining two sets of questions. The first set of questions concerns the relatedness of language to experience. Studies exhibit the first-person character of language by focusing on lived experience, the issue of reference, and disclosive speech. The second set of questions concerns the relatedness of language to intersubjective experience. Studies exhibit the second-person character of language by focusing on language acquisition, culture, and conversation. Contributors draw from the insights of a variety of phenomenological authors, including Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Gadamer, and Ricoeur, in order to advance the understanding of linguistic phenomena. 1 Several Recent Foci In its first 100 years, phenomenology happened upon the relation of language and experience as one of its fundamental themes, a relation slowly

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widened beyond the logical to encompass the whole sphere of human experience, including the philosophical, and a relation slowly deepened to recognize the constitutive nature of language. In the first two decades of its second century, there has been a marked renewal of interest in this theme among phenomenologists, a renewal due principally to three contributing factors. First, the centenary of Husserl’s Logical Investigations motivated scholars to celebrate this work and its interrelationship of language and experience. Second, the appearance of heretofore unpublished texts from both Husserl and Heidegger has led scholars to new insights. Third and most significantly, interactions with other traditions and disciplines, including analytic philosophy, developmental psychology, and linguistics, have led phenomenological authors to call upon the resources of phenomenology to address new questions and to approach old questions in new ways. Focus on language allows us both to appropriate and to expand the experiential and intersubjective horizons of Husserlian phenomenology. Beyer (2017) details the contrast between Husserl and Frege concerning sense, a contrast that sets up the traditions of phenomenology and analytic philosophy. Some phenomenologists productively question the analytic internalism–externalism debate concerning meaning (Kelly 2001); Zahavi (2008) and Crowell (2008) resist the characterization of Husserl as an internalist while also underscoring that the phenomenological breakthrough involves a recalibration of the terms of the debate: phenomenology shows that the mind is external and the world is internal. The most extended recent engagement with Husserl’s phenomenology of language comes from Romano (2015), who develops Husserl’s attempts to return reason to sensibility in dialogue with contemporary analytic philosophy of language. A first question for phenomenology and language concerns this cross-fertilization: “How can phenomenology’s experiential register help reshape contemporary debates in analytic philosophy?” At the beginning of the Logical Investigations, Husserl sets aside the social dimension of speech in order to focus on the relation of a solitary perceiver’s speech to the things of perception. The centenary of Logical Investigations in the year 2000 and the subsequent publication of Husserl’s attempted revisions to the Sixth Investigation (Husserl 2002, 2005) attracted considerable scholarly attention to Husserl’s phenomenology of language, its possibilities and its limits. Mattens’s edited volume (2008) includes a wide range of scholarly and speculative developments of Husserl’s thoughts on language, including the various focal points of Husserl’s repeated attempts to revise the Sixth Investigation, and Dodd (2012) considers these revisions in light of Derrida’s criticisms. Zahavi and Stjernfelt’s collection of essays on the Logical Investigations features a clear overview of Husserl’s phenomenology of language by Sokolowski (2002), who subsequently offers an intersubjective development of Husserl’s basic approach to language (Sokolowski 2008). A second question for phenomenology and language concerns this

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intersubjectivity: “To what extent can (Husserl’s) phenomenology of language make sense of the obviously social dimension of speech?” Heidegger’s conception of language has been the subject of much recent scholarly activity, although not all of it approaches his conception as essentially phenomenological. Carman (2003), Inkpin (2016), and Hatab (2017) gravitate toward the powerful and evidently phenomenological analyses of Heidegger’s Being and Time, which explores world as the domain of speech, and Campbell (2012) shows the way in which such themes are the fruit of his earlier engagement with Aristotle’s ontological account of life. Taylor (2016) redeploys his earlier phenomenological investigations of language to speak of the constitutive role of language for human experience, and he does so in order to offer an alternative to the standard analytic approach to language.4 A third question for phenomenology and language concerns the peculiar status of language in Heidegger’s conception: “What role does language play in the phenomenological task of exhibition?” Maly (2008), Ziarek (2013), and most of the contributors gathered by Powell (2013) exploit the resources in Heidegger’s late writings for making sense of language, focusing especially on Heidegger’s esoteric notebooks that began to be published only in 1989. Some of these studies treat Heidegger in terms of the poetic discourse of the late 1930s rather than in terms of a commitment to phenomenology. Hence, a fourth question for phenomenology and language focuses on his last writings: “To what extent can (Heidegger’s late) musings on poetic language be construed as a continuation and even a deepening of the phenomenological project?” In this regard, Gosetti-Ferencei (2004) approaches Heidegger’s interest in poetic language as a development of phenomenological disclosure, and Wrathall (2011) explicates Heidegger’s later account of language as gathering in a way that is essentially phenomenological, and he does so in dialogue with such analytic authors as Putnam, Burge, and Dummett. The question of the relevance of phenomenology persists for post-Heideggerian authors. Culbertson (2019) examines the phenomenon of linguistic alienation in continental thinkers such as Kristeva and Derrida and brings out the normative significance of a phenomenological and hermeneutic approach to language. She argues that feminist and post-colonial theory, far from compromising this normative significance, in fact underscores it. Merleau-Ponty follows Husserl and Heidegger in making the question of language fundamental to the phenomenological enterprise (Apostolopoulos 2019). Unlike Husserl and Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty exemplifies a way of doing phenomenology in dialogue with empirical research, and hence he remains especially instructive for the kind of conversation happening today between phenomenology and empirical inquiries. Engelland (2014) draws from Merleau-Ponty’s explorations of embodiment and child development as well as classical analytic authors such as Quine, Wittgenstein, and Davidson to elucidate the phenomenological role of bodily joint presence in making possible the learning of our mother tongue.5 Inkpin (2016) and Breitling

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(2017) find resources in Merleau-Ponty for articulating a conception of language as world-disclosing; Inkpin applies this conception to cognitive science and Breitling to the possibility of intercultural conversation. But the engagement with empirical and analytic approaches to language goes beyond an explicit invocation of Merleau-Ponty. In conversation with linguistics and psychologists, Sokolowski (2008) carefully maps the way speakers of language show up in experience as responsible for the truth of that experience as well as the way the structure of that shared experience informs the syntax of our speech; Stawarska (2015) provides a phenomenological reading of the founder of modern linguistics, Saussure; and Hatab (2017) raises questions arising from evolution and artificial intelligence. The engagement with the sciences affords empirical confirmations of many phenomenological claims, but at times it also exposes the need to reconfigure the frameworks operative in those sciences. A fifth question, then, for phenomenology and language concerns the question of method: “How might the method of phenomenology differ from other empirical procedures so that it can productively engage empirical sciences while remaining faithful to its own principles?” It is to this last question that we now turn. 2 The Question of Method One feature of the recent phenomenological authors is the awareness that phenomenology must be updated in some way in order that its riches might be made available to the contemporary conversation about language. Something of the obscurity of phenomenology is accidental and can be removed without loss. Contemporary phenomenology of language has endeavored to reformulate or even distance itself from Husserl’s vocabulary and infrastructure. Sokolowski recasts the shift from the natural attitude to the transcendental one in terms of a shift in philosophical speech (Sokolowski 2008, 3). Engelland (2014) deploys a streamlined phenomenology that avoids needless technical vocabulary, focuses on everyday experience, and learns from phenomenological insights available in historical figures such as Aristotle and Augustine. Other authors are likewise sensitive to accessibility but go further to question the relevance of the transcendental framework for the phenomenology of language. Inkpin for one calls for a “minimalist phenomenology” that seeks to exhibit directly the phenomena while avoiding the maximalist claims of Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty about the being of subjectivity and things; Inkpin instead turns to 4E cognitive science (embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended) for filling out the context for his minimalist phenomenological analyses (Inkpin 2016, 21). Hatab similarly construes phenomenology in minimal terms under the heading “proto-phenomenology.” He wishes to avoid Husserl’s approach and instead begin with everyday experience. But he also advocates what he calls “existential naturalism” according to which what’s real are the things that show up in everyday experience and nothing besides (Hatab 2017, 8–10). Both

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Inkpin and Hatab find the Heidegger of Being and Time to be the authentic exemplar for this non-Husserlian version of phenomenology. Moreover, as I mentioned above, many commentators want to read Heidegger’s thoughts on language as being Heideggerian to the exclusion of being phenomenological or transcendental. What understanding of phenomenology is necessary for making sense of language? Here there seem to be a bewildering variety of possibilities: the early or the late Husserl as well as the early and late Heidegger, just to name four contenders. Let me discuss Heidegger on the verge of his later thought, for rightly understanding his views does much to assuage the apparent tension between his thought and Husserl’s. Heidegger’s cardinal insight into language is that speech is essentially a matter of showing via gathering, that is, speech discloses by articulating the thing in question.6 He never makes this the focus of philosophical investigation; instead, he presses onward to articulate the context or domain in which this showing–gathering takes place.7 In 1935, he makes clear that the connection of gathering (Sammlung) and context (Zusammenhang) is the choice fruit of the transcendental turn. He offers transcendental philosophy as the means to avoid segregating that which must be united in order to be understood. In particular, he thinks it undermines the attempt to set up mathematical logic as “the scientific logic of all sciences,” an attempt that misses the roots of the assertion in the logic of experience itself (Heidegger 1967, 156). He also thinks it undermines the “idolization of facts” that marks contemporary reflection on science, an idolization that fails to appreciate the productive role of prejudgments in making scientific inquiry into objects possible (Heidegger 1967, 60, 180). Instead, he invites us to make the transcendental turn and conceive the more original belonging together of speech and thing from which the two sides have been artificially separated off. “The ball is underinflated,” we might say, when we notice that the basketball barely bounces. Logic offers one opportunity of interest: we attend to the statement, “The ball is underinflated,” and locate its truth conditions. Physics offers another opportunity of interest: we attend to the pressure of the air inside the ball relative to the air outside of the ball. The transcendental interest, Heidegger tells us, sees the assertion and the experienced thing in their original unity: the assertion articulates and presents the ball’s being-unable-to-be-bounced (Heidegger 1967, 178–9). Only the transcendental turn affords the possibility of understanding the being of language. How can this commitment to the need of the transcendental turn be squared with Heidegger’s attempts, at the same time as these remarks, to distance himself from the terminology of transcendence? The answer is that the later Heidegger wishes to retain the transcendental turn even as he deepens it historically (Crowell 2001, 2013; Dahlstrom 2001; Golob 2016; Engelland 2017). He writes in 1964, “Language is a primal phenomenon which, in what is proper to it, is not amenable to factual proof but can be caught sight of only in an unprejudiced experience of language” (Heidegger

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1998b, 57). Heidegger’s later thought requires first enacting, in a phenomenological rather than a Kantian mode, the transcendental experience of Being and Time: But to disclose the a priori is not to make an ‘a-prioristic’ construction. Edmund Husserl has not only enabled us to understand once more the meaning of any genuine philosophical ‘empiricism’; he has also given us the necessary tools. ‘A-priorism’ is the method of every scientific philosophy which understands itself. There is nothing constructivistic about it. But for this very reason a priori research requires that the phenomenal basis be properly prepared. The horizon which is closest to us, and which must be made ready for the analytic of Dasein, lies in its average everydayness. (Heidegger 1962, 490) Heidegger’s focus on the everyday, which is on the forefront of consideration for the contemporary phenomenology of language, is not opposed to Husserl and transcendental philosophy; rather Heidegger understands it as the correct development of the Husserlian breakthrough. Similarly, Heidegger’s later approach to language is for him the correct development of Being and Time’s breakthrough. If we sidestep this breakthrough and nonetheless try to retain the phenomenological return to the things themselves, our analyses will lack the significance of the a priori. They will appear to be psychological descriptions of how things happen to be instead of philosophical elucidations of how things must be. Speech will appear to be something that shows up in the field of manifestation, as a thing, event, or process, rather than to be the medium of manifestation. In this connection, Ricoeur observes that “phenomenology is worthy of its name only if it remains transcendental and not empirical” (Ricoeur 1967, 27). Of course, phenomenology does well to lose its unnecessary baggage, including the Husserlian obsession with transcendental subjectivity and the Heideggerian penchant for mystification, in order to clear the way for the phenomenological elucidation of the transcendental domain of experience. What sort of methodological commitments are necessary for the phenomenology of language? I have not sought to settle every question but only to indicate that those features attractive about the phenomenology of language seem connected to methodological commitments that are regrettably often regarded as unattractive. Phenomenology of language does well to lead with the phenomena, minimizing talk of transcendence at the outset, and only to make explicit the full methodological commitments after having first exhibited their fecundity. My suggestion is that phenomenologists of language might consider minimalist or proto-phenomenology as being a good place to start, and yet they have good reason to think that a transcendental phenomenology, intersubjectively and clearly developed, might be the most adequate account in the end. In particular, we may do well to take up Ricoeur’s rich

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suggestion that we think of the phenomenology of language and the transcendental task in tandem: If phenomenological reduction is to be something other than the suspension of our links to the world, it must be the ‘beginning’ of a life of meaning, the simultaneous ‘birth’ of the spoken-being of the world and the speaking-being of man. (Ricoeur 1967, 30)

3 Some Phenomenological Themes The phenomenological return to the things themselves happens upon several enduring themes in the philosophy of language. Among these are the play of presence and absence, the pre-predicative basis of judgment, and embodied intersubjectivity. 3.1 Presence and Absence Husserl’s Logical Investigations develops the interplay of empty and filled intentions. One might be told about El Greco’s stunning painting “The Vision of St. John” and thereby intend it emptily. One might even imagine its seven twisting nudes or view a photo of it and thereby have a partial fulfillment of that empty intention. But one might also travel to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and see it in person and thereby have the empty intention completely filled. Through these graded fulfillments (intended as: absent, imagined, depicted, present in the flesh), it remains one and the same painting. We find Husserl emphasizing both the independence of meaning from perception and the fulfillment of meaning in perception. That is, I can mean something without its being present in any way, without even a surrogate such as a mental image supporting that intention, but when I do see the meant thing, I experience that meaning as fulfilled by that sight: the very same thing before meant emptily in its absence is here meant fulfilled in its presence. Heidegger’s program reflected in the title, Being and Time, takes as its point of departure Husserl’s characterization of perception as a making-present, a term which he thinks suggests a fundamentally temporal process (Heidegger 1962, 498nxxii). Heidegger develops the language of presence on the heels of Being and Time in the famous 1927 lecture course, Basic Problems of Phenomenology, in which he observes that “handiness and unavailability are specific variations of a single basic phenomenon, which we may characterize formally as presence and absence and in general as praesens” (Heidegger 1982, 305). Sokolowski (1978/2017) has done more than any other interpreter to promote the importance of presence and absence for the philosophy of language. Derrida famously criticized Husserl for privileging presence over absence; one can

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grant Derrida the artificiality of some of Husserl’s abstractions in approaching language while nonetheless insisting that a concern for absence belongs to the very heart of Husserl’s breakthrough concerning language (Derrida 1973; Sokolowski 1980; Crowell 1996; Lee 2010). 3.2 The Pre-predicative As Husserl demonstrates in Logical Investigations and Experience and Judgment, experience involves passive syntheses of the various things that show up in its field. To speak involves singling out something and registering its part–whole relations. The statement, “There’s a bird in the store!” makes explicit the part–whole relation resident in the experience of bird and of store. Predication (the apophantic is of S is p) remains founded on pre-predicative explication (the hermeneutic as of taking S as p). In his determined efforts to make manifest world, Heidegger takes isolated judgments, returns them to their pragmatic contexts, and roots these contexts first in human existence’s efforts to care for being and second in the contexture of time. We talk about things that are explicit and what is explicit happens against the backdrop of a general implicit understanding of things, an understanding rooted in our own projects. Heidegger returns the various things we might say to the pre-discursive grip we have on the world, but that grip is at the most basic level—alongside fundamental moods and projective understanding— linguistic. Everyday language (Sprache) is rooted in discourse.8 Both Husserl and Heidegger explore the pre-predicative, but Husserl focuses on contemplative experience (just looking around) and Heidegger focuses on practical experience (taking care of things). Heidegger says that his sense of pre-predicative is more basic than all looking around. Does Heidegger identify a more fundamental layer of the pre-predicative than does Husserl? Husserl tells us at the beginning of Experience and Judgment that he is giving an account of the genealogy of logic and he is accordingly going to attend only to contemplative interest (Husserl 1973, 65–6, 203). He does not deny that there is practical interest, which he explicitly mentions later; he says only that he will map the logic of this domain and not that one. Heidegger gives an account of how the practical interest can shift over to a theoretical one, how a tool when missing or broken can attract attention to itself as a bearer of properties instead of as a means to an end. But Heidegger nowhere gives an account of an originally contemplative interest. Think of the sort of interest awakened by a seven-year-old boy at the beach, who discovers, in the roots of washed up seaweed, a live sea star, one that he contemplates intently before releasing into the water. Much of human life, including science, unfolds from just this contemplative interest (Soffer 1999). Husserl, rather than Heidegger, gives us an account of how it unfolds. It may be that we can think of Husserl’s and Heidegger’s pre-predicative as complementary rather than competing.9

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3.3 Embodied Intersubjectivity A conspicuous feature of ordinary language is the persistent use of personal pronouns, pronouns that not only pick out recipients and agents of action (“I gave you an ‘A’”) but also recipients and agents of thoughtful experience (“I think your work is excellent”). The discovery of intentionality recognizes the presence of the world of things to each one of us; this discovery entails the peculiarity that each of us, present to the world, is present to each other yet in a way essentially different from any other thing; we are present as agents of presence. Such an observation raises the question concerning how we show up in the field of experience. Husserl begins the First Logical Investigation by separating off the indications operative in conversation from the pure expression operative in soliloquy, but later in Ideas II and Cartesian Meditations he gives an account of the perception of others through the contexture of indications; Merleau-Ponty connects the dots between Husserl’s phenomenology of language and phenomenology of intersubjectivity. We are able to tap into the world of conventional language thanks to the prior world of perception, rooted as it is in our expressive bodies, revealing us to others as those to whom the world of experience stands open. The reciprocity of personal pronouns is grounded in the reciprocity of our bodies as agents of perception. Searle worries that appeals to the experiencing body cannot explain how they relate to the organic or physical body, comprised of such things as brains and central nervous systems (Searle 2005, 329). Sokolowski suggests that we regard such bodily structures as comprising a kind of “lens” that transparently makes the sensible world available to agents of experience; as a lens, it admits of two perspectives: it can be looked at in addition to be looked through (Sokolowski 2008, 193–237). The phenomenological and the scientific need not be thought of as mutually exclusive (Engelland 2014, 193–214). 4 Philosophy of Language and Phenomenology Socrates, dissatisfied with the Presocratic failure to account for the unity of phenomena, turns to speech about things to grasp them in their unity. Plato playfully exhibits the conventional character of etymologies in the Cratylus while underscoring the truth-character of speech in the Sophist. Aristotle’s On Interpretation sorts the conventional and the natural by rooting language in the publicness of our perception of things. Augustine’s De Doctrina Christiana distinguishes conventional and natural signs, a distinction that enables his account of language acquisition in the Confessions in terms of ostension; his De Magistro constitutes a rigorous exploration of the ambiguity of signs including every act of pointing. Subsequent medieval and modern thinkers likewise wrestle with the philosophical problem of language. Among the many species falling under the genus, philosophy of language, one finds not only analytic philosophy and the phenomenology of language but ancient, medieval, and indeed modern species.

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A figure that looms large in both analytic and phenomenological approaches to language is Wittgenstein. One takes him on board one’s own project only by leaving a lot of flotsam behind. Analytic authors do not by and large adopt his method even though they regard him as an important reference point; and phenomenological authors find his philosophizing to be phenomenologically suggestive despite the radical insufficiency of his own formulations concerning method. What is attractive about Wittgenstein is his return to the complexity of everyday language, experience, and being with others (Engelland 2014, 41–65; Inkpin 2016, 159–97). There’s also something in the infectious intensity with which he wrestles with issues. At first, one is rebuffed; but the more one reads the more one feels moved to philosophize for oneself. Wittgenstein’s interest in Augustine at the start of the Philosophical Investigations opens up the possibility of reading back behind Frege to alternative approaches to the philosophy of language (Engelland 2014). Taylor develops phenomenological insights of German Romanticism, drawing on Hamann, Herder, and Humboldt, and he does so to counter the persistence of certain rationalist themes in analytic philosophy (Taylor 2016, ix). Sokolowski presents the phenomenology of language as achieving points of contact with the Aristotelian approach to language, a connection first promoted by Heidegger (Sokolowski 2008, 273–85). The phenomenology of language affords an opportunity to engage the full breadth of philosophical approaches to languages, whether ancient, medieval, modern, or analytic. One can see everywhere anticipations of the phenomenological account, which presses the questions: what are these anticipations, how can they be brought to fruition, and how can our understanding of phenomena thereby be enriched? 5 Questions for the Phenomenology of Language As this introduction has detailed, the important task of relating phenomenology to analytic philosophy of language is well underway, although much work must still be done. However, there are a number of ad intra questions for phenomenology that need clarification before a wholesale ad extra engagement can profitably be accomplished. Among these are the questions of the extension of the phenomenology of language: all too easily the phenomenology of language is restricted to Husserl, excluding Heidegger or at least the later Heidegger or the subsequent hermeneutical tradition; is such a restriction justifiable? Also, must we choose between an asocial phenomenology of language from Husserl and a social hermeneutics of language, or are there resources in Husserlian phenomenology for handling the social dimension of speech? Most importantly, are not the classical phenomenologies of Husserl and Heidegger hostile to language? Finally, what are some initial, critical points of contact between phenomenology and analytic philosophy of language? Addressing these questions in the way this volume does only

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serves to make the phenomenology of language a more formidable presence in the contemporary conversation concerning the philosophy of language. Phenomenology will be most valuable in a discussion with analytic philosophy of language if it takes its bearings from its own method and interests; that is, part of what phenomenology has to contribute is a wider compass of what is interesting philosophically about language. Phenomenology is not an afterthought but the first thought for an approach to language that is mindful of the linguisticality of experience. Hence, a phenomenological approach to language will think that something like poetry merits considerable attention whereas another tradition might view it as philosophically uninteresting. Scheler observes: For by creating new forms of expression the poets soar above the prevailing network of ideas in which our experience is confined, as it were, by ordinary language; they enable the rest of us to see, for the first time, in our own experience, something which may answer to these new and richer forms of expression, and by so doing they actually extend the scope of our possible self-awareness. (Scheler 2008, 252–3) In view of these considerations, the volume is entitled, Language and Phenomenology rather than Philosophy of Language and Phenomenology or even Phenomenology of Language. The volume seeks to raise the question and highlight the fruitful relation that obtains between language and phenomenology. The success of this volume invites subsequent more systematic approaches to the various themes in the phenomenology of language, additional comparisons to contemporary analytic discussions in the philosophy of language, and also explorations relative to texts in the history of philosophy, especially Plato, Aristotle, and Augustine. Though it has some precedent in the history of philosophy and some overlap with contemporary Anglo-American philosophy, phenomenology alone thematizes the power of the first- and second-person perspectives, the power of an approach to language rooted in the logic of experience and its openness to truth. 6 This Volume The two parts of the book reflect the phenomenological fact that language cannot adequately be treated from the third-person perspective. For language draws its life from the field of experience, and phenomenology shows that understanding language involves considerations unique to the first- and second-person perspectives: the phenomenology of language leads us to consider the world that is present to each of us, together. The first half of this volume deals with issues that arise concerning language and experience; the second half deals with issues concerning language and explicitly joint experience.

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Regarding the theme, language and experience, the first set of chapters explores the phenomenological contribution to the study of language in terms of living experience, reference, and embodiment. Daniel Dahlstrom draws from Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty to examine the importance of the first-person for any investigation of language. Taylor Carman presents Merleau-Ponty’s account of reference as a function of the expressive body and argues that, despite the merits of this account of reference, it lacks the resources for explaining syntax. Dominique Pradelle challenges Merleau-Ponty’s “wild” interpretation of Husserl’s pre-predicative experience by investigating Husserl’s mature views on the relation of the predicative to the pre-predicative. Jacob Rump articulates the value of Husserl’s account of the normativity of meaning in relation to Ludwig Wittgenstein, Saul Kripke, and Hannah Ginsborg. The next set of chapters turns to the relation of language to the theme of disclosure. Scott Campbell returns to Heidegger’s earliest lecture courses in order to argue that—contrary to what is often thought—language plays a central role in Heidegger’s hermeneutic development of phenomenology. Leslie ­MacAvoy details the way in which Heidegger’s engagement with Aristotle in the mid-1920s allows him to bring out the linguistic character of ­perception and thereby develop the ontological significance of language. Katherine Withy reads Heidegger’s ontological analysis of language in Being and Time in light of his later writings and provides a rigorous, synthetic account of language in his path of thinking. Jennifer Anna Gosetti-­Ferencei, taking a cue from the language of disclosure in Heidegger and other phenomenologists, finds phenomenological insights at work among several notable poets: Rainer Maria Rilke, Robert Frost, and Wallace Stevens. In the second half of the volume, contributors turn their attention to the second theme, namely, the interconnection of language and joint experience. In the first group of chapters, questions concerning the communal character of language and the social character of its acquisition come to the fore. Andrew Inkpin draws on Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein to do justice to the way language use calls upon both individual resources and communal practices. In dialogue with psychology, Pol Vandevelde finds in Husserl’s revisions to the Logical Investigations resources for understanding how a natural language can help shape thought. Michele Averchi invokes several later texts of Husserl to press the case that Husserl has a rich account of how language allows us to appropriate the experiences of other people. Lawrence Hatab, inspired by Heidegger, engages a wide range of empirical studies in order to underscore the importance of language—and its acquisition—for world-disclosure. The final group of chapters concerns the interplay of speech in conversation. Carolyn Culbertson draws from Gadamer to analyze the reciprocal turn-taking at work in conversation; for her, the renewal implicit in the turn-taking gives life to conversational exchange. Richard Kearney

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demonstrates that Ricoeur locates the heart of conversation in the welcome of hospitality; speech thereby harbors an ineluctably ethical dimension. Chad Engelland replies to phenomenology’s critics by showing that the conversation of phenomenology has its origin in the “inflection” of ordinary linguistic terms such as “presence” and “absence”; in this way, phenomenology’s possibility is bound up with one of its specific discoveries, namely the unity of language and experience. Notes 1 The analogy is from Heidegger who compares the philosophy of life to the botany of plants (Heidegger 1962, 72). 2 He repeats and widens the criticism three decades later: “. . . most thinkers coming from the phenomenological tradition have difficulty holding on to the theme ‘language’ in their reflections” (Gadamer 1992/2000, 19). 3 This remains true even if one does not accept his divorce of life and world. 4 Taylor earlier observes that the constitutive view of language he advocates is the fruit of a “hermeneutical view” explored by Heidegger and later Gadamer (Taylor 1985, 9–11). 5 Schmidt (2013) finds similar themes at work in Gadamer. 6 “Is not speaking, in what is most proper to it, a saying, a manifold showing of that which hearing, i.e., an obedient heeding of what appears, lets be said?” (Heidegger 1998b, 59). 7 Heidegger says his approach to language differs from analytic thought insofar as he endeavors to answer the question: “what is it that is to be experienced as the proper matter of philosophical thinking, and how is this matter (being as being) to be said?” (Heidegger 1998b, 56). 8 “The fact that language now becomes our theme for the first time will indicate that this phenomenon has its roots in the existential constitution of Dasein’s disclosedness. The existential-ontological foundation of language is discourse or talk” (Heidegger 1962, 203). Despite this constitutive role for discourse, he later felt moved to write by hand in the margin of his personal copy of Being and Time that language is not founded on prelinguistic significations: “Language is not built up [aufgestockt], but is the original essence of truth as there [Da]” (Heidegger 2001, 442). See Inkpin (2017). 9 Heidegger (1962) is not interested in mapping the pre-predicative as such; rather he wants to lead attention from the traditional topic of things to the novel topic of the domain in which we encounter things. Heidegger’s idea seems to be that thinking about the contemplative interest can easily insinuate the false picture of a subject opposite an object. Thinking about the practical interest more easily suggests a subject immersed in a network of things anchored in the subject’s care for a future good. The same phenomenon of world could have been made manifest regarding care in the theoretical interest, but doing so would have been considerably more difficult.

References Apostolopoulos, D. (2019) Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Language, London: Rowman and Littlefield. Beyer, C. (2017) “Husserl and Frege on Sense,” in S. Centrone (ed.), Essays on Husserl’s Logic and Philosophy of Mathematics, Synthese Library 384, 197–227, Dordrecht: Springer. Breitling, A. (2017) Weltgestaltung durch Sprache: Phänomenologie der sprachlichen Kreativität und der interkulturellen Kommunikation, Leiden: Wilhelm Fink Verlag. Campbell, S. (2012) The Early Heidegger’s Philosophy of Life: Facticity, Being, and Language, New York: Fordham University Press.

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Carman, T. (2003) Heidegger’s Analytic: Interpretation, Discourse, and Authenticity in Being and Time, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Crowell, S. (1996) “Husserl, Derrida, and the Phenomenology of Expression,” Philosophy Today 40: 61–70. Crowell, S. (2001) Husserl, Heidegger, and the Space of Meaning: Paths toward Transcendental Phenomenology, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Crowell, S. (2008) “Phenomenological Immanence, Normativity, and Semantic Externalism,” Synthese 160: 335–54. Crowell, S. (2013) Normativity and Phenomenology in Husserl and Heidegger, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Culbertson, C. (2019) Words Underway: Philosophical Reflections on Language from the Continental Tradition, London: Rowman and Littlefield International. Dahlstrom, D. (2001) Heidegger’s Concept of Truth, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Derrida, J. (1973) Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, trans. D. B. Allison and N. Garver, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Dodd, J. (2012) “The Depth of Signs: Three Texts on Language from Edmund Husserl’s Revisions to the Sixth Logical Investigation,” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 33: 3–26. Engelland, C. (2014) Ostension: Word Learning and the Embodied Mind, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Engelland, C. (2017) Heidegger’s Shadow: Kant, Husserl, and the Transcendental Turn, New York: Routledge. Gadamer, H.-G. (1963/1976) “The Phenomenological Movement (1963),” in D. E. Linge (trans. and ed.), Philosophical Hermeneutics, 130–81, Berkeley: University of California Press. Gadamer, H.-G. (1992/2000) “Toward a Phenomenology of Ritual and Language (1992),” in L. K. Schmidt (ed.) and L. K. Schmidt and M. Reuss (trans.), Language and Linguisticality in Gadamer’s Hermeneutics, 19–50, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Golob, S. (2016) Heidegger on Concepts, Freedom, and Normativity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gosetti-Ferencei, J. A. (2004) Heidegger, Hölderlin, and the Subject of Poetic Language: Toward a New Poetics of Dasein, New York: Fordham University Press. Hatab, L. (2017) Proto-phenomenology and the Nature of Language: Dwelling in Speech I, New Heidegger Research, New York: Roman & Littlefield. Heidegger, M. (1962) Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson, New York: Harper & Row Publishers. Heidegger, M. (1967) What Is a Thing? trans. W. Barton and V. Deutsch, Chicago, IL: Henry Regnery Co. Heidegger, M. (1982) The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, rev. ed., trans. A. Hofstadter, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Heidegger, M. (1985) History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena, trans. T. Kisiel, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Heidegger, M. (1998a) “Letter on ‘Humanism’,” in W. McNeill (ed.) and F. A. Capuzz (trans.), Pathmarks, 239–76, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Heidegger, M. (1998b) “The Theological Discussion of ‘The Problem of Nonobjectifying Thinking and Speaking in Today’s Theology’—Some Pointers to Its Major Aspects (Appendix to “Phenomenology and Theology”),” in W. McNeill (ed.), Pathmarks, 54–62, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Heidegger, M. (2001) Sein und Zeit, 18th edition, Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag.

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Henry, M. (1999) “Material Phenomenology and Language (Or, Pathos and Language),” Continental Philosophy Review 32: 343–65. Husserl, E. (1969) Formal and Transcendental Logic, trans. D. Cairns, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Husserl, E. (1973) Experience and Judgment: Investigations in a Genealogy of Logic, ed. L. Landgrebe and trans. J. S. Churchill and K. Ameriks, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Husserl, E. (2002) Husserliana 20/1: Logische Untersuchungen. Ergänzungsband. Erster Teil. Entwürfe zur Umarbeitung der VI. Untersuchung und zur Vorrede für die Neuauflage der Logischen Untersuchungen (Sommer 1913), ed. U. Melle, The Hague: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Husserl, E. (2005) Husserliana 20/2: Logische Untersuchungen. Ergänzungsband. Zweiter Teil. Texte für die Neufassung der VI. Untersuchung. Zur Phänomenologie des Ausdrucks und der Erkenntnis (1893/94–1921), ed. U. Melle, The Hague: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Inkpin, A. (2016) Disclosing the World: On the Phenomenology of Language, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Inkpin, A. (2017) “Being Articulate: Rede in Heidegger’s Being and Time,” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 25: 99–118. Kelly, S. D. (2000) The Relevance of Phenomenology to the Philosophy of Language and Mind, New York: Routledge. Lee, N.-I. (2010) “Phenomenology of Language Beyond the Deconstructive Philosophy of Language,” Continental Philosophy Review 42: 465–81. Maly, K. (2008) Heidegger’s Possibility: Language, Emergence-Saying Being, Toronto: Toronto University Press. Mattens, F., ed. (2008) Meaning and Language: Phenomenological Perspectives, Dordrecht: Springer. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1964) “On the Phenomenology of Language,” in R. C. McCleary (trans.), Signs, 84–97, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Powell, J., ed. (2013) Heidegger and Language, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Ricoeur, P. (1967) “New Developments in Phenomenology in France: The Phenomenology of Language,” Social Research 34: 1–30. Romano, C. (2015) At the Heart of Reason, trans. M. B. Smith and C. Romano, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Scheler, M. (2008) The Nature of Sympathy, trans. P. Heath, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Schmidt, D. J. (2013) Between Word and Image: Heidegger, Klee, and Gadamer on Gesture and Genesis, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Searle, J. (2005) “The Phenomenological Illusion,” in M. E. Reicher and J. C. Marek (eds.), Erfahrung und Analyse, 317–36, Wien: ÖBV & HPT. Soffer, G. (1999) “Phenomenologizing with a Hammer: Theory or Practice?” Continental Philosophy Review 32: 379–93. Sokolowski, R. (1974) Husserlian Meditations: How Words Present Things, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Sokolowski, R. (1978/2017) Presence and Absence: A Philosophical Investigation of Language and Being, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, reprinted by The Catholic University of America Press. Sokolowski, R. (1980) “The Issue of Presence,” Journal of Philosophy 77: 631–43. Sokolowski, R. (2002) “Semiotics in Husserl’s Logical Investigations,” in D. Zahavi and F. Stjernfelt (eds.), One Hundred Years of Phenomenology, 171–83, Dordrecht and Boston, MA: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

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Sokolowski, R. (2008) Phenomenology of the Human Person, New York: Cambridge University Press. Stawarska, B. (2015) Saussure’s Philosophy of Language as Phenomenology: Undoing the Doctrine of the Course in General Linguistics, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Taylor, C. (1985) Philosophical Papers 1: Human Agency and Language, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Taylor, C. (2016) Language Animal: The Full Shape of the Human Linguistic Capacity, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wrathall, M. (2011) Heidegger and Unconcealment: Truth, Language, and History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zahavi, D. (2008) “Internalism and Externalism in Phenomenological Perspective,” Synthese 160, no. 3: 309–11. Ziarek, K. (2013) Language after Heidegger, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Part I

Language and Experience

1

Language and Experience Phenomenological Dimensions Daniel O. Dahlstrom

La parole est un geste et sa signification un monde.1

One aim of much Anglo-American philosophy of language over the past century has been to explain how words refer to things, sometimes the same things, and how they are meaningful whether or not they refer to something. Another aim has been to explain how we express ourselves and communicate in words.2 What is common to these aims is an effort to explain an ordinary language user’s linguistic competence, her adherence to rules and principles (syntactic, semantic, pragmatic) of the natural language she uses when she speaks or writes, listens or reads (Blackburn 1986, 26–37). The task is immense, not least given the fact that there are multiple ways of referring, meaning, and communicating, and given the fact that “ordinary language user” is obviously a moving target. Yet this tradition, broadly speaking, has made considerable progress on several fronts, not least in clarifying basic issues. Standard reference and introductory texts to this tradition have, nonetheless, been remarkably parochial. One looks in vain for engagement with considerations of language outside the mainstream of Anglo-American philosophy of language.3 This parochialism no doubt reflects common practice among the leading figures in that tradition, coming together as they have at conferences, reading and criticizing each other’s writings in the same language, working toward a consensus on the basis of shared presuppositions about the central issues and how to frame them. To some extent, the self-imposed isolation is understandable, particularly given the advances made within the tradition. But it is suspect in the way that any hegemony is suspect, ignoring alternative, potentially promising voices. The following paper attempts to chisel away at this self-imposed isolation by reviewing and occasionally criticizing phenomenological approaches to four central features of language. The review draws principally on relevant analyses of these dimensions in Heidegger’s Being and Time and MerleauPonty’s Phenomenology of Perception.4 By way of (1) describing experiences as we live through them, their analyses stress (2) the pre-reflectiveness and (3) intentionality of our experiences of speaking, listening, and communicating

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as well as (4) the embeddedness of those experiences—and, by extension, language itself—in our worldly, embodied existence. In the course of elaborating these phenomenological dimensions, I also note places where the phenomenologists’ analyses come up short, albeit in different ways, calling for criticism and revision—but not neglect. To the contrary, no adequate philosophical treatment of language, I submit, can fail to consider the phenomenological dimensions opened up by their analyses. Hence, the principal aim of the following remarks: to demonstrate the distinctive promise and challenges of these classical phenomenological analyses of language.5 1 Centerpiece of a Phenomenology of Language: The Experience Itself There is a tendency among some contemporary philosophers of language to overlook the experiences of the speakers and hearers themselves. When these experiences are overlooked, language often becomes something impersonal, made up of visible marks, audible sounds, the traces left by them, and the “laws” of connections among them. Indeed, in some cases, no appeal is made to speaker’s experienced intent or consciousness to explain linguistic phenomena.6 It suffices to identify the mechanics of the respective processes, mechanics that may be understood in strictly neurophysiological or purely socio-behavioral terms. A neurophysiological approach to language use may be said to naturalize it in the way that a reliabilist epistemology naturalizes the phenomenon of knowing, bypassing the experience of the knower in the process. On this naturalist approach, language takes place, as Merleau-Ponty puts it, in a circuit of third-person phenomena (un circuit de phénomènes en troisième personne) and the human ability to speak is like the electric lamp’s ability to become incandescent (l’homme peut parler comme la lampe électrique peut devenir incandescente) (Merleau-Ponty 1945, 204). Something similar holds when the linguistic use is traced sans reste to the rules of a particular language community and its “form of life.” Since different sets of rules could issue in the same linguistic practices, it makes no sense—so it is argued—to ask which set guided the language user (think of two computer programs churning out the same data). So the most that can be done is to generate rules such that if someone follows them, she is competent, thereby giving an explanation without recourse to the language user’s sense of adhering to a rule or not. Nor is an investigation bent on determining the rules followed by the language user at odds with a more straightforwardly naturalist explanation in strictly neurophysiological terms, since its determinations can serve as stand-ins for yet-to-be-determined neurophysiological mechanisms.7 Phenomenologists have no problem with neurophysiological, phonological, psychological, sociological, or ethnological studies of language. To the contrary, they have much to learn from these studies. Yet, from a phenomenological point of view, such studies tend to pass over basic features of the

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experience of language, features that they must presuppose both in their subjects and in their own accounts of them. Establishing these features requires an approach that enables reflection on the experience of language as it is spoken and heard in the first and second person. To some extent, this reflection is provided by consulting firsthand experiences of language in the subjects investigated, e.g., asking a lisping child if it hears the lisp, asking members of a tight-knit religious community what singing its spirituals means to them, probing members of a group subject to prejudice why they find a particular term offensive, or obtaining evaluations of a university lecturer’s performance from students. Yet as manners of supplementing the more straightforwardly objective studies of language, these experiences are not necessarily studied for their own sake, ignoring the possibility that there is some content and structure to them as such. Twentieth-century phenomenology, beginning with Husserl and continued by Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, is devoted to opening up this possibility, precisely by focusing on experience as it is lived.8 In this regard, the operative term in Husserl’s phenomenology is Erlebnis, often translated as the “lived experience,” in contrast to Erfahrung, designating experience as an object of observation or, more broadly, empirical methods of consideration. (For some examples, consider the difference between blushing and seeing someone blush, promising and a third-party’s report of the promise). Building on the insight that there is a determinable content to lived experiences that escapes empirical investigations, phenomenology is bent on describing lived experiences and determining what is essential to them. For similar reasons, a phenomenology of language also differs from many standard studies in such disciplines as philology, linguistics, and literary theory. There are, to be sure, many examples of phenomenological linguistics9 and phenomenologists interpreting poetry and literature.10 Knowing the difference between synonyms and homonyms, polysemy and metonymy is certainly helpful in understanding and using language. Yet as long as research in those disciplines works with the assumption that language makes up an objective system, a system on which the experiences of speakers and hearers merely supervene, they have matters phenomenologically backwards. Their working assumption treats language solely as something on hand (vorhanden) in nature, like minerals and cells. For phenomenology such an assumption is a category mistake of the highest order. To be sure, as Heidegger puts it, talking has a worldly character; that is to say, from the moment that it is voiced, it is something handy within the world and, as such, can be broken down into “word-things” (Wörterdinge) that are merely on-hand.11 But both language as a tool (the stuff of rhetoric, propaganda, advertisement, and the like) and language as a thing (the object of phonetics and phonology, philology, linguistics, and the like) presuppose speaking and listening, what Heidegger labels “talk,” the original, existential sense of language.12 Words have the handiness of tools when used to persuade, cajole, etc., and, like objects on hand in nature, they can be the objects of different sorts of scientific

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scrutiny. But we use and study words only because, more fundamentally, speaking and listening are ways of disclosing the world. If phenomenology considers it mistaken to reduce the experience of language to an objective, external system in which words, speakers, and hearers are mere variables (what Merleau-Ponty dubs the “empiricist” view of language), it also finds fault with attempts to construe utterances merely as functions of thought (the “intellectualist” view) or mental states, studied by cognitive science or psychology.13 That reduction, by subsuming words under some law (physical, physiological, etc.) of their appearance, presupposes but cannot explain their meaningfulness. But the construal of a word merely as a function of thought or a mental state mistakenly treats it as an “external sign of an internal recognition that could take place without it and to which it makes no contribution” (Merleau-Ponty 1945, 206). To paraphrase Merleau-Ponty, while there are only objects and no subjects speaking in those scientific reductions, the construal of language as an epiphenomenon of thought has a subject but the subject thinking, not the subject speaking.14 2 Pre-reflective Experience of Language Particularly if thought is equated with some sort of objectifying reflection, it is obvious that much talk is thoughtless. But this equation is obviously suspect; there is a difference between thinking of what we are doing while doing it (i.e., during an episode of doing it) and thinking of it after the fact (as there is, too, between merely recalling to a friend what we did and classifying it as an object of some psychological theory). “When he is talking, the subject neither thinks of the sense of what he is saying nor represents to himself the words that he employs” (Merleau-Ponty 1945, 210). This claim seems to overgeneralize, but even in most cases where the point holds, it by no means follows that the person talking is not thinking (or understanding) and feeling. In the ordinary experience of talking without thinking explicitly about the noises we thereby make (the material of words, meanings, and so on), the expressions themselves disappear in favor of what is expressed as well as thoughts and feeling about it. Speaking of this “marvel of language,” Merleau-Ponty relates how, from the moment my eyes follow the lines on paper and I am captivated by what they signify, I no longer see them.15 In making their claims, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty are appealing to a pre-reflective or unreflected (irréfléchi)—and in that sense, hidden— experience of language as well as a capacity to describe it in non-objectifying terms (Heidegger 1927, 35; Merleau-Ponty 1945, iv). When we speak and listen, words are spoken and heard, they even have a meaning, and communication occurs without necessarily reflecting upon any of these aspects of the experience. But this pre-reflectiveness, I have been arguing, is not to be confused with a lack of thought, feeling, or experience. Nor obviously does it rule out the possibility of attending to the sounds or marks of the words themselves apart from their meaning.16

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Much like Heidegger (albeit drawing at least terminologically on Saussure), Merleau-Ponty differentiates speech (parole as the genesis and creation of linguistic significance, “speaking the word”) and language (langage as the systems of vocabulary and syntax, “means of expression,” depots and sedimentation of acts of speaking, “the spoken word”).17 So, too, he distinguishes language’s disclosiveness from its function as an instrument, the openness to possibilities that comes with the former in contrast to the closure inherent in a means–end relation.18 He drives home the pre-reflective character of a linguistic experience by noting the difference between reading a text intently and thinking about it. The words completely occupy us and no thoughts intervene in the former case but, as soon as we have finished reading, it is as if a spell has lifted and thoughts about the text arise (Merleau-Ponty 1945, 209f). While we experience language in many different ways, the experiences form a continuum stretching from “naive” and spontaneous exclamations or exchanges to “self-conscious” and deliberate, even highly constructed formulations.19 Most of our everyday experiences of speaking and listening probably fall on the naive end of this spectrum. Like much of early language acquisition, these experiences are mostly unplanned, as we talk more or less extemporaneously with little if any forethought. Conversations with friends or exchanges where emotions run high are obvious examples here. To be sure, even in these settings, we are often not wholly inattentive to what we say and how we say it. We sometimes catch ourselves in midstream, saying to ourselves or our interlocutors: “No, wait a minute; I didn’t mean to say that,” or “That’s not the right way to put it; let’s put it this way….” In this way, interwoven with ordinary experiences of speaking and listening, prereflectively operative purposes and constraints—further grist for the phenomenologist’s mill—come to light. On the other side of this continuum are experiences of choosing our words very carefully, particularly when we are negotiating a matter of some delicacy, preparing a lecture, or writing a paper for publication. The same holds for formal treatises, public documents, works of literature, and the like. What is produced is the product of considerable planning, and drafts that go through multiple revisions. At this juncture, we experiment, trying out different formulations, structures, and sequences until we find something that works or, under time-constraints, settle for a particular wording. Yet just as we sometimes catch ourselves questioning what we’re saying in otherwise spontaneous experiences of language, so too our interventions in the course of deliberately revising are often no less unscripted and unplanned. Such unreflected, unplanned interventions are nonetheless quite intelligible since they are guided by some purpose or combination of purposes such as clarifying, exhorting, questioning, describing, accentuating, inferring, explaining, edifying, entertaining, etc. Even if percolating unannounced, various constraints (“You can’t put it that way”) and prospects of degrees of efficacy (“That way of putting it is better”) flow from these purposes, availing themselves to phenomenological reflection.

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On both ends of the spectrum—spontaneous discourse and belabored composition—we often have tacit yet patent awareness of why we say or write what we do. That is to say, we can frequently say what some of our reasons are if asked or if we reflect upon what motivated our decisions, but we do not always entertain or formulate them explicitly, even in the process of revision. This feature also holds for rudimentary syntactical rules, constraints that are largely taken for granted although many editorial decisions are explicitly made on the basis of adherence to grammar. But the fact that we can identify some purposes, constraints (including rules20), and degrees of effectiveness in wording or that we can recognize them if they are pointed out to us is evidence of the phenomenologists’ workplace: pre-reflective experience—in this case, a pre-reflective experience that we have with and of language. A phenomenology of language aims at describing these prereflective linguistic experiences with a view to disclosing (discerning) what is essential to them. 3 The Intentionality of Language The early Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty learned their phenomenological trade by heeding Husserl’s advice to go back to the original experiences of things themselves. From Husserl they also learned that many of those experiences are directly intentional in character. Acts of thinking and perceiving are intentional because, by virtue of their content (matter), they are directed at something (objects)—unlike the non-intentional experience of some pains. The same holds for what Husserl calls “signitive intentions” (“acts of meaning” this or that); there, too, the object meant is the object of the intention.21 In his First Logical Investigation, Husserl distinguishes meanings of linguistic expressions from expressions themselves (since different expressions can have the same meaning) and from their references (since expressions with different meanings can have the same reference and expressions with the same meaning can have different references). Meanings are ways of intending objects, e.g., when I perceive a river, the meaning of a river—along with its appearance hic et nunc—is what enables me to do so; it is part of what makes up the perception, i.e., perceiving it as the river. Linguistic meanings are ways of intending objects, i.e., means of referring to them, through linguistic expressions. For example, when I say “that’s the river,” I single out a particular object as a river; when I say “the river is wide,” I single it out as one that is wide to boot, and so on.22 With regard to linguistic expressions, Husserl concedes, to be sure, that we can speak of “what is expressed” in different ways. We may mean (a) the meaning of an expression simply, (b) the object meant by it in a given use of the expression, or (c) the object not simply as thus meant but also as given in precisely the same way that it is meant, i.e., in a way that fully realizes what is meant. Nonetheless, even when (a) is meant, for example, when we ask what someone means by using a certain expression, it remains a way of intending

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an object, e.g., the meaning of “river” is to pick out rivers (instead of lakes, puddles, and so on). The meaning is not an internal, mental state (although a mental state can obviously be the object meant). Husserl stresses, to be sure, that an object may be meant more or less precisely and amply, fulfilled to different degrees and in different ways, but the intentionality of the expression— its being about an object—remains paramount.23 Yet his intentional analysis of linguistic expressions remains the antithesis of a so-called “dog-legged” account of linguistic meaning (“dog-legged” because words are construed, not as directly intending something, but as first intending some else, some medium). Locke gives a classical formulation of a dog-legged account in terms of ideas: “Words in their primary or immediate Signification, stand for nothing but Ideas in the mind of him who uses them . . . .”24 Husserl’s counterargument is a straightforwardly phenomenological argument, namely, if we pay attention to the experience of linguistic meanings, we find them to be ways of referring to things within the world and not to ideas, mental representations, and the like. Already in the opening pages of Being and Time, taking a page from Husserl’s intentionalist analysis, Heidegger rejects a Lockean model of language in the course of interpreting Aristotle’s account of logos. He initially interprets logos as talk about something in such a way that those talking with one another can “see” it. What is said (insofar as it is genuine) is drawn all the while from what is talked about so that the communication by talking (die redende Mitteilung) makes what is talked about apparent and accessible to others. Talking does this by putting one thing together with something else, thereby letting it be seen in a certain way or as this or that (e.g., “The beer’s on the table,” “The beer’s cold”). Herein lies, he adds, the original sense of “synthesis” (positing with), too often conflated with the derivative sense of synthesis in a judgment. (In the original sense, the beer is put together with the table; in the derivative sense, a concept of “being on the table” is predicated of a subject, identified as an instance of a beer-concept.) What talk lets us see, i.e., what is shown as such by it (das Aufgezeigte als solches), in each case already lies on hand as the basis for any addressing and discussing. This account is truncated, to be sure. Contemporary philosophers of language will immediately note a lack of discrimination between referring and meaning, naming and describing. Nor is it true without further qualification that what is said lets things be seen (since instead of letting things be seen—even falsely—it may prevent them from being seen at all) or that what is discussed is already on hand (as though words cannot announce upcoming realities or introduce new ones). Yet in Heidegger’s defense, these remarks are only introductory, made in the course of flagging the meaning of logos as one of the linguistic roots of “phenomenology.” Insofar as talking (logos) and the “synthesis” contained in it consists in allowing something (and, indeed, one thing rather than another) to be seen, it cannot consist, he submits, in combining inner, mental representations, thereby engendering a problem of their correspondence with outer, physical reality. The implication

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is, as it was for Husserl, the unfeasibility of the Lockean model, not least because it can scarcely avoid supposing the intentionality of talk that Heidegger finds in Aristotle.25 Notably, when Heidegger focuses directly on assertions in Being and Time, he also deploys this reading of Aristotle’s account of logos, again taking exception to Lockean-inspired approaches to language. He outlines three meanings of assertions, the first of which is (1) ostension, pointing something out (Aufzeigung) in such way that it can be seen from its own vantage point, i.e., as it presents itself. Even if an entity is not visibly near, what is pointed out is “the entity itself and not a mere representation,” neither something merely represented nor the mental state of the one making the assertion (Heidegger 1927, 154).26 Assertion also involves (2) predication, a way of restricting the view of what is pointed out (asserted in the first sense) in order to make “explicitly apparent” how it presents itself in its determinateness. At the same time, “assertion” also means (3) communication, speaking aloud so that others can hear, sharing what is asserted (communicated, pointed out).27 When I say to my friend “the beer’s on the table,” I am pointing it out and not something else, pointing it out in the way it presents itself, further specifying it in the process, and doing so to alert my friend to it (on the assumption that it presents itself to her as well). These analyses of logos and assertion clearly broach themes of concern in contemporary philosophy of language.28 Despite being underdetermined in certain respects (as noted above), these analyses call attention to the distinctive experience of intentionality incorporated in certain forms of speaking and listening (e.g., assertions). No observed relation between things and no dog-legged appeal to ideas is part of this experience. In Heidegger’s account, to be sure, assertions are made within a framework (the so-called “forestructure”) of interpretations. Yet while these interpretations are perspectival and sometimes misleading, they are also in his view interlocutors’ only means of making assertions—declarative sentences in the indicative mood—that indicate things as they present themselves. In other words, while always presupposed, the interpretive forestructure, far from reintroducing another dog-legged account, makes the intentionality of language possible. Merleau-Ponty also draws on Husserl’s intentional analysis, extending it even more firmly than Husserl to the words themselves.29 Thought can express itself in words because words already have meaning, i.e., because “speech possesses a power of signification proper to it” (Merleau-Ponty 1945, 212). When I speak with others or even with myself about a brush, I do so, he submits, without appealing to some mental representation or subsuming it under some concept that happens to be associated with the word “brush.” To the contrary, as he puts it, “the word carries the sense and, in imposing it on the object, I am conscious of reaching the object” (le mot porte le sens, et, en l’imposant à l’objet, j’ai conscience d’atteindre l’objet). Nor can we be said to name an object after recognizing it; naming it is the recognition itself (Merleau-Ponty 1945, 207). Some patients are capable of reading

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a text expressively without understanding it because, beneath the conceptual significance, the words have an “existential significance that is not simply passed on by them but inhabits them and is inseparable from them” (Merleau-Ponty 1945, 212). Far from being a mere sign of objects and meanings then, “a word inhabits things and conveys meanings” (habite les choses et véhicule les significations). It does not pass on a thought already made, but “accomplishes it” (l’accomplit)—and this goes for the listener no less than the speaker (Merleau-Ponty 1945, 207). And yet Merleau-Ponty also notes that we can understand what someone says without having spontaneously or separately formed the thoughts ourselves (though the understanding must then coincide in some sense or degree with what was meant). Or, to put the matter slightly differently, the thinking takes shape in linguistic expression and communication. In speaking and listening, moreover, we think about what is expressed or represented and not the expressions or representations themselves. Once again, Merleau-Ponty stresses the parallel with bodily motion: just as we move our arms without envisioning our arms or the space around us, so we speak without verbal images or representations of the words we use (Merleau-Ponty 1945, 210). 4 The Embeddedness of Language in the Experience of the World Both Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty differentiate phenomenology sharply from psychology insofar as internal or subjective states of mind form psychology’s subject matter. For both phenomenologists, experience is never a purely internal affair but invariably implicates a world, a historically constituted world and things and others within it. The experience of language is no different; its embeddedness in a structured process of being-in-the-world is paradigmatic for both thinkers. 4.1 Heidegger’s Existential Analysis The analysis undertaken in Being and Time is existential because its object is existence, where “existence” is a term reserved for the sort of being that makes our humanity possible. Heidegger targets the basic components of existence (such as language) that together make up the structure of human comportment or behavior (Verhalten, a metonym for being-in-the-world). He stresses this togetherness—the fact that their tightly interwoven character constitutes existence—to ward off the notion that they are attributes (propria, accidentia) of the species (homo) that would be capable of description or ontological identification apart from them. A fly can exist without being at my window, a sign can exist without being painted, but we do not exist without speaking and listening. What is also distinctive of such basic components of existence is the fact that analysis reveals them to be part of the experience—the self-disclosure—of

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existing even when, as noted above, this aspect is normally hidden, tacit, pre-reflective. Heidegger dubs the fundamental components of existence that at once disclose and constitute it “basic existentials.” In Being and Time his analysis of talk (Rede, the existential dimension of language) follows the analysis of two other basic existentials—an affective pre-disposedness (situated attunement) and an understanding—that in different but joint ways disclose our being-in-the-world. The former is the way we find ourselves pre-disposed to a situation, open and exposed to it, feeling a certain way about it; the latter is the way we understand ourselves in terms of our possibilities, projecting and disclosing purposes and meanings for ourselves, others, and things around us in the process.30 An affective pre-disposedness and an understanding, so construed, operate in tandem to constitute human existence. How I feel about my situation (the way that I am affectively pre-disposed) and what I am trying to accomplish in it (what I understand myself to be doing) are essentially connected to one another. Heidegger regards the experience of language as existentially no less fundamental, i.e., constitutively disclosive, than these other basic existentials. It is equally “original” or “primordial” (gleichursprünglich), i.e., irreducible to them and yet disclosively constitutive of human existence together with them. Talking to myself or others about my understanding of what I am doing and how I feel about it is a way of articulating and thereby disclosing my situation existentially, without being reducible to those feelings and actions. As noted above, Heidegger distinguishes language as an existential from its use as a tool or its appearance as a natural phenomenon (and thus the subject of various sciences). Language in the existential sense differs from these other senses of “language” by virtue of constituting and disclosing—together with our situated attunement and understanding—what it means for us (being here, being-in-the-world) to exist.31 The extent of the embeddedness of language in Heidegger’s analysis is particularly evident from his treatment of sense and meaning. Meanings (Bedeutungen), insofar as they form the basis of the possibility of words and language, are themselves made possible by the meaningfulness (Bedeutsamkeit) of the complexes of things we use. Meaningfulness, so construed, coincides with the relevance and reference of one implement to another and the purpose of a given complex of implements as a whole (being for the sake of some human purpose). In a culture with handles and doors, for example, when I open a door by turning a door handle, I use the handle to accomplish that function; at the same time, I open the door for the purpose of entering or exiting. The handle and the door can be said to be meaningful, i.e., to make sense in view of respective functions and purposes.32 Inasmuch as no words need be spoken, silently or aloud, for them to make sense, this meaningfulness is nonlinguistic. Here there is a raft of things making sense—a “totality of relevance” (Bewandtnisganzheit) (Heidegger 1927, 84)—that need not take linguistic form. But they can. Saying that something makes sense is a way of signaling that it can be articulated.33 In the articulation itself linguistic expressions have

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meanings but only thanks to the meaningfulness (sense and the relevance) of things. The linguistic meanings of the words used in the last paragraph to signify the door, the handle, their functions and purposes, and so on suppose, on this account, the meaningfulness of the door, the handle, and so on. Some version of this linguistic meaning can be expressed to a degree in other languages and cultures, supposing that they have a facsimile of functioning handles and purposeful doors. Heidegger’s intentions here are perfectly clear. As he puts it, We do not first restrict the concept of sense [Sinn] to the meaning [Bedeutung] of ‘the content of judgment’ but understand it instead as the characterized existential phenomenon in which the formal scaffolding of what is disclosable in understanding and articulable in the interpretation become visible at all (Heidegger 1927, 156). For our purposes here, the operative term is “articulable” since, as an existential, talk precisely “articulates what can be understood, its intelligibility” (Verständlichkeit) (Heidegger 1927, 161). Still, these glosses are dissatisfying for several reasons. First, there is a range of possible interpretations of the claim that the relevance or sense of things can be articulated (that nonlinguistic meaning can yield linguistic meaning); yet Heidegger leaves the claim unspecified. (For example, we can articulate someone’s behavior by saying that it “leaves us at a loss for words” but that is a far cry from saying that it is “the height of virtue.”) Readers are left, furthermore, to ponder whether claims about the possibility of expressing meaning in language (i.e., articulability) undermine remarks about the dependency of linguistic meaning. If meanings are in principle articulable, i.e., discursively expressible, then the claim that language is dependent upon meanings (that meanings “accrue” to language) rings hollow. In other words, language could only express meanings if those meanings already incorporated a structure or possessed a makeup that is proto-discursive. Adding to the confusion are the possible meanings of the notion of “equiprimordiality” in this connection. Commentators diverge over whether talk’s equiprimordiality indicates that Heidegger espouses a linguistic model of meaning or a pragmatic model, i.e., whether all meaning takes a linguistic (or at least proto-linguistic) form or not.34 The stakes are obviously high, particularly for Heidegger’s own project, since extending the linguistic model to the meaning of “being” appears, on some accounts, to make his fundamental ontology into a form of linguistic idealism.35 Heidegger’s analysis of language in this connection is troubling for a second, potentially even more powerful reason. Its construal of talking solely in terms of its capacity to articulate the meaningfulness and relevance of things is conservative to a fault, failing to take note of language’s capacity to introduce meaning that would otherwise be absent. To be sure, the parts are arguably in place to handle this objection, since talk, as an existential, is allegedly constitutive and disclosive in a way coextensive with but not

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reducible to our feelings and projects. So, too, it is necessary to distinguish inauthentic talk (Gerede) from authentic talk (Gewissen). Yet the analysis in Being and Time is short on details in this regard, especially when we consider how linguistic meaning shapes our worlds and our relations to things, others, and ourselves in our worlds.36 While potent, the foregoing criticisms do not by themselves disestablish Heidegger’s broad thesis about the embeddedness of language. They do demonstrate, however, insufficiencies in his argument and the need for disambiguation if it is to contribute to contemporary philosophy of language. As will be noted, Merleau-Ponty’s account of language’s embeddedness is prepared for some of these criticisms, although it is itself susceptible to criticisms of another sort. 4.2 Merleau-Ponty’s Gestural Analysis Although Heidegger’s gloss on the meaningfulness presupposed by talk coincides with human absorption in a world of implements, nothing stands in the way of conceiving it in more or less natural (not culturally specific) terms. Thus, as an organism, a human body exists by reaching out purposively to what lies in its natural environment, establishing its sense as, for example, a means of nourishment or shelter, and incorporating it into the body’s being-in-the-world. In just this sense, being-in-the-world is the framework for Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology no less than it is for Heidegger’s. The difference lies in Merleau-Ponty’s characterization of being-in-theworld as, at bottom, a perception and, indeed, a perception inseparable from the body’s movements in and toward the world.37 Far from being thought’s stepchild, language “presents or rather is the subject taking a position in the world of significations” (Merleau-Ponty 1945, 225). The chapter dealing with language in the Phenomenology of Perception is aptly entitled “the body as expression and speech,” since he embeds linguistic behavior in a way of relating to the world, a certain “style” and “attitude” of doing so bodily or, better, through our ways of moving (our bodies). In this setting, language (like thought) is a “manifestation of the fundamental activity by which human beings project themselves onto a ‘world.’”38 Merleau-Ponty grounds his theory of language in an account of gestures. Gestures (much like signs in Heidegger’s account) may be seen as occupying a level between nonlinguistic and linguistic meanings. In a certain respect, the gesture is merely an instance of an incarnate subject’s activity of borrowing structures from natural life and giving them a new significance that transcends its anatomy and natural condition. A gesture is physical but its meaning is not contained in it as a physical phenomenon alone since, unlike the physical phenomenon, it presupposes relevant conventions as well as someone other than the person gesturing, namely, someone who might take up the gesture. The person making the gesture thus does so with the dual intention of (a) indicating something and (b) alerting someone else that she is

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doing so, on the basis of standard conventions for this sort of indication. The term “indicating” here is intended in a broad sense (ostensive and disclosive). Gestures can take the form of ostension (pointing to an object) but they can also take the form of disclosive bodily movements (a quizzical look indicating puzzlement, raising a hand to indicate a wish to pose a question, a traffic cop holding up his hand to indicate that oncoming cars should stop, patting someone on the back to indicate approval, someone rolling their eyes to indicate disapproval, kneeling during a religious service as a display of piety). In all these ways, gestures are situated, bodily enactments of meaning, with a built-in social or intersubjective dimension. What is meant is invariably the world or something within the world inhabited by the body. At the same time, gestures, so conceived, provide a platform for linguistic meanings proper. Thus, ostensive gestures set the stage for the intentionality of naming, asserting, and describing; the other disclosive gestures mentioned give rise to a range of performatives. Like a gesture, a word is physical (a sound or image) but its sense is not contained in it as a sound or image.39 By the same token, since they are linguistic gestures, words delineate their sense for themselves (Merleau-Ponty 1945, 217). They do so, Merleau-Ponty submits, at least in part through culture which provides a common world to speakers in much the way that the sensible world serves as the background for gestures. When we speak or listen, we draw upon the more or less “common sense of the words,” a product of the fact that “we live in a world where speech is instituted” (Merleau-Ponty 1945, 214). Thus, as becomes particularly evident in a foreign land, “I begin to understand the sense of a word by its place in a context of action and by participating in a common life” (209). This common experience points to the fact that speech becomes “sedimented,” constituting an “intersubjective acquisition” (Merleau-Ponty 1945, 221). The idea that gestures occupy a level between nonlinguistic and linguistic meanings is obvious when the gesture is part of a language game, for example, when an apprentice asks a master carpenter what he wants and the carpenter simply points to a board. But gestures and their context can also be wordless (e.g., waving goodbye, embracing). Moreover, what is simply an emotional expression (e.g., grimacing, smiling, cowering, raising eyebrows) can become a gesture when used to communicate and when—among other things—the proper conventions are in place. Yet the conventions themselves are insufficient to explain gestures and, by extension, words. Hence, Merleau-Ponty reasons, we must acknowledge “an initiating gesture” (un geste d’initiation), first endowing objects with significance. To be sure, meanings introduced by gestures, including initiating gestures, remain extensions of the way “a comportment of my body invests the objects around me with a certain significance for me and others” (Merleau-Ponty 1945, 225). But just as there are initiating gestures, there are forms of “authentic speech” (parole authentique)—epitomized by writers, artists, philosophers—that bring about a new sense (Merleau-Ponty 1945, 226, 229).

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The conventional character of language (especially the so-called “natural languages”) is obviously vital. But its very utility and pervasiveness, Merleau-Ponty warns, can make us forget the contingency, indeterminacy, and groundbreaking potential of any speech and communication. Inasmuch as speech enacts and conveys its own meaning and style, it can be at once originative, transformative, and unfinished.40 When I write “Sadness slips and slowly slides down the sides of the Beguinage,” I put together the common sense of the words in a distinct act, originating a sense nonexistent before the enactment, transforming and thereby adding to the meanings of words, yet in a way that remains unfinished as long as there is more to say or the words fall on deaf ears. Something analogous occurs in schools of music and painting when they have something to say. But “the power of speech” only seems less visible in cases of literary arts, Merleau-Ponty submits, because we presume that our understanding of the common meaning of words suffices to disclose their meaning.41 Yet in fact a successful literary expression, far from simply reminding readers, realizes or brings about the meaning, giving it life “in an organism of words, installing it in the writer or the reader as a new sense organ, opening a new field or a new dimension to our experience” (Merleau-Ponty 1945, 213). In keeping with the embeddedness of language in being-in-the-world, there are multiple language games. Following Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty recognizes that there is an everyday level of speaking and listening that languishes in the “common sense of words” (flagged above). But for both phenomenologists, the story does not end there. It is necessary to go back to the origin, the primordial silence beneath the chatter of words and the action that breaks the silence. Consider, for example, the silent gesture of gently placing a hand on someone else’s hand.42 The gesture often breaks a silence, introducing a meaning that did not previously exist.43 Linguistic gestures, from questions and interjections to threats and public declarations of war or love, display this same sort of movement and structure. Yet Merleau-Ponty insists, as noted above, that both gestures at large and linguistic gestures in particular emulate the perceptual movement and structure of the body that gives birth to meanings generally. Speech, he submits, is “only a particular case” of this irrational power (Merleau-Ponty 1945, 221). Heidegger’s analysis of talk in Being and Time suffers, as noted above, from ambiguities in its account of the relation between the nonlinguistic senses of things and the linguistic meanings of words. Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of language as gesture, with its own meaning, is not subject (at least prima facie) to the same objections. Furthermore, insofar as gestural meanings mediate between nonlinguistic meanings and linguistic meanings, his analysis also provides a template of sorts for explaining the embeddedness of the latter (linguistic gestures) in the former. Yet while his account has these advantages (more clearly differentiating but also mediating nonlinguistic and linguistic meanings), it exposes itself to a difficulty against which Heidegger’s analysis insulates itself. Largely because—in Being and Time—he regards

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thinking as a founded form of enactment (fundierte Vollzugsform), derivative of understanding, it plays no role in his existential analysis of language (Heidegger 1927, 88, 96, 147). Merleau-Ponty’s analysis is, by contrast, replete with talk of thought and language. His concern for their connection is not surprising, given his aim (as noted above) of disestablishing intellectualist approaches to language that make it little more than an epiphenomenon (un accompagnement extérieur; l’enveloppe et le vêtement) of thought (Merleau-Ponty 1945, 206, 212). Still, while combatting the idea that the relation between thinking and speaking/listening is an “external” one (Merleau-Ponty 1945, 211f), he invokes their connection in multiple ways for his own analysis, without sorting out the possible relations or differences between them (perhaps in part because pensée and sens are metonyms in his account). At times he stops short of collapsing them into one another while contending that they are “wrapped up in one another.”44 In a similar vein, he observes that thought tends toward expression as its achievement (son achèvement) (Merleau-Ponty 1945, 206). Yet these observations do not keep him from also claiming that speech, in the speaker, does not pass down some readymade thought but instead “accomplishes it,” just as the listener receives the thought from the speech itself (Merleau-Ponty 1945, 207). Bringing them even closer together, he contends that speech is not thought’s clothing but its “emblem or body” and that a speaker’s speech is his thought (Merleau-Ponty 1945, 209, 212). Thought is constituted simultaneously with expression, he submits, so much so that there is no thought “outside words” (hors des mots) (Merleau-Ponty 1945, 213f). At times he even glosses thinking as soliloquy, maintaining that when a thinker thinks, she presents thoughts to herself by interior or exterior speech (Merleau-Ponty 1945, 207). Further complicating matters, he insists that, in addition to what anyone might think, there is “a thought in speech” (Merleau-Ponty 1945, 209). The problems generated by these myriad ways of characterizing thought and language can be traced to Merleau-Ponty’s aim of demonstrating that they are interconnected and, on some levels, indistinguishable. Still, the slipperiness of his analysis in this regard is unmistakable and the qualifications and distinctions necessary to address it are wanting. 5 Conclusion Both Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty embed the practice of speaking and hearing in activities of an embodied and shared being-in-the-world. The meaning of the latter (those activities) underwrites the meaning of the former (those practices), without by any means exhausting them or precluding the way that language can fundamentally transform experience. As Wayne Froman puts it, language and the phenomena found in the world are “mutually determining.”45 The embedded, mutually determining character of language thwarts any notion of linguistic idealism without denying the

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existentially constitutive force of language. My perception of clouds, like my use of a hammer, is meaningful in a way that gives meaning to the words “cloud” and “hammer”—even if, as a practical or cultural matter, I typically perceive or use only what I have learned to speak about.46 At the same time, it is no less true that speaking and listening—on different levels and in different ways—introduce new realities and new meanings. By way of conclusion, Heidegger’s and Merleau-Ponty’s common rejection of reductions of language to something purely objective or subjective deserves note. This approach may seem counterintuitive or even illogical if we presume the binary of objective (non-subjective)/non-objective (subjective). Yet there is plenty of phenomenological evidence of an experience of something irreducible to a given subject or object yet enabling their relation.47 Consider the experience of light (Plato’s heralded metaphor for truth), precisely as something that illuminates objects for subjects but is not itself in the same way an object or a subject. Or consider Heidegger’s favored metaphors of a clearing or an open. Merleau-Ponty makes a similar point by comparing words to the space or, better, the “field” (champ) of bodily movements.48 When we are in a clearing, out in the open, as we move with purpose to the left or the right, things manifest themselves to us. In our preoccupation with the things around us and our engagements with them, we typically pay no attention to what, lying between us and them, enables us to be among them. Words are like light in everyday use, enabling us (subjects) to name and recognize objects. Without words we are, so to speak, in the dark. Notes 1 Merleau-Ponty (1945, 214). For helpful, critical readings of earlier drafts of this chapter, I am indebted to Wayne Froman, Walter Hopp, Emma Jerndal, and James Kinkaid. 2 The former aim is the legacy of formal approaches to language inaugurated by Frege, the early Wittgenstein, and Russell; the latter reflects the turn to ordinary language in the later Wittgenstein, Austin (“performative utterances”), Searle (“speech acts”), and to “speaker-meaning” and “conversational implicature” championed by Grice; see Lepore and Smith (2012, viii), Russell and Fara (2012, 1–3), Nuccetelli and Seay (2008, 1–8). 3 For examples of this parochialism in introductory and survey texts, see Lycan (2008), Nuccetelli and Seay (2008), Soames (2010), Lepore and Smith (2012), and Russell and Fara (2012). 4 References to Being and Time (Sein und Zeit) will be followed by the page number from Heidegger (1927). Also discussed are some pivotal considerations in Husserl’s Logische Untersuchungen (Husserl 1901). The relatively scant attention paid here to Husserl’s phenomenological contributions to the philosophy of language should not be read, however, as an attempt to signal that they are less important than those of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. To the contrary, Husserl has given exemplary analyses of key notions that have often served as spurs to his prominent successors’ reflections. In the First Logical Investigation alone, he elaborates several “essential distinctions,” e.g., expression and meaning, expression and indication, sense-affording and sense-fulfilling acts, meaning and objective reference, giving and taking notice as communicative functions, occasional and objective expressions. In the Fourth Logical Investigation he develops the idea

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5 6

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9 10 11 12 13

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of a pure grammar. He introduces Formal and Transcendental Logic with considerations of linguistic phenomena and, in the posthumous work, Experience and Judgment, he looks to pre-predicative experience to develop a theory of predicative judgment along with accounts of the origin of negation and modality. Although Husserl’s views on language are omitted here for the sake of the manageability of the presentation, there has not been anything like a dearth of studies of Husserl’s considerable insights into the phenomenon of language; see, for example, Derrida (1967), Sokolowski (1974), Mohanty (1976), Smith and McIntyre (1982), Simons (1995), and Benoist (2003). I pursue this aim with a view as to how these analyses call into question or simply complement reigning paradigms, although demonstrating in detail how they do so is too large a task for this chapter. This claim by no means applies to investigations in the mold of Davidson (1986), Grice (1989), or Searle (1989). But it does apply to Chomsky’s I-language, conceived as the realization of a language faculty in an individual brain whose properties are, however, species-wide; see Chomsky (1986, 33; 1995, 12–7). Blackburn (1986, 32–3); see Quine (1972, 442). Quine’s approach is a form of behaviorism, but radically contingent, without the empiricist assumptions that presumably guarantee the priority of one set of rules over others. Social constructionist and conventionalist views of language would seem to run up against similar issues, some detailed by Higginbotham’s considerations in favor of an idiolectal conception of language (Higginbotham 2008). Higginbotham’s observations closely parallel the phenomenological analyses reviewed in this chapter. Heidegger’s focus on “lived experience” (Erlebnis) is particularly evident in his early Freiburg lectures and, though his focus and terminology shift shortly before composing Being and Time, many of the same themes and structures carry over into the work for which he is most known. The Phenomenology of Perception is terminologically closer to Husserl’s phenomenology in this respect; thus, “the first philosophical act” for Merleau-Ponty is that of “returning to the lived world [monde veçu]” and “recovering . . . the stratum of living experience [la couche d’expérience vivante] through which others and things are first given to us” (Merleau-Ponty 1945, 69). See Zlatev (2010), Lei Zhu (2011), Stawarska (2015), and Aurora and Flack (2016). For example, Sartre (1948), and Heidegger (1950; 1971). Heidegger exploits the difference between Worte and Wörter; see Dahlstrom (2013, 236f). While noting the difference between talking (Rede) and language (Sprache) insofar as the latter is used and studied, Heidegger also claims that talk is existentially language; Heidegger (1927, 161): “Die Rede ist existenzial Sprache.” Just as Heidegger insists on the irreducibility of being-here to something handy or on hand and, by extension, the irreducibility of talk to the use or study of words, so Merleau-Ponty insists on the irreducibility of the originality of perception to objectification of it along intellectualist or empiricist lines. In addition to hiding from us the human, cultural world in which almost our entire life is lived, empiricist constructions falsify the natural world (Merleau-Ponty 1945, 32). The common culprit here (common to intellectualism and empiricism) is a presumption that things and our perceptions of them are on some level of reflection fully determinate (Merleau-Ponty 1945, 380f). Merleau-Ponty (1945, 206): Dans la première conception, nous sommes en deçà du mot comme significatif; dans la seconde, nous sommes au delà, - dans la première, il n’y a personne qui parle; dans la seconde, il y a bien un sujet, mais ce n’est pas le sujet parlant, c’est le sujet pensant.

15 Merleau-Ponty (1945, 459); Heidegger makes an analogous claim, striking for its use of verbal metaphor, that a tool’s handiness remains inconspicuous as long as the world “does not announce itself” (Heidegger 1927, 75).

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instances in Heidegger’s existential analysis that ply metaphors of embodiment, anticipating what Merleau-Ponty makes explicit. Consider, for example, the ‘hand’ in Zuhanden and Vorhanden, the ‘throw’ in Geworfenheit and Entwurf, the ‘fall’ in Verfallenheit, the ‘standing out’ of Ecstasis, the ‘hold’ in Verhalten, the ‘moving around’ (Umgang), looking around (Umsicht) and, of course, the intraversible distancing (Entfernung) and nearing (Nähern) inherent in being-in-the-world; see Heidegger (1927, 108): “Das Dasein hält sich als In-der-Welt-sein wesenhaft in einem Entfernen. Diese Ent-fernung, die Ferne des Zuhandenen von ihm selbst, kann das Dasein nie kreuzen.” Although communication—with obvious implications of joint presence, joint attention, and Davidsonian triangulation—is no less essential to assertions than ostension and predication are, Heidegger fails to give the details of its significance in SZ; for an account of the communicative aspect within a Heideggerian context, see Powell (2010). In a related context, Engelland points out that Heidegger “cannot see the trees for the forest,” while Merleau-Ponty’s concentration on the living body presents a more adequate way of handling “the specifics of shared comportment” (Engelland 2014, 79). The first two aspects of assertions—being about something (ostension) and being about it a certain way (what it is taken ‘as,’ the point of predication)—may be read as flagging the phenomena of referring and meaning, respectively, in a way that makes them not only both distinguishable and inseparable, but also dependent upon the third aspect, communicability. In the preface to Merleau-Ponty (1945), the author cites Husserl’s notion of “operant intentionality”— l’intentionnalité opérante (fungierende Intentionalität)—making up the “pre-predicative unity of the world and our life” and furnishing the “text” that we strive to translate into “exact language” (Merleau-Ponty 1945, xiii). Heidegger’s conception of “understanding” as an existential is idiosyncratic; while neither “theoretical” nor “practical” in the ordinary sense, it makes theoretical as well as practical understanding possible. In this connection, Heidegger specifically notes that our “intonation, modulation, the tempo of talk ‘the way of speaking’ are ways of disclosing how we are disposed” (Heidegger 1927, 162); thanks to James Kinkaid for this reminder. Heidegger distinguishes lateral meaning (Wozu, for what) of implements, i.e., the functions fulfilled by them in relation to one another (e.g., the handle’s relation to the door) from the ultimate meaning, the purpose (Worumwillen, for the sake of) of an entire complex of implements. Very much like Husserl, Heidegger insists that it is not the sense but the entities that are understood, whereas “the sense is that in which the intelligibility of something is maintained” (Heidegger 1927, 84). Carman (2003, 221–32). One commentator contends that “the articulation of intelligibility can ‘have a specifically worldly kind of being’ only in language” (Lafont 2000, 73); the world-disclosiveness of language entails, on this view, a form of linguistic idealism. For a rebuttal of this interpretation, see Carman (2002); for surveys of the philosophical and exegetical issues, as a prelude to a limited defense of the linguistic model, see Inkpin (2016, 35–51). These debates and misgivings over Heidegger’s view of language center, to be sure, on his straightforwardly phenomenological analyses in SZ. Yet even in Being and Time he signals his later treatment of language and poetry when he briefly remarks that, in poetical discourse, “communication of the existential possibilities of one’s disposedness can become an aim in itself” (Heidegger 1927, 162). Thanks to James Kinkaid for this observation. The salience of this objection is complicated but by no means fully removed by consideration of the silent voice of conscience as a call to the self since here, too, the authenticity of the voice corresponds to our thrownness (Heidegger 1927, 291). Nor should it be overlooked that Heidegger’s approach to texts in the history of philosophy requires an

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42 43 44 45 46

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Daniel O. Dahlstrom appreciation of how language can make available to us insights otherwise often hidden from us. (I am grateful to Chad Engelland for pressing this point.) Indeed, Heidegger’s interpretation of the significance of the primacy of closure for the Pre-Socratics’ unreflective use of aletheia illustrates how words may say more than the users of the words know or understand. Nonetheless, when Heidegger ingeniously brings to light previously ignored meanings of words or introduces eye-opening neologisms, he does so with a view to disclosing something always already operative, even if by virtue of coming to us. In other words, his early philosophical reflections on language seem to overlook its capacity to create new meanings. This same shortcoming, it bears pointing out, is not to be found in Heidegger’s mature writings on poetry and language. Perception is the “background” (fond) for everything I do, while the world is the field (champ) of all my explicit thoughts and perceptions, and, when I return to myself from the dogmatism of common sense or science, I find “a subject promised to the world” (un sujet voué au monde) (Merleau-Ponty 1945, v). Merleau-Ponty (1945, 222). Merleau-Ponty attempts to drive home this point by way of recent analyses of aphasia and amnesia that explain words’ lack of meaning for certain patients in terms of the experience of the absence of a worldly orientation, a contextual purpose; see Merleau-Ponty (1945, 221–4). The embeddedness of language in something beyond it is underscored in Le visible et l’invisible as Merleau-Ponty contends that “language, far from holding the secret of the world . . . speaks not in a vacuum but of being and of the world” (Merleau-Ponty 1946, 130). Merleau-Ponty (1945, 214): “La parole est un veritable geste et elle contient son sens comme le geste contient le sien.” Merleau-Ponty (1945, 225): “Le sens du mot n’est pas contenu dans le mot comme son.” Merleau-Ponty (1945, 209); Merleau-Ponty in this way assigns a prominent place to a dimension of language that, as noted above, is covered over by Heidegger’s more conservative account in SZ—in contrast to his later writings on language and poetry. Merleau-Ponty (1945, 209); the fact that the words already have meanings and, indeed, that our understanding of those meanings enables us to listen and read with comprehension helps explain, Merleau-Ponty suggests, “the ideal of a thought without speech” (Merleau-Ponty 1945, 221). The date scene of the protagonists at a movie theatre in La-La Land gives a good example of this time-honored gesture, exploited by Sartre among many, many others. ‘Gesture’ in this figurative sense may help elucidate Merleau-Ponty’s talk of the “allusive” and “silent” character of language; see “Le langage indirect et les voix du silence” in Merleau-Ponty (1960, 49–104). Thanks to Emma Jerndal for this suggestion. Merleau-Ponty (1945, 212); also signaling their difference, he speaks of thought and objective language as two manifestations of the fundamental activity by which a human being projects herself onto a world (Merleau-Ponty 1945, 222). Froman (1982, 59–86). A further implication of the embedding: without pretending to explain the genesis of natural languages, it provides a template for understanding how words come to signify and communicate. In this regard, their accounts offer an alternative to the standard supposition that words are purely conventional; see Blackburn 1986, 24–5, 118–22; Saussure (1916, 100–2, 104–10, 157). For a strident defense of the explanatory significance of gesture as an alternative to a strictly conventionalist conception of language, see Dillon (1997, 187–90). See Heidegger’s passing characterization of ‘being-here’ as the “being” of the “Between,” a characterization he drops because it misleadingly suggests the coming-together (convenientia) of two entities already on hand (Heidegger 1927, 132). In the opening paragraph of the chapter on the phenomenon of speech, Merleau-Ponty’s observes that the attempt to describe it offer us “the chance of moving definitively beyond the dichotomy of subject and object” (Merleau-Ponty 1945, 203). Merleau-Ponty 1945, 210; see no. 19 above.

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References Aurora, Simone and Patrick Flack (2016), “Phenomenology and Linguistics,” Metodo 4 (2): 7–12. Benoist, Jocelyn (2003), “Husserl’s Theory of Meaning in the First Logical Investigation,” in Daniel Dahlstrom (ed.), Husserl’s Logical Investigations, Dordrecht: Kluwer, 17–35. Blackburn, Simon (1986), Spreading the Word: Groundings in the Philosophy of Language, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Carman, Taylor (2002), “Was Heidegger a Linguistic Idealist?” Inquiry 45: 205–16. ———. (2003), Heidegger’s Analytic, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chomsky, Noam (1986), Knowledge of Language: Its Nature, Origin, and Use, New York: Praeger. ———. (1995), “Language and Nature,” Mind 104 (413): 1–61. Dahlstrom, Daniel (2013), “Heidegger’s Ontological Analysis of Language,” in Jeffrey Powell (ed.) Heidegger on Language, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 13–31. ———. (2014), “Thinking Fast: Freedom, Expertise and Solicitations,” in Jeffrey Bloechl and Nicolas de Warren (eds.), Phenomenology in a New Key: Between Analysis and History: Essays in Honor of Richard Cobb-Stevens, Amsterdam: Springer, 169–80. ———. (2020), “Heidegger’s Performative Phenomenology: Formalization, Enactment, and Performativity,” in Lucilla Guidi (ed.), Phenomenology as Performative Exercise, Leiden: Brill. Davidson, Donald (1986), “A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs,” in Ernest Lepore (ed.), Truth and Interpretation: Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson, Cambridge: Blackwell, 433–46. Davidson, Donald and Gilbert Harman (eds.) (1972), The Semantics of Natural Language, Dordrecht: Reidel. Derrida, Jacques (1967), La voix et le phénomène, introduction au problem dans la phenomenology de Husserl, Paris: Presses universitaires de France. Dillon, MartinC. (1997), Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology, second edition, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Engelland, Chad (2014), Ostension: Word Learning and the Embodied Mind, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Froman, Wayne Jeffrey (1982), Merleau-Ponty: Language and the Act of Speech, Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press. Grice, Herbert Paul (1989), Studies in the Way of Words, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Heidegger, Martin (1927), Sein und Zeit, Tübingen: Niemeyer. ———. (1950), “Wozu Dichter?” in Holzwege, Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 248–95. ———. (1971), Erläuterungen zur Hölderlins Dichtung, fourth edition, Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann. Higginbotham, James (2008), “Languages and Idiolects: Their Language and Ours,” in Ernest Lepore and Barry Smith (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Language, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 140–50. Horst, Steven (1999), “Symbols and Computation: A Critique of the Computational Theory of Mind,” Minds and Machines 9: 347–81. Husserl, Edmund (1968), Logische Untersuchungen, II/1 and II/2, fifth edition, Tübingen: Niemeyer. Inkpin, Andrew (2016), Disclosing the World: On the Phenomenology of Language, Cambridge, MA: MIT press. Koskela, Anu (2005), “On the Distinction between Metonymy and Vertical Polysemy in Encyclopedic Semantics,” University of Sussex Working Papers in Linguistics and English

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Language, https://www.sussex.ac.uk/webteam/gateway/file.php?name=ak-metonymy.pdf& site=1 Lafont, Cristina (2000), Heidegger, Language, and World-disclosure, trans. Graham Harman, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lepore, Ernest and Barry Smith (eds.) (2008), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Language, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lewis, David (1975), “Languages and Language,” in Keith Gunderson (ed.), Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol. 7, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 3–35. Locke, John (1975), Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter Nidditch, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lycan, William (2008), Philosophy of Language: A Contemporary Introduction, second edition, New York: Routledge. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1945), Phénoménologie de la perception, Paris: Gallimard. ———. (1960), Signes, Paris: Gallimard. ———. (1964), Le visible et l’invisible, Paris: Gallimard. Mohanty, J.H. (1976), Edmund Husserl’s Theory of Meaning, Hague: Nijhoff. Nuccetelli, Susana and Gary Seay (2008), Philosophy of Language: The Central Topics, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Papineau, David (2012), “Naturalist Theories of Meaning,” in Ernest Lepore and Barry Smith (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Language, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 176–88. Powell, Jeffrey (2010), “Heidegger and the Communicative World,” Research in Phenomenology 40: 55–71. ———. (2013), Heidegger and Language, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Quine, Willard van Orman (1972), “Methodological Reflections on Current Linguistic Theory,” in Donald Davidson and Gilbert Harman (eds.), The Semantics of Natural Language, Dordrecht: Reidel, 442–54. Russell, Gillian and Delia Graff Fara (eds.) (2012), Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Language, New York: Routledge. Sartre, Jean-Paul (1948,) Qu’est-ce que la littérature? Paris: Gallimard. Searle, John (1989), “How Performatives Work,” Linguistics and Philosophy 15: 539–47. Simons, Peter (1995), “Meaning and Language,” in Barry Smith and David W. Smith (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Husserl, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 106–37. Smith, DavidW. and Ronald McIntyre (1982), Husserl and Intentionality: A Study of Mind, Meaning, and Language, Dordrecht: Reidel. Soames, Scott (2010), Philosophy of Language, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Sokolowski, Robert (1974), Husserlian Meditations: How Words Present Things, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Stawarska, Beata (2015), Saussure’s Philosophy of Language as Phenomenology: Undoing the Doctrine of the Course in General Linguistics, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Zhu, Lei (2011), “Sound, Body and Writing: A Phenomenological View of Linguistics as Representation of Speech,” in Piotr Stalmaszczyk (ed.), Turning Points in the Philosophy of Language and Linguistics, Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 213–24. Zlatev, Jordan (2010), “Phenomenology and Cognitive Linguistics,” in Shaun Gallagher and Dan Schmicking (eds.), Handbook on Phenomenology and Cognitive Science, Dordrecht: Springer, 415–46.

2

Merleau-Ponty on Expression and Meaning Taylor Carman

The linguistic gesture, like all others, sketches out its own sense. —Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Merleau-Ponty was not a philosopher of language, even on a fairly broad construal of that phrase. His philosophy is a phenomenology, and although he occasionally broaches the subject of language from a phenomenological point of view, he always distinguishes a phenomenology of language from a science of linguistics or theory of meaning, just as he distinguishes the phenomenology of perception and bodily experience from empirical psychology and physiology. What emerges from his phenomenological reflections on language, few and tentative as they are, is nevertheless a powerful and original conception of linguistic experience and action, which echoes insights of the later Wittgenstein and anticipates social externalist or anti-individualist accounts of meaning and mental content in more recent analytical philosophy. For Merleau-Ponty, that is, linguistic meaning can be abstracted neither from social practice nor from the worldly situations that constrain what we mean (and can mean) by what we say. Notwithstanding such affinities, however, Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological account of expression and meaning also departs radically from most contemporary approaches to the philosophy of language. Contrary to the emphasis placed by analytic philosophy on logic and inferential structure, Merleau-Ponty maintains that rational linguistic content is parasitic on, indeed a kind of refinement or crystallization of, nonconceptual forms of understanding, which are always already at work in our perceptual experience and behavior. More specifically, he argues that reference is grounded in ostension, or pointing, which, though it may be a uniquely human capacity, is nevertheless not a specifically linguistic phenomenon but a feature of what Merleau-Ponty calls our “motor intentional” awareness of our environment, woven into our primitive sense of sharing a world with others: someone else is, among other things, someone to whom I can point something out, and who points things out to me.

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For all its richness, however, Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of language, in part precisely by confining itself to our lived experience of speaking (and listening), leaves the fact of stable syntactic and semantic structure a bit of a mystery. Why do the subject–predicate form of propositions and the logical form of syllogisms persist in a way that lexicons, surface grammars, regional dialects, and literary traditions do not? I shall conclude by (tentatively) suggesting that in his neglect of durable linguistic structure, Merleau-Ponty was half right—wrong about syntax, but arguably right about semantics. Chomsky might be right that all human languages, in spite of their apparent differences, exhibit a universal grammatical form that is as much a stable biological fact about the human organism as puberty or color vision. The evident ease with which toddlers construct entirely novel grammatical sentences in whatever language they are exposed to is otherwise hard, arguably impossible, to explain. The very idea of fixed semantic structure, by contrast—that is, the conceptual architecture of linguistic meaning—is a far more dubious notion. Merleau-Ponty might well have been right to regard it, as the later Wittgenstein did, as a contingent landscape of shared possibilities carved out by traces and sedimentations of a prior history of expressive gestures. 1 Structure Merleau-Ponty introduced a generation of young French philosophers and students of the human sciences to what came to be called structuralism in his lectures on Ferdinand de Saussure at the Collège de France in the 1950s. It will be useful to begin by sorting out what he found important and useful in Saussure’s structural linguistics and what he took to be limitations inherent in the very idea of an objective science of language. Saussure is famous for drawing two distinctions (sometimes wrongly thought to coincide), both of which Merleau-Ponty finds problematic. The first is between “a language” (une langue), which has a determinate linguistic (morphological, lexical, grammatical) structure at a given time, and “speech” (parole), by which he means the embodied verbal action of speakers. Speech is the dynamic bodily behavior of an individual; language is a static psychological structure common to a community of speakers, a systematic whole underlying and informing speech acts. More simply put, parole is our idiosyncratic utterance of words; langue is what we know in common when we know a language. The distinction between parole and langue is close but not identical to the distinction Chomsky draws between performance and competence. The proper object of the science of linguistics, or “linguistics properly so called,” Saussure says, is not what you or I happen to say (after all, we say only a small fraction of what we can say, and we often misspeak), but the structures you and I both know in knowing the same language (Saussure 2013, 39).1 The other distinction Saussure draws, one that became the cornerstone of subsequent structuralist theory, is between synchronic (at a time) and

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diachronic (across time) analysis. Having set aside parole as the fragmentary and idiosyncratic speech acts of individuals, Saussure then distinguishes the diachronic description of changes in a shared language across time from the synchronic analysis of its structure at a given time. Again, it is the latter that he identifies with linguistics proper. A panorama of the Alps, he says, cannot be drawn from a moving perspective, but “must be taken from just one point. The same is true of a language” (Saussure 2013, 117). Merleau-Ponty might therefore appear to be merely confounding the terminology in his 1951 essay “On the Phenomenology of Language” when he criticizes Saussure for drawing too sharp “a distinction between a synchronic linguistics of speech (parole) and a diachronic linguistics of a language (langue), each irreducible to the other because a panchronic view would inevitably blot out the originality of the present” (Merleau-Ponty 1964, 86). But Merleau-Ponty is using the terms in a slightly differently way. His point is that looking back across time at the de facto history of language, observing how it has changed over time, cannot be severed from the effort to discern the systematic unity of the language we speak as we now speak it. Both of Saussure’s distinctions are therefore suspect, for the past inhabits the present, just as the fleeting contingencies of speech breathe life into the language that stands by all the while as a resource at our disposal: “History is the history of successive synchronies, and the contingency of the linguistic past invades even the synchronic system” (1964, 87). What Merleau-Ponty objects to, then, is neither of Saussure’s two distinctions as such, but rather his attempt to divorce the scientific study of language as an object from our lived experience of language as a means of expression. What Merleau-Ponty rejects is that abstraction, that idealized dichotomy between objective mental structure and (supposedly merely subjective) bodily comportment. Like all good phenomenologists, Merleau-Ponty is acutely aware that the best way to lose sight of the phenomena—what Husserl called “the things themselves” (die Sachen selbst)—is to denigrate them as “merely subjective” psychological data, noise, or interference that conceals rather than reveals the world. A proper phenomenological emphasis on linguistic practice over against fixed linguistic structure puts Merleau-Ponty’s approach close to that of the later Wittgenstein, who liked to quote the line in Goethe’s Faust, “In the beginning was the deed” (Wittgenstein 1980, 31). Language is, above all, a human capacity, a skill, a practice. What this entails is not that there is no abiding structure in a language over and beyond the patterns of de facto usage, but rather that any such structure must be grounded in the norms that guide our linguistic behavior. This affinity with Wittgenstein also sheds light on what Merleau-Ponty was, rightly or wrongly, drawn to in Saussure’s approach, namely its promise to dissolve what we might call the instrumentalist illusion. Instrumentalism is the idea that meaning is autonomous, given to the mind independently of language, and that we use words as a kind of code, tags or tools to express,

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name, and refer to concepts when we communicate with others. It is a picture of language and meaning that is beset with obvious difficulties, both conceptual and phenomenological. First, do we in fact experience our words and their meanings separately, stitched together like pieces of cloth, or do we not instead grasp what we mean precisely in the way we express ourselves, in our words? Worse, if to speak is, as Thomas Hobbes put it, “to transfer our mental discourse into verbal, or the train of our thoughts into a train of words,” how can we know that we all associate the same thoughts with the same words? (Hobbes 1994, 16). The problem is not that we might sometimes fail to communicate, but rather how, on the instrumentalist model, we can ever succeed. Instrumentalism, that is, makes communication look not just difficult, but impossible. There must therefore be a more intimate connection in principle between language and thought than it supposes. Merleau-Ponty seems to have credited Saussure with indicating a way out of instrumentalism in his account of the internal relation between words and meanings. A language, according to Saussure, is a system of differences among signifiers or signals (sound patterns, inscriptions) which, solely in virtue of those differences, function as signs (words), which include in themselves significations (meanings).2 Gift in German (which means poison) and “gift” in English are the same signifier but different signs owing to their different relations to other signifiers in the two languages, but also because they have completely different (and unrelated) meanings. Language, then, is not an external relation between words and objects, but an internally differentiated system of signs, which bind together signifiers and concepts: “A linguistic sign is not a link between a thing and a name, but between a concept and a sound pattern” (Merleau-Ponty 2013, 98). For Saussure, that is, “a meaning is simply the counterpart of a sound pattern,” and a concept is itself “one constituent part of a linguistic sign” (Merleau-Ponty 2013, 158–9, my emphasis). 2 Gesture In spite of Merleau-Ponty’s apparent enthusiasm, it is doubtful that Saussure himself thought of semiological linguistics as a challenge to instrumentalist theories of meaning. Saying that a concept or meaning is “one constituent part of a linguistic sign” might give the impression that the meaning depends on the sign to be the meaning that it is, as a branch, being a part of a tree, depends on the tree. But that does not follow. A river can be a constituent part of a political border and yet be the river that it is independently of the border. More generally, semiology is not semantics, and Saussure often gives the impression that the ideas we express in words just are what they are, quite apart from the role they play in constituting signs by coming into contact (wholly arbitrarily) with signifiers. Early in his classic Course on General Linguistics, for example, he says, “the speaker uses the code provided by the language in order to express his own thought” (2013, 31). Likewise,

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to say that what is essential to a system of signs is “the union of sense and sound pattern” (2013, 32) is not to deny that the meaning already resided in the mind of the speaker prior to being tied to the signifier. Be that as it may, Merleau-Ponty saw in Saussure’s project at least the hint of a radical departure from the mentalism and instrumentalism that loomed large as targets of criticism in Phenomenology of Perception. If meaning is not articulated prior to speech, but is instead a product of differences among signifiers, he reasoned, then language cannot be understood as a mere tool for the expression of independently existing or antecedently given contents. Language “does not presuppose thought, but accomplishes it” (2012, 216, 533). More precisely, given the phenomenological orientation of his argument, “speech, for the one who speaks, does not translate a ready-made thought, but accomplishes it” (2012, 217, my emphasis). Words are not mere instruments for expressing thoughts that precede them; rather, “Thought and expression are . . . constituted simultaneously . . .” (2012, 223). What does it mean to say that language does not presuppose thought, but achieves or accomplishes it? Merleau-Ponty bases the claim on a refusal to begin, as Saussure does, by distinguishing language from speech. Language is speech above all because it is practical, more particularly gestural. Speaking is doing, and doings have intentional directedness to goals or purposes. So, just as any bodily action aims at an end, so too speech aims at what it tries to express. The semantic breadth of the French word sens, which can mean direction as well as meaning, is convenient for Merleau-Ponty’s assimilation of linguistic content to the directedness of action at large: “The linguistic gesture, like all others, sketches out its own sense (sens)” (2012, 226, my emphasis). But to “sketch out” is not to create ex nihilo. A gesture, like any action, is teleological; it is guided by its end, its purpose. Just as actions do not create their own ends, neither are meanings generated afresh in every speech act. Consequently, Merleau-Ponty insists, “neither the word nor the sense of the word is constituted by consciousness” (2012, 464). Speech is not pure spontaneity; it is also a sensitivity, a responsiveness to what one is trying to say. To act is to anticipate the completion or fulfillment of a purpose. To do a job well—indeed, to do it all—you must attend to “the task at hand” and let yourself be guided by what you’re trying to accomplish. So too, what we try to express in language is not just a product of our effort, but an end guiding its performance: Speech is comparable to a gesture because what it is charged with expressing stands in the same relation to it as the goal to the gesture that intends it . . . . Meaning (signification) animates speech as the world animates my body—by a mute presence that awakens my intentions without unfolding itself before them . . . . The meanings of speech are always . . . the poles . . . that magnetize discourse without strictly speaking being given on their own account. (1964, 89)

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The experience of speaking, of expressing what one intends, is an experience of being somehow guided by what one wants to say, trying to find the words to express this feeling or that idea in just the right way. This teleological structure is also at work in what Merleau-Ponty in the Phenomenology calls “the tacit cogito,” that is, the incipient significance that motivates all efforts of thought prior to their crystallization in concepts and propositions, an indeterminate kind of thought behind or “beyond the spoken cogito, the one that is converted into utterances and essential truth” (2012, 465). The Cartesian cogito, the ideal clarity of rational thought, is thus a kind of fiction generated by our natural inclination to forget the primordial experience of an indeterminately anticipated end in its ultimate determination: The idea of a consciousness that is transparent to itself and whose existence is nothing more than the consciousness it has of existing is . . . [a] retrospective illusion: everything I will later be able to learn about myself gets posited in me as an explicit object. (2012, 440) How then, according to Merleau-Ponty, is the spontaneous expressivity of speech related to apparently observable lexical, grammatical, and semantic structures of language, structures that might even be objects of scientific theory? Here Merleau-Ponty’s argument begins to settle into the contemplation of a problem rather than the presentation of a solution, more a question than an answer. The linguistic gesture “sketches out its own sense,” and yet, “Consciousness does not constitute language (langage), it takes it up (l’assume)” (2012, 464, 536). We utter words, but only by availing ourselves of a language that the world offers us, both as a means and as the possible culmination or fulfillment of our effort to express ourselves. This is the apparent paradox that lies at the heart of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of language: speech spontaneously generates the very content that guides its search for words and phrases adequate to that content. And he often seems less interested in resolving or dissolving the paradox than in merely describing it. But how do meanings manage to polarize or “magnetize discourse”? Merleau-Ponty offers no theoretical explanation, but he does insist that the effect must be culturally mediated rather than merely natural and deterministic. It is, he thinks, the shared history and the social presence of a spoken language, precisely the diachronic accidents and the idiosyncrasies of speech that Saussure bracketed from his account, that give us the palpable sense of speaking a language that is, or can be, adequate to the expression of our own most personal thoughts and feelings—precisely in “the originality of the present,” something Merleau-Ponty thought Saussure had rightly emphasized (1964, 86). There is a reciprocal dependence, then, between the spontaneity of individual expression and the availability of a public language, not just in its

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present formal structure, but as a constantly evolving reservoir of possibilities. Words and phrases, like ideas and even emotions, are available to me. “But why, how, and in what sense are they available?” Merleau-Ponty asks (1964, 90). His answer is that they are present precisely by having gathered like layers of sediment in cultural memory: “already signifying instruments or already speaking significations (morphological, syntactic, and lexical instruments, literary genres, types of narrative, ways of relaying events, etc.)” became available, he says, when, in their time, they were established as meanings I can have recourse to—that I have—through the same sort of expressive operation. It is this operation that must be described if I want to comprehend the peculiar power of speech. (1964, 90–1) What initially looks like a paradox, then—namely, that speech lays down the linguistic conditions of its own possibility—is better understood as a kind of chicken-and-egg problem, a bootstrapping process that is less mysterious than it first appears. For what the abiding language amounts to is not a robust fixed structure, as Saussure imagined, but the gradual accumulation of traces, echoes, and memories of past spontaneous efforts of expression and articulation, “the same sort of expressive operation” I am now engaged in when I try to find le mot juste for what I think or how I feel. How do musical or other artistic idioms emerge and persist in a tradition? In virtue of the very same kinds of creative gestures one makes in trying to play or paint something original. This is the basis of a distinction Merleau-Ponty often draws as an alternative to Saussure’s two distinctions (between langue and parole and between diachrony and synchrony). It is a distinction between what he variously calls, somewhat confusingly, “authentic speech” and “secondary expression” (2012, 217n); “speaking speech” (parole parlante) and “spoken speech” (parole parlée) (2012, 238); “speaking language” (langage parlant) and “spoken language” (langage parlé); even at one point “transcendental” and “empirical” speech (2012, 451).3 The former term in each of those pairs refers to the original effort of creative expression; the latter refer to the cultural accumulation of those efforts in the form of a language available to us as containing the expressions adequate to our meaning. Recall the tacit cogito, the incipient but as yet indeterminate intention that guides us toward a well-defined thought. Contrary to “the spoken cogito,” Merleau-Ponty says, the tacit cogito “speaks in the way one sings because one is joyful.” It is not purely spontaneous or formless, however, “not merely a comprehensive and inarticulate grasp of the world, like that of the child taking its first breath, or of the drowning man who struggles for life” (2012, 465). For although the present perfect presupposes the present continuous, the latter also anticipates the former: speech is spoken only because it is, or

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has already been, speaking, and yet in speaking we must avail ourselves of a language that is ours only in virtue of having been articulated for us in advance. The dependence relation between the two is therefore reciprocal: “authentic” or “transcendental” expression (parole parlante) carves out grooves of established ways of talking (parole parlée) that in turn become entrenched and normative for future use. Linguistic forms and conventions are rooted in the ongoing articulation and rearticulation of new meanings, yet primal expression can itself be articulate thanks only to an already established linguistic tradition. The phenomenon guiding Merleau-Ponty’s argument is the familiar— though, it must be said, among contemporary philosophers of mind and language, chronically underappreciated—experience of coming to understand one’s own thoughts and feelings only by managing to articulate and express them: “For the speaking subject, to express is to become aware of; he does not express just for others, he expresses in order to know himself what he intends” (1964, 90). The idea is not original to Merleau-Ponty but has its roots in the eighteenth century with thinkers like Rousseau and Herder and can be discerned in Hegel, Marx, Kierkegaard, and Dilthey, among others. It formed a tradition that Isaiah Berlin and Charles Taylor called expressivism, and not only did Merleau-Ponty belong to it, he was, I believe, one of the formative influences on Taylor’s conception of it as a tradition (Taylor 1975, 13n et passim).4 For expressivism, ideas and emotions are not private internal states contingently externalized in arbitrary signals or codes; they are what they are precisely in their paradigmatic expressions. When I see and understand an angry or threatening gesture, Merleau-Ponty says, “the gesture does not make me think of anger, it is the anger itself” (2012, 225). 3 Pointing The most basic manifestation of this literal embodiment of meaning in expression can be found in ostension, which is to say, our experience of others as those with whom we share a world, and so to whom we can point things out, and who point things out to us.5 This phenomenon, at once social and semantic, brings together two of the most interesting and important passages in Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception: Chapter 3 of Part I on “The Spatiality of One’s Own Body and Motricity,” and Chapter 4 of Part II on “Others and the Human World.”6 In the first, Merleau-Ponty describes the case of Schneider, a wounded soldier suffering from a kind of brain damage that has impaired his ability to pick things out by pointing, though his practical motor skills are very nearly unchanged.7 Adhémar Gelb and Kurt Goldstein, who worked with the patient, describe him as “incapable of performing ‘abstract’ movements with his eyes closed, namely movements that are not directed at any actual situation” (2012, 132). He could still perform “concrete” movements, that is, “movements that are necessary for life . . . provided they have become habitual for

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him: he takes his handkerchief from his pocket and blows his nose, or takes a match from a matchbox and lights a lamp” (2012, 133). Schneider could not simply point to his eyebrow, out of the blue as it were, yet he could go through the repertoire of movements constituting a military salute. When he did so, however, he would not just move his hand to his brow, but instead throw his whole body into the performance of a meaningful action, which he managed to pull off only by imagining himself into the situation. What Schneider’s condition reveals, Goldstein argues, is that two distinct neurological functions are involved in normal bodily behavior: one for “pointing” (Zeigen), the other for “grasping” (Greifen). Although Schneider has lost the ability to point to things out of context, his grasping skills remain remarkably intact. This difference has been confirmed more recently by Melvyn Goodale and David Milner, who have shown that two distinct neural pathways in the brain, the ventral and the dorsal streams, are responsible for, in their words, “vision for perception” and “vision for action” (2004, 45–8). Patients suffering from various forms of brain damage may lose the one ability while retaining the other: either they can no longer identify what something is by pointing at it or drawing a picture of it, though they can still see how to grasp and manipulate it skillfully, or vice versa. What Schneider’s condition shows, Merleau-Ponty suggests, is that intelligent motor skills are not extensions or applications of a theoretical representation of objective space. “When I motion to my friend to approach, my intention is not a thought I could have produced in myself in advance, nor do I perceive the signal in my body” (2012, 141). If my friend resists, and I beckon again, insistently, “my impatient gesture emerges from the situation, without any interposed thought” (2012, 141). Intelligent bodily behavior is not based on the contemplative and reflective attitudes on which philosophers have traditionally modeled their theories of experience and understanding. Indeed, dealing skillfully with things in a spatial environment requires no conscious or reflective grasp of objects standing in determinate spatial configurations at all. Moreover, contrary to Goldstein, Merleau-Ponty insists that normal behavior is not merely a composite of two distinct functions, only one of which Schneider has lost. When we recognize things passively or point them out abstractly, we do not simply do what Schneider does, only more quickly and discreetly, namely enlist a whole ensemble of exploratory movements, hopefully stumbling upon the forms that then merely seem to be given. Rather, we have a capacity that Schneider lacks, in virtue of which our bodies and worlds really are given to us in sensory intuition. Schneider’s way of identifying and describing things in his environment is profoundly unlike ours. Nor is motor action for Schneider the same as it is for those of us who do not need to rely on it exclusively, as he does, in order to recognize objects around us and know our own position and orientation in space. What is lacking in Schneider’s sensorimotor experience? Not just spatial intuition as an isolated function, but a kind of bodily awareness that allows

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those of us not so impaired to encounter the environment as an environment. Schneider can perform motor tasks skillfully, but he seems not to notice any features of his surroundings that are not immediately relevant to those tasks. He can perform concrete movements on order, but even if the instruction has for him an intellectual significance, it has no motor significance, it does not speak to him as a motor subject . . . he can never unfold the thought of a movement into actual movement. He is missing neither motricity nor thought, and we must acknowledge, between movement as a third-person process and thought as a representation of movement, an anticipation or a grasp of the result assured by the body itself as a motor power, a “motor project” [Bewegungsentwurf], a “motor intentionality” without which the instruction would remain a dead letter. (2012, 140–1) Lacking any direct intuition of objective spatial relations, Schneider also lacks the ability to project himself into imaginary actions and imaginary worlds. Asked to salute, he takes up the role of the soldier with a kind of earnestness, a wholehearted engagement unnecessary for normal actors, who can simply “detach their real body from its living situation in order to make it breathe, speak, and if need be cry in the imaginary. This is what our patient can no longer do” (2012, 134). Instead, he “throws his body into blind attempts,” whereas unimpaired agents can literally see what they’re doing, which “can be expressed by saying that, for the normal person, every movement has a background, and that the movement and its background are ‘moments of a single whole,’” as Goldstein says (quoted here in Merleau-Ponty 2012, 141). Schneider can perform concrete movements, but he lacks the perceptual background that ordinarily imbues such movements with their worldly significance. His concrete movements are thus in a sense blind, which is why his condition, now known as visual form agnosia, used to be called “mind blindness” (Seelenblindheit). Schneider’s movements, Merleau-Ponty says, do not open up their own background, but are embedded in a kind of plenum: “the world no longer has a physiognomy for him” (2012, 165). The neurological distinction between grasping (dorsal stream) and pointing (ventral stream) misses the crucial intermediary phenomenon of motor intentionality, which involves the projection of a world given in intuition, as opposed to constructed in thought. Goldstein was wrong, then, to call acts of ostension “abstract.” Pointing is an innate capacity, possibly unique to human beings, and it manifests itself in the first year of life. It is one of the bedrock physiological conditions of cognition, not a product of reflective thought.8 Moreover, demonstrative action remains deeply interwoven with the rest of our practical comportment throughout our lives, particularly in our social interaction with others.

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Babies spontaneously mimic facial gestures before they are able to observe their own faces, hence before they have any notion of what they look like: A fifteen-month-old baby opens his mouth when I playfully take one of his fingers in my mouth and pretend to bite it. And yet he has hardly even seen his face in a mirror and his teeth do not resemble mine . . . . He perceives his intentions in his body, my body with his own, and thereby my intentions in his body. (2012, 409) More recent studies have produced even more dramatic results, including facial mimicry in infants as little as 42 minutes old (Melztoff and Moore 1977, 1983). Clearly, nothing like objective observation or explicit analogical correlation between oneself and others, intuited or inferred, is going on in such cases. Instead, the infant’s body is attuned to others in a kind of immediate sympathetic harmony. Consequently, even as an adult, “insofar as I am born and have a body and a natural world, I find other behaviors in that world intertwined [s’entrelace] with my own” (2012, 415). There is no room at this level, already manifest in infancy but enduring and thriving in adulthood, for observation or judgment to intervene in our bodily interconnectedness: There is, between my consciousness and my body, as I live it, and between this phenomenal body and that of another, as I see it from the outside, an internal relation that makes the other appear as the completion of the system. (2012, 410) As Merleau-Ponty says elsewhere, “man is a mirror for man” (1993, 130). 4 Conclusion Ostension and our primitive recognition of others are the prelinguistic phenomena responsible for our most basic semantic relation to the world, namely our capacity to point things out to each other. Merleau-Ponty cannot be credited with anything like a theory of meaning or reference, but his phenomenology sheds light on language by tracing it back to the motorintentional character of the communicative gestures that bind our awareness of others to our awareness of the world we share with them. What this suggests is that the conceptual content of experience is not fundamental, but must be understood as a refinement or crystallization of more basic prerational efforts of expression. What is lacking in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of language, it must be admitted, is an account (or even an acknowledgment) of durable linguistic structure as such. It is quite possible that everything we call meaning, even the contents of seemingly straightforward propositions, will

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remain theoretically elusive, as slippery and indeterminate as what we grasp at in trying to make sense of love, life, and literature. It would be far less plausible to deny that grammar has a robust stable form across human languages and throughout history, so that rational cognition is not a mere chaos of individual and cultural idiosyncrasies. The gap that separates the universal but extremely capacious shape of natural human cognition from the unfathomably fine nuances of all sense and significance, however, might well be an abyss. Notes 1 Saussure’s concept of langue and Chomsky’s notion of linguistic competence differ crucially inasmuch as the former means a particular language, instituted by convention, while Chomskyan linguistics describes the biologically innate, universal grammar underlying all human languages. 2 Signification in Saussure’s terminology is more like Fregean sense than reference: what is “signified” is for Saussure a concept, not an object. 3 The third set of terms in this list is from Merleau-Ponty (1973, 10). 4 See also the essays “Language and Human Nature” and “Theories of Meaning” in Taylor (1985, 1992, 368–92: ch 21), and Berlin’s “Herder and the Enlightenment” in Berlin (2000). 5 For an illuminating philosophical survey of the subject see Engelland (2014). 6 I discuss these issues and these texts at greater length in Carman (2020). 7 Gabrielle Jackson (2018) offers a detailed and nuanced account of the Schneider case. For an appraisal of the interpretation, reception, and legacy of the case study in neuroscience, see Marotta and Behrmann (2004). 8 Tomasello (1999, 2014) argues persuasively that ostension and joint attention are essential to the kind of cognition distinctive of human beings, including—pace Chomsky— linguistic understanding.

References Berlin, I. (2000), The Proper Study of Mankind: An Anthology of Essays, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Carman, T. (2020), Merleau-Ponty, 2nd ed., London and New York: Routledge. Engelland, C. (2014), Ostension: Word Learning and the Embodied Mind, Cambridge: MIT Press. Goodale, M. A. and D. A. Milner (2004), Sight Unseen: An Exploration of Conscious and Unconscious Vision, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hobbes, T. (1994), Leviathan, ed. E. Curley, Indianapolis: Hackett. Jackson, G. (2018), “Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Concept of Motor Intentionality: Unifying Two Kinds of Bodily Agency,” European Journal of Philosophy 26 (2): 763–79. Marotta, J. J. and M. Behrmann (2004), “Patient Schn: Has Goldstein and Gelb’s Case Withstood the Test of Time?” Neuropsychologia 42 (2004): 633–8. Meltzoff, A. N. and M. K. Moore (1977), “Imitation of Facial and Manual Gestures by Human Neonates,” Science 198 (4312): 75–8. ———. (1983), “Newborn Infants Imitate Adult Facial Gestures,” Child Development 54: 702–9. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1964), Signs, trans. R. C. McCleary, Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Translation modified.

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———. (1973), The Prose of the World, trans. J. O’Neill, Evanston: Northwestern University Press. ———. (1993), The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting, eds. G. A. Johnson and M. B. Smith, Evanston: Northwestern University Press. ———. (2012), Phenomenology of Perception, trans. D. A. Landes, London and New York: Routledge. Page references correspond to the 2005 French edition, given in the margins of the translation, which I have occasionally modified. Saussure, F. (2013), Course in General Linguistics, trans. R. Harris, London: Bloomsbury. Page references correspond to the French edition, given in the margins. Taylor, C. (1975), Hegel, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. (1985), Human Agency and Language: Philosophical Papers 1, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. (1992), Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Tomasello, M. (1999), The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. ———. (2014), A Natural History of Human Thinking, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Wittgenstein, L. (1980), Culture and Value, ed. G. H. von Wright, trans. P. Winch, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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On Husserl’s Concept of the Pre-predicative Genealogy of Logic and Regressive Method Dominique Pradelle

At first glance, the Husserlian concept of a pre-predicative dimension seems very simple and relatively undetermined: if one relies on etymology, it refers simply to that which lies underneath all the activities of logical thinking. In as much as the latter is supposed to have predication as its fundamental form, “pre-predicative” would therefore mean that which is free from any predicative or judicative determination. Consequently, the term prepredicative would simply designate the entire experience we can have of a world and the various objects within it, before any intervention not only from acts of scientific judgment, but also those that are prescientific or extra-scientific. According to this line of reasoning, therefore, the conceptual doublet pre-predicative/predicative would be equivalent to that of experience/judgment, a pairing which expressly appears in the title of Husserl’s book compiled by Landgrebe (Husserl 1948). The doublet would, furthermore, overlap the Kantian duality between the intuitive and the discursive, i.e., on the one hand, the immediate relation of consciousness to individual objects of perceptual experience, and, on the other, the determination of these objects by the means of concepts found in language. Thus, the “and” of the title, “Experience and Judgment,” would designate the very theme of inquiry set forth in the book, namely, to elucidate the connection binding together the experience of individuality with the entire discursive dimension, i.e., the formation of conceptuality and of syntactical structures—perception and language, the individual object and the general concept, experience and the discursive determining activity. The pre-predicative dimension would constitute the object of a transcendental aesthetic, as opposed to the object of a transcendental logic: that is, the object of an eidetics of the forms of the world given in experience and a theory of its transcendental constitution, as opposed to an objective eidetics of entities as they truly are, of true theories and of the norms of epistemic rigor, as well as of the theory of their modes of transcendental constitution. Given that this opposition had been set and determined in the Conclusion of Formal and Transcendental Logic (Husserl 1992, 386–7), the task of Experience and Judgment would thus be to realize the philosophical program sketched out in the work of 1929. It is in this light that the term “pre-predicative” has become synonymous, according to Merleau-Ponty, with a philosophical leitmotiv: that of the repeated exigence

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to deconstruct all idealizations in order to return to the forms of phenomenality still free of all logicity (Merleau-Ponty 1989, 66). That being said, questions nonetheless arise. In the first place, what type of connection is being sought between the intuitive and discursive spheres, and designated by the conjunction and? Does it consist in a structural articulation between the syntactical forms of signification and the synthetic forms of the experience of individual objects? Is it an empiricist problem regarding the formation of general concepts on the grounds of this experience? Or is it the problem of how the apophantic forms of predication and the ontological forms of entities given in experience correspond to each other? Is it a problem that concerns the foundation of the principles of formal logic (non-contradiction, excluded middle, double negation) in formal-ontological principles that themselves have their source in the experience of individual objects? Therefore, is the connection between the predicative and pre-predicative dimensions one of a foundation, of a structural prefiguration, or of a genetic anchorage? In the second place, what concept of experience is here designated by the term pre-predicative? Is it the empiricist or sensualistic concept of experience, which refers to the pure givenness of sense impressions, and at most to the sensuous perception of an individual object? Is it the Kantian concept of experience, which, for its part, is not to be confused with simple perceptions and refers to the relation of consciousness to an object in as much as it possesses a validity that is both for anyone (intersubjective) and at all times (omnitemporal)? Or is it the enlarged concept of perception understood as the givenness of individual or general objects, which embraces the seizing of material essences, whether mixed or purely categorial? Finally, is it legitimate to consider that there exists a dimension of pure experience still devoid of any linguistic element as well as of any conceptual determination? Did Hegel not see that from the moment we come to the world we are immersed in the element of language? And that, as a consequence, the subject’s surroundings and the totality of objects in the surrounding world, far from being able to be given in an experience prior to any kind of linguistic formation, may never be reduced to individual objects, but rather, are given from the start as examples or incarnations of linguistic idealities, always already framed by a classificatory system of genera and species? Does this not from the start make it futile to nourish the philosophical project of regressing from the discursive sphere toward a pre-discursive dimension, with a view to grounding the structures of the former in the latter? Correlatively, is not the approach of genetic phenomenology, which consists in elucidating the genesis of subjectivity itself, i.e., exploring the history of consciousness and the order in which the various types of experiences and acts are situated in it—is not such an approach, because of its lineage to the Condillacian gesture of a hypothetical return to a first experience, condemned by its very idealizing character?

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The concept of the pre-predicative is located within a problematic constellation, the meaning of which gets delimited right at the beginning of Experience and Judgment: it is the program of a “genealogy of logic” (Genealogie der Logik), which embraces “questions of origin” (Ursprungsfragen) and turns out to be oriented entirely toward an “elucidation of the origin” (Ursprungsklärung) (Husserl 1948, 1). In what sense must the term “origin” be taken here? If the concept of origin inserts itself in the framework of a genetic phenomenology that aims at elucidating the pure ego’s becoming out of the unity of a history, must the scripture retracing this odyssey-of-consciousness thematize, following a strictly empiricist method, the order in which consciousness acquires its knowledge by starting from the level of originary sensations, or of the sensuous perception of external objects? If so, does it have to do with an empiricist derivation from the original level of sensations or sensuous perceptions, or even a reductionist program aiming at reducing all higher order formations of meaning to formations of lower order, until one reaches the original level of the sensuous? In addition, what within the putatively foundational pre-predicative level can take on the cardinal function: is it the noetic forms of perceptual consciousness, i.e., the structures of receptivity, which are supposed to prefigure, on the pre-logical plane, the ideal structures of signification taken in the strictly logical sense? Or still yet, is it the noematic or ontological structures (of entities given in a possible experience) that take on this function of structurally prefigurating the ideal forms of logos? Or do the two planes each in turn play a foundational role? 1 The Regress toward the Pre-predicative: The Pre-predicative and the Pre-logical In order to carry out this regressive inquiry, one should not take the notion of logic in an indeterminate sense: what precisely is it in logic that is led back to its origin? What is the higher-order logical dimension that is taken as a guiding theme for the regressive process? Indeed, even though the logical sphere is at once situated at the level of ideal significations that pertain to logos in the strict sense (Husserl 1976a, 285–6), it is nevertheless stratified and polymorphic: one first finds there the atomic or elementary types of significations that may enter into propositions in the manner of syntactical stuffs (substrates, predicates, relations); next there are the cardinal forms of a propositional judgment, starting with the elementary cell of the simple judgment (is it the predicative judgment?) and extending to the complex forms, obtained thanks to (1) the elementary logical connectors (conjunction, disjunction, implication, etc.), (2) the quantifiers (universal, particular, singular), and (3) the modalizations (actual, possible, contingent, probable, doubtful, necessary, etc.); finally, there are (4) the analytically valid forms of analytical reasoning (modus ponens, modus tollens, etc.), as well as (5) the logical axioms or principles meant to stand at the foundation of all correct inference in forma (principle of non-contradiction, law of

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the excluded middle, double negation). Does the project of a genealogy of logic embrace all of these elements? Does it ambition to take all of (1) the fundamental categories of syntactical stuffs, (2) the original form of a simple judgment, (3) the logical connectors, quantifiers and modalities, (4) the principles of logic, and (5) the analytical forms of reasoning, with a view to anchoring all of them within the pre-predicative sphere? Husserl decides the matter with a terse and almost reductive thesis: “At the center of formal logic” (Zentrum der formalen Logik), as it unfolded historically, he writes, there lies “the concept of the predicative judgment” (Begriff des prädikativen Urteils), in such a way that the “core” of formal logic resides in “apophantic logic,” i.e., a logic of assertoric propositions or, in traditional terms, a “theory of the judgment [Lehre vom Urteil] and its forms” (Husserl 1948, 1/11). Given that the regress toward the pre-predicative sphere is done not on the basis of judgment, in general, but rather on the basis of the predicative judgment, taken as the guide, Husserl needs to show, against the Brentanian or Fregean recusals of the primacy of predication, that the judgment’s essence does in fact lie in its predicative structure (see Staiti 2018, 158); he does so as early as §2 of Experience and Judgment. In the wake of Aristotle, the judgment is assimilated to the assertoric or declaratory proposition (apophansis) which, insofar as it asserts something (kateˉ goroumenon: the predicate) of something (hypokeimenon: the substrate), displays a dual structure, one with two terms (Zweigliedrigkeit) (Husserl 1948, 4). If the Aristotelian tradition, in this way, yields to us an “original model [Urmodell] of judgment,” the following question remains open: is this the unique “primal form” (Urform), or must we admit of two or more co-original forms of the same rank (Husserl 1948, 5/14)? Husserl gives an answer to this in his 1917–18 lecture courses on logic, which have to be analyzed in order to understand why the predicative form is indeed the original cell of all judgments, the foundational infrastructure on which the other forms build, in the manner of superstructures (negation, conjunction, disjunction, modalization, quantification), by way of transformation or combination. Tradition posits the categorical judgment as the original form, yet itself admitting of two fundamental forms, namely, positive and negative judgments. A contrario, Husserl analyzes the categorical judgment in the following way: it implies a “nominal position understood as a fundamental position” (nominale Setzung als Grundsetzung) or as an “infrastructural position” (Untersetzung), which is to say, that of the substrate or the object that has the function of subject in the statement (Subjektgegenstand); and, on its foundation, a “position built on the latter” (darauf gebaute Setzung), which is to say, that of the predicate: the positing-S-as-p (Als-P-Setzen-des-S). Consequently, far from the case in which affirmative and negative propositions are two juxtaposed or co-original forms (gleichursprüngliche Formen), the original position is the predication “S is p,” which lies in only one layer (einschichtig), while the negative proposition is stratified (geschichtet), comprising two noematic strata. The negative proposition is a contra-position, i.e., a second-order

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position directed “against the Being-p-of-S, thus against the position of the predicate”—or more exactly, not against the noetic act of positing (gegen ein Setzen) S as p, but against “that which is posited as it is” (Gesetztes als solches), i.e., its noematic ideal correlate: To the idea that S is p, I reply “no!” One should note here the exact place of the “not”: far from being directed against the proposition as a whole (“It is false that S is p”), it “resides exclusively on the side of the second main member of the judgment, i.e., the predicate” (Husserl 1996, 134–5). Thus, one distinguishes from this negation of the first degree (which belongs to the ideal predicative content) a negation of the second degree, the latter of which is directed against the entire proposition or state-of-affairs: “That S is p, this is not the case.” To such a stratified negation corresponds the affirmation at the same level, which bears on the proposition, and which posits: “That S is p, this is indeed the case.” This implies that beneath the higher degree affirmation and negation, both of which relate to the proposition or the state-of-affairs and express, respectively, an acquiescence (Zustimmung) and a recusal (Verwerfung), one finds the pure and simple assertion (schlichte Behauptung) as the judicative infrastructure, yet devoid of any affirmative or negative assertoric position. It is “an original form that still contains nothing of the yes or no: ‘S is p’, the originally positive judgment, and above this two iterable operations, those of negation and of affirmation” (Husserl 1996, 136–7). Husserl’s position stands opposite Frege’s, which, in line with the principle of an economy of thought, refuses to distinguish between two forms of negation, namely, intra-propositional negation (as an element of the predicate) and the negative assertoric force investing the entire proposition (Frege 1918–19, 154). By giving primacy to the categorical proposition, the paradigmatic and originary character of the predicative form is thereby established: the genealogy of logic can rightly take as guide for its regressive approach the sole predicative structure; it can deal with other logical structures (negation, conjunction, disjunction, modalizations, quantification), meanwhile, only as derivative superstructures. The region reached by this activity of regression can therefore rightly be called pre-predicative. Yet can one call that domain, to which the regression gives access, prelogical? At first glance, it seems so. Indeed, if one analyzes what is proper to logical evidence, one must admit that predicative evidence envelops pre-predicative evidence, which is to say, of the latter, the experience of the substrate(s) on which the judgment comes to bear: “Predicative includes pre-predicative evidence” (Husserl 1973, 52/11). “The theory of prepredicative experience, of precisely that which gives in advance the most original substrates in objectual self-evidence, is the proper first element of the phenomenological theory of judgment” (Husserl 1948, 21/27). This “founding of the self-evidence of judgment in objectual self-evidence” (Husserl 1948, 17/24) is neither, however, immediate nor obvious; on the contrary, it requires several procedures for methodologically leading back to it.

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On the one hand, since any judgment can be repeated in a mechanical way without any actualization of the evidence, it is necessary to return from the blindly reproduced judgment to the judgment accompanied by evidence; on the other hand, with judicative evidence being separable into immediate and mediate kinds, i.e., direct evidence and those founded on the evidence of other judgments, it is necessary to return from mediate evidence to the immediate evidence that lies at their foundation—and these must be both the simplest and the most original in the genetic order (Husserl 1948, 22–5). That being done, one can then analyze the judgment: since the latter assigns a predicate p to a substrate S, the evidence for its truth is the intuitive givenness of the state-of-affairs corresponding to it (the fact that S is p, the being-p-of-S). This evidence of the state-of-affairs (Sachverhalt) is, in turn, founded in the experience of the situation (Sachlage), i.e., the givenness, within receptivity, of the quality p’s relation of inherence to the substrate S (Husserl 1948, 285–6/239–40); and this experience is ultimately founded on the perceptual self-givenness of the thing. For example, the evidence of the fact or state-of-affairs that “snow is white” refers to the experience of the qualitative situation of the inherence of whiteness to snow, and the latter, in turn, refers to the pre-predicative perception of snow as white. But this is not enough. Indeed, the substrate S of the judgment can be a higher degree objectivity, resulting from numerous syntactical operations, as in the example, “The cardinality of the set of real numbers.” In order to regress to the simplest evidence, in this case, it is necessary to implement a principle of reducibility for judicative evidence: any higher-order judicative evidence can be reduced to a judicative evidence of an immediately lower degree and, by referential propagation, to the evidence of a judgment at the ultimate degree, which in the end pertains to the individual substrates of perceptive experience. To put the principle in Carnapian terms: any higher order judgment can lead back to protocol sentences (Husserl 1974, 212– 3/204–6). By way of correlation, this reductive approach also applies to the substrates themselves; among the substrates, one must indeed distinguish between derived and original substrates. The former result from the nominalization of a syntactical operation: for instance, the set of objects A, B, C results, by nominalization, from the conjunction of A and B and C; or alternatively, redness derives from the red quality. The latter are, on the contrary, original, insofar as they neither derive from syntactical operations nor involve within themselves the sense residues of such operations: this pebble, this tiled roof. Starting from a substrate of a high degree, one can then reverse this “essentially necessary sense-history” (wesensmäßige Sinnesgeschichte) (Husserl 1974, 215/207) and deconstruct one-by-one all the acts of syntactical construction, in order to return from the upper substrate to the immediately lower substrate and, in the final analysis, to the ultimate substrates given in the experience of individuals (Husserl 1948, 19/26). In the previous example, from the mathematical cardinality of sets, one can return to the set of real numbers; from the latter to that of rational numbers, and, in like fashion,

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to natural integers, then to singular integers understood as a multiplicity of units, and finally, to the individual objects from which they were drawn by formalization. Through these methodological steps that lead back from the complex to the simple, the superior to the inferior, and the derivative to the original, one reaches the ultimate level, which is foundational for all logical evidence; not solely pre-predicative experience, but the ultimate pre-predicative experience, understood as the givenness of individual objects. The latter would, in this sense, form the absolutely prelogical level: it would be prior to any syntactical activity. However, the main thesis of Experience and Judgment makes it necessary to correct this assimilation of the pre-predicative to the pre-logical or alogical: “Logical activity [logische Leistung] is already present at levels in which it was not recognized by the tradition and . . . , accordingly, the traditional logical problematic begins at a relatively higher level [hohes Stockwerk].” And yet: It is precisely at these lower levels [in jenen Unterschichten] that the concealed presuppositions [verborgene Voraussetzungen] are to be found, on the basis of which the meaning and legitimacy of the higher-level self-­ evidences of the logician [Sinn und Recht der höherstufigen Evidenzen des Logikers] are first and ultimately intelligible [letztlich verständlich werden]. (Husserl 1948, 3/13) What is one to make of this? Here it is necessary to make the fundamental distinction between two meanings of logos: from logos understood in the strict sense as an intentional correlate of meaningful acts of expression (Bedeuten), and as the domain of ideal significations, one must separate logos understood in the broad sense, i.e., as a domain of meaning that does not yet pertain to the ideality of discursive signification, and which therefore remains devoid of all conceptuality as well as of all linguistic expression, and which is the intentional correlate of acts that are at an inferior level, in comparison to signifying acts (Husserl 1976a, 285–6/294–5). In fact, the main benefit that Husserl expects from the genealogical analysis is, in his words, “to attain that comprehensive concept of logic and the logos of which we spoke” (jenes umfassenden Begriffs von Logik und Logos) (Husserl 1948, 3/13), which is to say, to open deeply the meaning of logic by reaching at layers that logic traditionally considered to be pre-logical, i.e., prior and foreign to all logical activity. But what exactly do these lower order layers designate? On the noetic plane, they are levels of consciousness that precede and found the linguistic meaningful acts of expression. They include: (1) the perceptual orientation toward individual objects, (2) the affective and implicitly axiological orientation toward the surroundings, and (3) the pre-objective orientation relative to the data provided by the sensuous field—which is well summarized by the title, “General Structures of Receptivity” (allgemeine Strukturen der Rezeptivität) (Husserl 1948, 73–112/71–102)—but also (4) the acts of apprehension, i.e., the explicating acts of the perceptual moments of

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the object and of the perceptual relations into which it enters (Husserl 1948, 112–230/103–48)—all this before the implementation of any kind of “will to cognition” (Wille zur Erkenntnis) (Husserl 1948, 232/198), or of the desire to firmly establish (Feststellung) what the entity is, or to acquire knowledge endowed with a validity that is both intersubjective (for anyone) and omnitemporal (at all times). Thus, one reaches the pre-predicative sphere by the neutralization of all will to know. On the noematic plane, we have the intentional correlative levels that are prior both to any ideal signification and to any general object. They include: the individual objects given in perception, the still implicit nuances (affective, axiological or esthetic), the concrete fragments and abstract moments of the object that are given to the gaze before any conceptual clarification, the relations that stand in the surroundings (perceptual, affective or practical), as well as the structures of the pre-objective sensuous fields. It is the sphere of the individual in all its forms, and (perhaps) in the unexact forms of generality, which emerge already within the typification of the surrounding world: both the structures of the individual and of vague generality, still untouched by any kind of linguistic conceptuality. What is to be expected from such a regress? One cannot immediately and easily identify the pre-predicative sphere with the perceptual world. Indeed, the return to the pre-predicative always takes place within the perspective of questioning the origin of logic, taken in the strict sense of the logical tradition: it is necessary to regress from the essential logical structures of signification toward the noetic and noematic structures that are present in the lower layers of logos—and to conduct this movement with a view to found the former on a lower level. Yet what exactly does founding (fundieren) mean? If a layer of meaning or of an object is founded on another, this means both that it implies or presupposes it, and that it is built on its foundation (Husserl 1988, 252). Thus, the founding of the structures of ideal logos on those of pre-predicative logos is tantamount to displaying the infralinguistic and infraconceptual level that serves as the base for the discursive elaboration of these structures; but it also comes to showing how the latter foreshadow the former. The whole genealogic project is therefore dominated by an isomorphism thesis of all the different layers of noetic activity: With the expression ‘judgment,’ a general essence [allgemeines Wesen] is denoted which, in its basic structure [seiner Grundstruktur nach], is the same at all levels of logical activity [in allen den Stufen logischer Leistung . . . dasselbe ist] in which it occurs. (Husserl 1948, 59/58) On the one hand, whatever degree of complexity the various modes of syntactical combination and transformation grant to the act of judgment, its structure remains the same as those of lower level judgments (the protocol

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sentences referred to individual judgments); this is where the fundamental forms of predication, negation, conjunction, quantification, and modalization are to be seen. On the other hand, these elementary syntactical forms are, more importantly, involved already in acts of judgment in the broad sense, namely either in the objectifying acts prior to any kind of discursivity or in the modes of the pre-predicative orientation toward entities given in experience: With every pre-predicative, objectifying turning-toward an existent [auch schon bei jeder vorprädikativen vergegenständlichenden Zuwendung zu einem Seienden], it is already necessary to speak of an act of judgment in the broader sense [im weiteren Sinn von einem Urteilen] . . . . The term ‘judgment’ taken in this sense is then the name for the totality of objectivating (objectifying) ego-acts [Gesamtheit der objektivierenden (vergegenständlichenden) Ichakte]; in the language of Ideas, of doxical ego-acts [doxische Ichakte]. (Husserl 1948, 62–3/61) Here the final aim of the genealogical project gets revealed: it is to uncover, at the heart of the pure and simple consciousness of the individual object, the structural matrix of all the elementary syntactical categories; it is to highlight the isomorphism that lies between the strong syntax of logical operators put forward by tradition and the weak syntax that already structures the experience of individual objects. This applies for the general categories of signification, i.e., the genera of syntactical stuffs (substantives, adjectives, relations): these find their prepredicative origin in the ultimate kernels (letzte Kerne) of experience, namely, the absolute subjects, the ultimate predicates, and the ultimate relations that are given in the experience of objects (Husserl 1974, 210–1/202–3), e.g., the perceptual datum of the tiled roof, the tiles’ redness, and the spatial position of the tiles. It applies as well to the syntactical forms: negation finds its origin in the consciousness of negativity or of the “not,” i.e., in the deception of a perceptual anticipation (Husserl 1948, 94–8/88–91); conjunction certainly finds its origin in the perception of a figural moment, of a plurality perceived as a unity (e.g., an alley of trees, a flock of birds). Such is also the case with judgments: these have their structural prefiguration in “propositions [Posita] in the Realm of Representations” (Sätze im Gebiet der Vorstellungen), which are by no means propositions in the discursive sense, but which designate (by etymologically tracing back Satz to the verb setzen, to posit) the positional acts of an object in experience, implying within themselves the unity of an objective meaning (e.g., this white paper in front of me) and of a thetic character (e.g., truly existent) (Husserl 1976a, 305/117). Finally, regarding modalities: these have their origin in the doxic modalizations of the consciousness of an individual object, i.e., modifications of perceptual certainty that account for the fact that an object can appear as doubtful, possible, and so on. (Husserl 1948, 99–112/91–101)

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One can take note of the narrow articulation, and even of the surreptitious shift that is at play here from the noematic plane to the noetic one. Indeed, some logical structures have their origin in the ontological structures of the object given in experience: such is the case for the adjective and for the relation. Others, on the contrary, have their origin in the noetic structures of the consciousness of an object: this is the case for negation and the modalities. Still others have their origin in both the noetic structures of the perceptual interest and the noematic structures of the object: thus, the substrate’s form arises from the concentration of perceptual interest upon a given center—which, starting as a fragment of the object or as an abstract moment thereof, thereby becomes a substrate-object in its own right—but also from such ultimate substrates as are the natural objective units of our experience (Husserl 1948, 124–5, 147–8/112–3, 130–1). Thus, in asking the question as to whether the origin of the logical categories is ontological or noetic, which is to say, whether they are anchored in the object of experience or in the experience of the object, or again, in noematic or noetic structures, it is not possible to give a unilateral and clear-cut answer: the structures of ideal logos have a polymorphic origin on several levels of experience, and the phenomenologist’s task is precisely to know how to move his gaze so as to decipher its various genealogical strata. 2 The Three Deconstruction Methods Involved in the Regress to the Pre-predicative Our objective being to regress below the aiming of ideal significations and general objects, i.e., to regress below the sphere of language, all the way back to the infra-linguistic level of the structures of receptivity, it is necessary to implement a certain number of methods of thematic abstraction, reduction, or deconstruction (Abbau) of all the higher levels of intentional activity (scientific, logical in the strict sense, discursive), in order to be able to go back to a lower stratum, still devoid of any kind of ideality and of all higher degree activities. In Experience and Judgment, these methods are not presented by Landgrebe in a strict order; nevertheless, it is possible to reassemble and exhibit them in the requisite order. 1

The first reductive procedure required is also the most famous one: the deconstruction of idealizing acts and their idealized intentional correlates, which cover and veil the life-world (Lebenswelt). Indeed, “the retrogression to the world of experience is a retrogression to the ‘life-world’” (Rückgang auf die Lebenswelt), understood as both the world in which we live, i.e., the all-encompassing horizon to which all our intentional acts relate, and the “ground for all cognitive performance and all scientific determination,” namely the infrastructure that stands prior to all theoretical acts (Husserl 1948, 38/41). However, just as for Bergson, the access to the immediate data of consciousness is by no means

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immediate, neither is the access to this nuclear stratum of the world immediate; it does not offer itself directly to the gaze. Indeed, “the world in which we live . . . is always already pre-given to us as impregnated by the precipitate of logical operations” (immer schon vorgegeben als durchsetzt mit dem Niederschlag logischer Leistungen) (Husserl 1948, 39/42; see Staiti 2018, 159). The world offered to experience is not a world devoid of the results of idealizing and determining activity, but to the contrary, it has a historical thickness charged with the whole scientific tradition. Indeed, it is a world defined by the a priori “idea of the determinability ‘in itself’ of what exists” (Husserl 1948, 49–50/42–3); it is stamped with the project of scientific determination of the existent: namely, the orientation toward the existent as it is in itself, i.e., the ideal of objectivity (Objektivität), or in other words, the will to produce statements endowed with omnitemporal and intersubjective validity (“once and for all” and “for everyone”). From this disposition follows the presupposition of the possibility for the sciences to determine the world, to have it dominated by the exact methods of the natural sciences. Now, such a programmatic Idea requires idealizing acts of the world of experience, which include the following. First of all, in accordance with a famous page from Il Saggiatore by Galileo (Galilei 1890–1909, VI, 347), sensuous (or secondary) qualities, which, given their validity relative only to a single subject, must be eliminated in order to let only the non-sensuous (or primary) qualities remain, which possess an intersubjective validity and pertain to the pure forms of time, space, and causality (the common sensibles). Second, such common sensibles must undergo a process of mathematization or geometricization, i.e., the exactification (Exaktmachung) of the morphological (or unexact) idealities (straight, round, flat, oval, etc.) which, by passing to the limit, transforms them into exact idealities, absolutely defined (line, circle, plane, ellipse, etc.) and makes it possible to represent bodies existing in nature through geometrical figures (Husserl 1976a, 154–5/166–7, 1976b, 21–32). Third, the secondary qualities, or sensible plena, must undergo indirect mathematization, a process which, by making them correspond with primary qualities or pure mathematizable forms, according to a rule (for example, a wavelength for a color), allows for the co-idealization of sensible plena (Husserl 1976b, 32–40). Finally, the pre-scientific notion of causality (i.e., the vague idea that bodies have their “habits” [Gewohnheiten] and “comport themselves similarly in similar circumstances”) must give over to the thesis that there is a “universal exact causality” (universale exakte Kausalität), namely, the a priori acceptation that “a universal inductivity [universale Induktivität] applies in the world of intuition,” which is to say, that natural phenomena are governed by exact laws consisting in constant relations between mathematical quantities (Husserl 1976b, 28–9; 37–8). As a result, far from being immediately given in an intuitive purity, “the world of our experience is interpreted beforehand by resorting to

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2

an ‘idealization’” (von vornherein . . . gedeutet unter Zuhilfenahme einer “Idealisierung”). Since the idealizing methods have covered up the intuitive world with a “garment of Ideas” (geometrical Ideas, exact causality), “we take for true being what is [really] a method,” by substituting for the perceptual entity the entity in itself, determined with exactitude, supposing it to be both its true ontological substrate and its causal background (Husserl 1976b, 51–2). Such is the exact meaning of the word substruction: that which is an intentional correlate of a higher degree, built on the perceptual stratum, is fallaciously transformed into the primary layer of the object, as a cause in itself that produces the observable appearances and that is located under them. To restore the pre-predicative world in its intuitive content it is necessary to deconstruct all these idealizing procedures by a methodical abstraction, in order to regress, away from the “judgments of experience” that are endowed with objective validity and incorporated to the world as it is offered to the eye (Husserl 1948, 41/44), unto the “judgments of perception” and, beyond these, unto the pure perceptions now purified of all implicit or inherited idealization. In neutralizing any will to objective truth and any teleological orientation toward the existent in itself, one comes to deconstruct (1) the Idea of exact causality, in order to return to the vague habits that physical bodies have; (2) the geometrical Ideas, in order to go back to morphological or descriptive idealities; and (3) the exclusivity of primary qualities, in order to restore, to their proper place, the sensuous qualities, and in so doing, to give back to the world its color. In this way, it is possible to carry out the methodical restitution of the pre-predicative sphere and thereby to disclose it as a nuclear stratum that had constituted, without our knowing it, the ground of all our judgments (contra Staiti 2018, 164–8). Even though this reduction of scientific exactness may be the most famous undertaking, it should not hide the other abstractions necessary. Indeed, one must also implement a deconstruction of the linguistic ideality that is linked to the use of general terms. For even when all scientific idealization has been neutralized for the benefit of a return to experience: A certain idealization is already present in judgments of experience in that we designate by general names [mit allgemeinen Namen bezeichnen] the substrates chosen as exemplary; the objects thus designated are then assumed to be familiar to at least the linguistic community concerned [bekannt für die betreffende Sprachgemeinschaft]. (Husserl 1948, 58/57–8) In every empirical judgment there remains a linguistic idealization below its scientific counterpart: insofar as individual objects are designated by general terms (tree, bush, dog, etc.), they are at once grasped as exemplifications of general linguistic concepts. Now, insofar as the move

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to “designate as” provokes a corresponding move to “see or perceive as,” the intervention of general concepts induces a conceptual shaping of the experience of an individual object: the object is at once perceived as belonging to a type or a general species (as a tree, a bush, a dog, etc.), rather than as a this-here that possesses such and such singular determinations capable of being given in experience (a given set of sensuous qualities, a given form, a given extension, etc.). In reference to the process described by Hegel in the Phenomenology of Spirit, the very utterance of an empirical state-of-affairs impresses upon it the form of conceptual generality; to this, Husserl adds that such linguistic impregnation of experience entails a conceptual mediatization of the access to the individual, with the result that one never experiences the individual as such. One can think here of the thesis defended by McDowell according to which there is an inextricable union of sensibility and understanding: even though perceptual receptivity includes an irreducible part of sensuous passivity, it necessarily implies acts of language inasmuch as it is oriented to objects: to perceive this object as being this or that is hardly possible without an act of linguistic understanding of the categories in question (McDowell 1996, 46). This linguistic framing of experience proves, moreover, always to be relative to a particular language, which itself refers to a linguistic community, with a limited intersubjectivity able to understand this language. From the moment, therefore, that I use general terms to designate a singular object or apprehend it as an element of a class, I myself exemplify the general function of a speaker speaking this language, or a subject understanding it, and in this way I summon the linguistic community to which I belong. In doing so, I give to the object, perceived as an example of . . ., an ideal character, in the manner of an intersubjective validity, which goes infinitely beyond my own experience. In order to recapture the pre-predicative dimension of my experience in its purity, it is necessary to perform the process of a linguistic epocheˉ, which is to say, a joint abstraction from (1) the linguistic idealities I employ, (2) the limited intersubjective validity of the language I speak, and (3) the language community to which I belong: In order now to arrive at an original act of judgment . . . , we must act as if the operations were precisely my own completely original acquisitions [jeweils meine ganz ursprüngliche Erwerbe], without any such reference to a community already there. (Husserl 1948, 58/57) One can see here a dimension of the reduction to the sphere of ownness— carried out in the Fifth Meditation—namely the specific thematic epocheˉ that consists in excluding, in thought, all the modes of intentionality, which, in a mediate or immediate way, involve a foreign subjectivity (Husserl 1973, 124–5/92–3). The layer of intersubjectivity to be neutralized comprises the acts of designating as and of perceiving as; for, insofar

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3

as they embrace the fact that linguistic expressions possess a meaning communicable to anyone, they imply a “first idealization—that of being valid for a linguistic community” (Geltens für eine Sprachgemeinschaft) (Husserl 1948, 58/57). Thus, in order to achieve a double regress, it is a question of putting out of play this mode of intersubjective validity in language. First, one must regress from the intersubjective validity of a shared language to the exclusively egoïc validity of a private language whose meaning signifies only for me; in other words, the originary logical activity must be the “activity of a single subject” (Leistung eines Subjekts), i.e., me (Husserl 1948, 59/58). But more profoundly, since the ideality of all linguistic sense already implies “a first and fundamental sense of ‘everyone’ [erster Sinn von Jedermann], and therefore of ‘others’ [also auch von Anderen]” (Husserl 1974, 247/240), it is also necessary to bracket all languages and all idealities of linguistic sense in general, because they imply the property of being able to be understood by anyone. It is necessary, therefore, to neutralize the conceptual framing of the perceptual apprehension of objects in the surrounding world, i.e., all membership of the individual object in a class, or even all seeing as . . . referred to general species. In so doing, one is regressing to “a world only for me” (Welt nur für mich) (Husserl 1948, 59/58), a world that, stripped of all impregnation by linguistic generalities, is reduced to a horizon of pure individual things, pure “this-here” things. It is a world in which I myself, in the solitude of a private experience that is not yet opposed to any common or public experience, can explore the eidetic stock as well as the contingent properties, without exceeding the ambit of the purely egoïc validity—the infra-linguistic world of private experience (see Carr 1974, 208; Seebohm 1997, 144–5; Staiti 2018, 159). A third reduction turns out to be necessary: the reduction of all cultural significations, as well as of all references to a particular cultural intersubjectivity and to a particular social community. Within the experience of the surrounding world, one must indeed make a distinction between simple and founded experiences (schlichte und fundierte Erfahrungen). If this distinction, made in the Sixth Logical Investigation, corresponds to the divide between sensuous objects and objectivities of the understanding, it breaks free from it and retains only its structural character: simple experiences are single-rayed (einstrahlig), and their correlate contains only one layer of objective sense (einschichtig), while founded experiences are multi-rayed (vielstrahlig) and their correlate includes several strata (vielschichtig) (Husserl 1984, 674–5/282–3). This structural character makes it possible to distinguish between nature and culture. Material nature, on the one hand, is a “world of substrates that can be grasped in a purely sensuous way” (Welt schlicht sinnlich erfaßbarer Substrate), i.e., a world of substrates involving one layer of sense alone, and given in a single ray of intentional acts, namely, those of sensuous perception. On the other hand, objects from the cultural

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environment (everyday objects, utensils, works of art, etc.) involve several layers of sense, which are themselves relative to a plurality of noetic layers. In addition to being sensory things, cultural objects comprehend a new stratum, namely, that of “predicates of signification” (Prädikate der Bedeutung) or of “spiritual signification” (geistige Bedeutung)—for instance, functional predicates or predicates of practical use (e.g., the hammer is used to drive nails), or axiological predicates of utility or beauty (e.g., the statue is an object of worship and a work of art), etc. (Husserl 1952, 185–8/194–8). Such predicates refer to the establishment of a practical or axiological meaning, which merges with material objects; they are transmitted from generation to generation by tradition as stable, intersubjective assets, and they are accessible time and again to any subject of the cultural community through an act of “understanding the predicates of signification” (Verstehen der Bedeutungsprädikate) (Husserl 2002, 122–5). The fact that predicates of cultural sense are founded (fundiert), i.e., that they are of a higher degree (höherstufig) than material nature, means both that they presuppose it as an infrastructure and that they are built on its foundation; thereby, the natural object becomes the “expression of cultural being-sense” (Ausdruck von geistigem Seinssinn) and acquires the function of expressivity (Husserl 1948, 55/55). It is for this reason such an analysis regarding the foundation of sense strata also applies to expressions readable on a human body. Yet, due to this foundational hierarchy of layers, nature appears as the foundational stratum and as the condition for the possibility of all experience of objects and of an environment in general: For something to be given as useful, beautiful, alarming, terrifying, attractive, or whatever, it is necessary that it be something present and sensuously apprehensible [irgendwie sinnlich erfaßbar anwesend], given in immediate sense experience [in unmittelbarer sinnlicher Erfahrung gegeben] . . . . Thus, in the world of experience, nature is the lowest level, that which founds all others [unterste, alle anderen fundierende Schichte]. (Husserl 1948, 54/53–4) On the one hand, the core of sensuous accessibility is presupposed by all experiences of a cultural object; on the other hand, any variation of the practical or aesthetic sense, in regard to the same object, leaves, as an invariable residue persisting beneath the change, that pure sensuous object. Now, the layer of expressivity inherent in the object refers to a cultural co-humanity, i.e., that of all subjects able to partake in the same understanding experience with a view to recapture the cultural signification of objects in the surrounding world (an ability which can, respectively, actualize the meaning of a totem or of a church, of a shield or a computer, etc.). Therefore, this layer involves a form of idealization which is parallel to the idealization that occurs within the linguistic sphere and which yields a shared validity of sense for

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the object, in reference to a limited intersubjectivity. In other words, since the apprehension of the objects implies the “recognition of their general validity” (Anerkennung ihrer allgemeinen Geltung) (Husserl 2002, 125), a primary sense of “everyone” is summoned here also. Thus, in order to return to the world of purely egoïc experience, it is necessary to neutralize this intersubjectivity and, by abstraction, to eliminate the stratum of cultural meaning: In order to attain the truly ultimate and original self-evidences of prepredicative experience, we must go back from these founded experiences to the simplest [von diesen fundierten Erfahrungen zurückgehen müssen auf die schlichtesten], and thus leave all expression out of play [allen Ausdruck außer Funktion setzen]. (Husserl 1948, 56/56) In this way, we reach once again a world that is only for me: a world that is reduced (by the removal of all cultural meaning) to sensuous perception alone, and therefore a “pure universal nature” (pure universale Natur), passively pregiven and, moreover (by putting others and all intersubjectivity out of play), perceivable by me alone. It is a world of pure, sensuous substrates, of primary substances, of bodies given in external experience; it is a world that allows reflection to restore the primitive logical acts, namely, those of the pure and simple being-posited of a perceptual object (see Villela-Petit 1996, 247; Staiti 2018, 164–8). 3 The Status of the Pre-predicative What is the status of the pre-predicative sphere thus attained? For Husserl, is it a question of taking up a practical and normative aim by calling us to a form of life that is still wild, not yet domesticated by the rules of logos and of culture, and that would constitute the heart of the life of consciousness? Is it to take up a theoretical aim by restoring phenomenality in a raw state, not yet shaped by the linguistic and logical laws of syntax and of semantics? Far from such aims, the reconstruction of the pre-predicative makes sense only within Husserl’s deployment of the genealogical Rückfrage toward the origin of logic (reduced to the sole origin of predicative judgment and its elementary variants). The pre-predicative is the term reached by a methodic process directed toward the restitution of the primitive layers of intentional acts and of sense presupposed by the ideal logos of logic, and upon which the latter was built by forgetting them. Thus, the entire deployment of this genesis of logic is governed by the fundamental thesis regarding the holism of intentional life: it certainly belongs to the method of transcendental phenomenology to proceed layer by layer, following the order of foundation, and to elucidate reflexively within each layer the operations that constitute the relative object therein (res temporalis, res extensa, res materialis, living being, animated being, person, society, etc.); nevertheless, this analytic procedure

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must be counterbalanced by the idea that “intentionality is not something isolated” (Intentionalität ist nichts Isoliertes), but rather, that any mode of intentionality, when taken separately as a theme, must then be replaced into the whole life of consciousness, and thus referred to the modes it presupposes and from which it arises, as well as to those to which it is teleologically related (Husserl 1974, 269/262). Such is the case here for the intentional acts of logical life: if, as Levinas says, “Phenomenology states concepts without ever destroying the scaffolding that made it possible to climb up to them” (Levinas 1974, 204), it is necessary to restore the ground and the scaffolding that allowed for the emergence of the meaningful acts of expression and the ideal significations: the apophantic formalization, predication, the syntactical operations, quantification, and modalizations. And if a distinction has been made between the ideal logos of the logical tradition and the logos of the still mute experience, the regress from the former to the latter allows one to regain “logos in its nascent state” (Merleau-Ponty 1989, 67). References Bégout, Bruce (2000), La généalogie de la logique, Paris: Vrin. Carr, David (1974), Phenomenology and the Problem of History: A Study of Husserl’s Transcendental Philosophy, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. ———. (1977), “Husserl’s Problematic Concept of the Life-World,” in Frederick Elliston and Peter McCormick (eds.), Husserl: Expositions and Appraisals, Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 202–12. Courtine, Jean-François (ed.) (1996), Phénoménologie et logique, Paris: Presses de l’ENS. Crowell, Steven Galt (2001), Husserl, Heidegger and the Space of Meaning, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. De Gandt, François (2004), Husserl et Galilée. Sur la crise des sciences européennes, Paris: Vrin. Ferencz-Flatz, Christian and Staiti Andrea (2018), The Promise of Genetic Phenomenology, Studia Phaenomenologica XVIII, Bucharest: Zeta Books. Frege, Gottlob (1918–19), “Die Verneinung,” Beiträge zur Philosophie des deutschen Idealismus 1: 143–57. Galilei, Galileo (1890–1909), “Opere di Galileo Galilei: Edizione nazionale,” in A. Favaro (ed.), Il Saggiatore, vol. 6, Firenze: G. Barberà. Husserl, Edmund (1948), Erfahrung und Urteil, Hamburg: Glassen & Goverts, 1948; trans. J. S. Churchill and K. Ameriks, Experience and Judgment, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973. ———. (1952), Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, Bd. II: Phänomenologische Untersuchungen zur Konstitution, ed. M. Biemel, Hua IV, The Hague: M. Nijhoff; trans. R. Rojcewicz and A. Schuwer, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy, II: Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution, Dordrecht/Boston/London: Kluwer, 1989. ———. (1973), Cartesianische Meditationen und Pariser Vorträge, ed. S. Strasser, Hua I, The Hague: M. Nijhoof; trans. D. Cairns, Cartesian Meditations, The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1960. ———. (1974), Formale und transzendentale Logik. Versuch einer Kritik der logischen Vernunft, ed. P. Janssen, Hua XVII, Den Haag: M. Nijhoff; trans. D. Cairns, Formal and Transcendental Logic, The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1969.

Husserl on the Pre-predicative 73 ———. (1976a), Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, Bd. I, ed. K. Schuhmann, Hua III/1, Dordrecht: Kluwer; trans. F. Kersten, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy, I, The Hague, M. Nijhoff, 1983. ———. (1976b), Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie, ed. W. Biemel, Hua VI, The Hague: M. Nijhoff; trans. D. Carr, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970. ———. (1984), Logische Untersuchungen, Zweiter Band, Zweiter Teil: VI. Untersuchung, Untersuchungen zur Theorie und Phänomenologie der Erkenntnis, Hua XIX/2, ed. U. Panzer, The Hague/Boston/Lancaster: M. Nijhoff; trans. J. N. Findlay, Logical Investigations, vol. II, ed. D. Moran, New York and London: Routledge, 2001. ———. (1988), Vorlesungen über Ethik und Wertlehre 1908–1914, ed. U. Melle, Dordrecht: Kluwer. ———. (1996), Logik und allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie. Vorlesungen 1917/18, ed. U. Panzer, Hua XXX, Dordrecht: Kluwer. ———. (2002), Natur und Geist. Vorlesungen Sommersemester 1919, ed. M. Weiler, Hua Materialien IV, Dordrecht/Boston, MA/London: Kluwer. Kern, Iso (1989), “Statische und genetische Methode,” in R. Bernet, I. Kern, and E. Marbach (eds.), Edmund Husserl: Darstellung seines Denkens, Hamburg: F. Meiner. Levinas, Emmanuel (1974), Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence, Den Haag: M. Nijhoff (Paris: Livre de poche). Lohmar, Dieter (1996a), “La genèse du jugement antéprédicatif dans les Recherches logiques et dans Expérience et jugement,” Courtine 1996: 217–38. ———. (1996b), “Zu der Entstehung und den Ausgangsmaterialien von Edmund Husserls Werk Erfahrung und Urteil,” Husserl Studies 13: 31–71. ———. (1998), Erfahrung und kategoriales Denken. Hume, Kant und Husserl über vorprädikative Erfahrung und prädikative Erkenntnis, Dordrecht/Boston, MA/London: Kluwer. ———. (2012), “Genetic Phenomenology,” in S. Luft and S. Overgaard (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Phenomenology, London/New York: Routledge, 266–75. Luft, Sebastian (2011), Subjectivity and Lifeworld in Transcendental Phenomenology, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. McDowell, John (1996), Mind and World, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996. Merleau-Ponty (1989), Le primat de la perception et ses conséquences philosophiques, Bulletin de la Société française de Philosophie 41 (4) (Oct–Dec 1947); reprinted in Le primat de la perception et ses conséquences philosophiques; précédé de Projet de travail sur la nature de la perception (1933) et La nature de la perception (1934), Paris: Cynara. Piazza, Tommaso (2003), “Is Husserl a Theorist of Non-conceptual Content?” Leitmotiv 3: 195–206. Seebohm, Thomas (1997), “Individuals, Identity, Names: Phenomenological Considerations,” in B. Hopkins (ed.), Husserl in Contemporary Context: Prospects and Projects for Phenomenology, Dordrecht: Kluwer, 115–50. Staiti, Andrea (2018), “Pre-predicative Experience and Life-World: Two Distinct Projects in Husserl’s Late Phenomenology,” in D. Zahavi (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the History of Phenomenology, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 155–72. Villela-Petit, Maria (1996), “L’expérience anté-prédicative,” Courtine 1996: 239–60.

4

Husserlian Phenomenology, Rule-Following, and Primitive Normativity Jacob Rump

This chapter outlines a Husserlian phenomenological approach to debates in the philosophy of language about rule-following and the normativity of meaning, following some of Husserl’s own remarks about meaning and the status of rules. While Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology predates Ludwig Wittgenstein’s introduction of these issues in the late 1930s and 1940s as well as Saul Kripke’s influential reintroduction of them in the 1980s, Husserl was interested in many of the same broad issues, especially concerning the objectivity and intersubjectivity of meaning vis-à-vis normativity. Sketching a Husserlian solution to the rule-following paradox will not only provide an occasion to interpret his phenomenological approach to these issues; it will also allow me to show how this approach bypasses certain presuppositions about meaning common in the period of the linguistic turn—presuppositions also questioned, in different ways, by Wittgenstein himself, by Kripke, and more recently by Hannah Ginsborg. In Section 1, I introduce Kripke’s formulation of the rule-following paradox and identify some concepts that will need to be addressed in any phenomenological solution to it: dispositionalist arguments for reductionism about meaning; anti-reductionism about meaning; and the normativity of meaning. Section 2 examines Ginsborg’s recent approach, which seeks a middle way between full reductionism and anti-reductionism about meaning while holding on to the notion that meaning is grounded in “primitive normativity.” I go on in Section 3 to show how Husserlian phenomenology is grounded in a different version of primitive normativity, one that maintains a direct connection between primitive normativity and meaning at the level not of language but of intentionality, exhibited in perception itself. On this view, perception is understood not simply as a mode of access to facts guaranteeing objectivity, but as the continued, lived unfolding of experience that points beyond those facts to broader intentional horizons of possible meaning. Section 4 demonstrates how this account, like Ginsborg’s, relies on the notion of a more primitive level of judgment but locates such judgment in embodied practices, the normative grounding of which is ultimately for Husserl—as for Kripke and Wittgenstein—not individual but communal. Section 5 argues that this interpretation of Husserl amounts to what Kripke would call a “sceptical solution” to the rule-following paradox, in that it

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accepts the sceptical insight that meaning cannot be reduced to an account of facts; thus, while it resists reductionism about meaning, it also insists that this insight does not affect the status of meaning as characteristic of our everyday lives and experiences. The phenomenological solution is thus not really a middle way at all, but rather a different, more refined version of anti-reductionism—one that takes meaning itself, though not exclusively in the guise of language or concepts—to be primitive. 1 Rule-Following, Dispositions, and Normativity Interest in Wittgenstein’s remarks on rule-following was renewed in Kripke’s 1982 Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, wherein he introduces the idea of a particular sort of scepticism—“meaning scepticism”—that challenges our very conception of linguistic meaning. Following Wittgenstein, Kripke sketches a paradox using an arithmetical example—though he emphasizes that the paradox applies to meaningful language use in general (1982, 7). The meaning in question is that of the term “plus” or the sign “+,” either of which we can interpret as standing for the rule of addition. The notion of a rule is important here because it seems to capture the idea that the relevant meaning should apply to an indefinite and potentially infinite number of future cases (1982, 7–8). Only in this way can I see my current usage as conforming with my past usage, and thus be sure of what I meant. Now, Kripke says, suppose I am faced with a new computational problem that I have never solved before: 68 + 57. I solve the problem, arriving at the sum of 125, confident that my answer is correct both in the arithmetical sense that 125 is the sum of 68 and 57, and in the metalinguistic sense that ‘plus’, as I intended to use that word in the past, denoted a function which, when applied to the numbers I called ‘68’ and ‘57’, yields the value 125. (1982, 8) But then suppose, Kripke says, that I am faced with an objection from a “bizarre sceptic” not on the arithmetic but on the metalinguistic level: Perhaps, he suggests, as I used the term ‘plus’ in the past, the answer I intended for ‘68+57’ should have been ‘5’! . . . If I am now so confident that, as I used the symbol ‘+’, my intention was that ‘68+57’ should turn out to denote 125, this cannot be because I explicitly gave myself instructions that 125 is the result of performing the addition in this particular instance. By hypothesis, I did no such thing. But of course the idea is that, in this new instance, I should apply the very same function or rule that I applied so many times in the past. But who is to say what function this was? In the past I gave myself only a finite number of examples instantiating this function. All, we have supposed, involved

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numbers smaller than 57. So perhaps in the past I used ‘plus’ and ‘+’ to denote a function which I will call ‘quus’ and symbolize by ‘[quus symbol]’. It is defined by: x [quus] y = x + y, if x, y < 57 = 5 otherwise. (1982, 8–9) What fact can I, the speaker, appeal to, in order to prove that I previously meant “plus” and not “quus”—that the intention behind my previous usage was addition, and not “quaddition?” This amounts not simply to the epistemological question about how I know that I meant “plus” and not “quus,” but also to the metaphysical question in virtue of what is it the case that I meant “plus” and not “quus?” (1982, 39). The point of the sceptical paradox is not simply to throw doubt on my introspective certainty concerning my own intentions as a speaker, but rather to throw doubt on the whole notion of meaning: if there is no fact of the matter determinant of our meaning-intentions, then how does anyone ever mean anything at all? The relevance of the notion of rule-following for giving an account of meaning is evident in the fact that—put very generally—we take meaning to be a phenomenon governed by objective parameters not exclusively in the control of the speaker. Unless constraints of some sort are determined for it in advance, it seems, my meaning-intentions could amount to anything at all: there would be no objectivity constraint external to my individual thinking—no fact of the matter—which determines what I intended to mean in using a word, and thus, in the addition case, there is nothing to which I can appeal to prove that I in fact meant “plus” instead of “quus.” In order for there to be such an objective predetermination, it seems we need in some way to reduce my meaning in uttering a word or a sentence to something not of the same order as that meaning, on pain of regress: it cannot be the case that the rule-following that is determinant of the meaning of a given pattern of linguistic usage itself results from following an antecedent (linguistic) rule—a rule for following a rule—for then the antecedent rule would itself be a rule the following of which could only be explained by a further antecedent one, and so on. At some point, in order to avoid the regress, it must be possible to reduce linguistic meaning to something outside the linguistic domain altogether. At first glance, it might seem plausible to accomplish this by reduction from language to the domain of concepts as the vehicle of mental content underlying and giving meaning to linguistic expressions. However, this only pushes the problem back: we will now need to find the rules for correct concept application in terms of antecedent conceptual rules. As Paul Boghossian has noted, the sceptical arguments Kripke advances call into question not only linguistic meaning, but also meaning as a function of concepts or a language of thought, and thus seem to call into question the notion of mental content as such (1989, 510–4).

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The most obvious remaining candidate for reductionism about meaning is some sort of fact about my dispositions. Kripke sums up the dispositionalist response to the paradox thus: True, my actual thoughts and responses in the past do not differentiate between the plus and the quus hypotheses; but, even in the past, there were dispositional facts about me that did make such a differentiation. To say that in fact I meant plus in the past is to say—as surely was the case!—that had I been queried about ‘68 + 57’, I would have answered ‘125’. By hypothesis I was not in fact asked, but the disposition was present none the less. (1982, 23) While Kripke advances several arguments against such dispositionalism, the most important for our purposes is the claim that any attempt to account for my past meaning in terms of dispositional facts about my past states will ultimately run up against the normativity of meaning: At most, dispositional facts could explain what a given human being will mean in future uses of a word. But our meaningful usage of language is premised upon an understanding of meaning not as a function of what a speaker will in fact mean, in future utterances, but of what they should mean in those utterances. To see this, we need only consider Kripke’s examples of ways in which the speaker’s intention could go wrong (e.g., in the arithmetic example): “computational error, finiteness of my capacity, and other disturbing factors may lead me to be disposed not to respond as I should, but if so, I have not acted in accord with my intentions.” It is the normativity governing these intentions for future usage, not the fact(s) about my dispositions, that must ultimately ground my response in the sense of making it meaningful, and thus “the relation of meaning and intention to future action is normative, not descriptive” (1982, 37). In light of this normativity constraint, Kripke’s sceptic challenges dispositionalist positions (and reductionist positions more broadly) by questioning the existence of any fact determinant of meaning-intentions (Kripke 1982, 28). The “sceptical solution” Kripke attributes to Wittgenstein is antireductionist (or non-reductionist; I take the terms to be interchangeable) in that it accepts that there is no such fact. But it also insists that this solution leaves untouched the conviction of our everyday experience, “that when people speak of themselves and others as meaning something by their words, as following rules, they do so with perfect right” (1982, 69). I argue below that this conviction—that in spite of the sceptical paradox, meaning is always already evident in our experience—is essential for any phenomenological approach to the issue of rule-following. One of the great difficulties raised by the rule-following paradox is that this normativity constraint is in tension with the objectivity constraint discussed above. The reductionist will claim that, in its zeal to give credence to the normativity of meaning, anti-reductionism risks downplaying the very

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Table 4.1 Two views of meaning View of Meaning

Constraints Met (and How Met)

Reductionism Objectivity (dispositional facts as (dispositionalism) inherently objective) Problem: fails to meet normativity constraint Standard Normativity (meaning as inherently anti-reductionism normative) Problem: fails to meet objectivity constraint

Foundational Level Facts

Meaning (meaning = linguistic, conceptual)

aspect of meaning that makes it seem intuitively akin to rule-following to begin with. The whole point of thinking about meaning in terms of rules is to explain the way in which language can be shared and used objectively and thus publicly, and the anti-reductionist move does not adequately ground the sort of objectivity that the ability for linguistic communication entails insofar as it fails to escape the picture of meaning as consisting exclusively of the subjective intentions of the speaker—precisely the problem that first raised the paradox and left us unable to identify our language use with “plus” instead of “quus.” Put differently, even if meaning is in some sense normative, what I should mean by a word cannot simply be a matter of whatever I subjectively feel like meaning; meaning must meet the objectivity constraint by being somehow governed by rules that pertain to something outside the will or whims of the subject. We can summarize this discussion in Table 4.1. 2 Ginsborg on Primitive Normativity Given these parameters, one obvious strategy for dealing with the rulefollowing paradox is to attempt to do justice to both the objectivity constraint and the normativity constraint through some sort of “middle way” between the extremes of reductionism and anti-reductionism. In recent work, Hannah Ginsborg attempts such a middle way by appeal to the notion of primitive normativity. In an important passage in her well-known 2011 essay on the topic, she extends familiar discussions of rule-following via examples of the use of arithmetical language to an example of the acquisition of color concepts. We are asked to imagine a child without mastery of color concepts, who, following the example of an adult who does have such mastery, successfully sorts out all the green members of a set of objects of various sizes and shapes, despite her lack of mastery of the word “green” or the concept green. Despite this lack of mastery, Ginsborg claims, the child’s successful completion of the sorting procedure is normative in the sense that it amounts to a kind of judging: it is plausible that she does so with a sense that this is the appropriate thing to do. She takes it that the green spoon ‘belongs’ in the box containing the previously sorted green things and that the blue spoon does not. (2011b, 235)

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Unlike a trained parrot, who may have a similar disposition to respond with “green,” the child in the block-sorting example “takes herself to be responding appropriately”—she has “consciousness of appropriateness,” and thus, contra the parrot, the child “does not respond ‘blindly’ to her circumstances.” She sees her utterance as appropriate (2011b, 237). Ginsborg leverages the normative status of this “taking-to-be-appropriate” to claim that her account of primitive normativity is still “nonreductionist to the extent that it requires us to accept at least one sui generis intentional attitude, namely, the attitude through which we take each of our actual responses to be appropriate to the circumstances” (2011b, 252). Primitive normativity is thus only disposition-like; it does not fully collapse into reductionism and thus remains capable of meeting the normativity constraint. At the same time, since this taking-as-appropriate is a precondition for linguistic or conceptual mastery, it cannot presuppose such mastery, and, ipso facto, taking-to-be-appropriate does not depend on the child “taking what she is doing to accord with a rule that she was following, for example, the rule that she is to put all of the green things in the same box” (2011b, 235). Since it does not depend on the self-conscious entertaining of rules in the form of the linguistic or conceptual contents of her mental states, this primitive level of taking to be appropriate can still be explained in a quasi-reductive manner as the “actualization” of a disposition (2011b, 244). And because of this, Ginsborg claims for her account “the advantage over traditional anti-reductionism that it is able to accommodate the quasidispositional character of meaning and rules, and so to tie meaning to our actual patterns of response” (2011b, 252). Without some form of reduction of meaning to at least this “quasi-dispositional” level, we would fail “to account for the way in which what someone means, or what rule she is following, seems to determine not just what she ought to do, but what she in fact will do” (2011b, 230), and thus, too, we would fail to meet the objectivity constraint. Through the combination of taking-to-be-appropriate and quasi-dispositionalism, then, Ginsborg’s notion of primitive normativity amounts to a “middle way” between reductionism and anti-reductionism. From a Husserlian phenomenological perspective, Ginsborg’s move to locate normativity directly in primitive judgments about our lived experience get things exactly right. Indeed, it places her position in a philosophical tradition beyond and antedating phenomenology: to translate Ginsborg’s claims above into a slightly different vocabulary—one warranted by her own attribution of this view to Kant’s third Critique—this level of judgment in primitive normativity is transcendental, both in the sense that it counts as condition for the possibility of meaning as understood at the level of language and concepts, and in the sense that it is based in the epistemological recognition that meaning and knowledge issue from the subject. Because of this recognition of the ineliminable role of subjectivity in meaning, Ginsborg insists that this primitive level of judgment should not be construed as a judging of facts; it is “not in the first instance to be

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identified with the acceptance of some proposition as true” (2011a, 177). When one uses a term as it ought to be used, she writes, The “ought” is not that of practical rationality, nor can it be understood as the kind of ‘semantic correctness’ which can be explicated in terms of truth. Rather, it is what I have called a primitive “ought,” whose recognition does not depend on an antecedent grasp of meanings and concepts but which instead makes it possible for sounds and marks . . . to amount to meaningful discourse in the first place. Such an “ought.” I have suggested elsewhere, informs our most basic sorting inclinations, or what we might call our “ways of going on” from initial samples. (Ginsborg 2012, 137, my emphasis) This prioritizing of questions about meaning over questions about truth can be seen as a further transcendental aspect of Ginsborg’s view. On the transcendental but also phenomenological view I sketch below, Ginsborg is right that this primitive “ought” isn’t dependent on an antecedent grasp of linguistic meanings, and that such primitive normativity makes it possible for sounds and marks to amount to meaningful discourse. But the passage above suggests that Ginsborg takes the primitive level below linguistic and conceptual meaning to be thereby below the level of meaning tout court. In the same essay, in defending her view against a certain line of dispositionalist response, she notes that her view implies the “further requirement that this normative attitude be understood as somehow constitutive of, and thus in a strong sense antecedently presupposed by, the possibility  of meaning” (2012, 139–40). Ginsborg does not directly address the question of whether there might be some domain of meaning outside of the linguistic or conceptual, but her characterization of primitive normativity as “quasi-dispositional” (and thus a kind of partial reductionism) strongly speaks against it. While Ginsborg has met the normativity constraint, she does so in a way that still reduces meaning in the sense that it appeals to a level more foundational than meaning. In this sense, her notion of primitive normativity hews too close to reductionism to count as a genuine “middle way.”1 Thus we can expand Table 4.2 from above. 3 Perception as Intentional Meaning In the first section of this chapter I pointed out the need, in order to meet the objectivity constraint, to reduce linguistic meaning to something outside of and—pace Ginsborg, more primitive than—language and concepts. But fulfilling this requirement need not equate to a reduction to something outside of meaning tout court. The Anglo-American philosophical tradition in which the debates about rule-following developed has tended to assume, in line with its historical roots in the linguistic turn, that questions of meaning are ultimately questions about language and concepts. Ginsborg, despite the novelty

Husserl on Rule-Following 81 Table 4.2 Three views of meaning View of Meaning

Constraints Met (and How Met)

Reductionism Objectivity (dispositional facts as inherently (dispositionalism) objective) Problem: fails to meet normativity constraint Ginsborg’s Objectivity (taking to be appropriate as partial reductionism actualization of a disposition) (quasiNormativity (taking to be appropriate as dispositionalism) primitive ought) Problem: meets normativity constraint outside domain of meaning Standard Normativity (meaning as inherently anti-reductionism normative) Problem: fails to meet objectivity constraint

Foundational Level Facts

Primitive normativity as prior to meaning (meaning = linguistic, conceptual) Meaning (meaning = linguistic, conceptual)

and Kantian background of her account of primitive normativity, remains thoroughly in the Anglo-American tradition in this respect. The Husserlian phenomenological position I am sketching insists, instead, that what we are talking about at the level of primitive normativity must itself count as meaningful. On this view, primitive normativity is indeed, as Ginsborg insists, a pre-condition for linguistic and conceptual meaning, but not, as for her, in virtue of the “quasi-disposition” of taking-to-be appropriate. Rather, taking-to-be appropriate is itself only comprehensible against the prior background of the world as meaningful. The child is able to see her action (sorting, counting) as appropriate only because she can, even more fundamentally, see-as (take-as) at all. This seeing-as is characteristic of the basic structure of intentionality, and on a Husserlian view, it is via this primary and essential structure of experience— not in some external fact—that the objectivity constraint is met. As the phenomenon of seeing-as suggests, the place to look for a meaningful level of primitive normativity in Husserl is not directly to his account of linguistic meaning, but to his account of perceptual meaning [Wahrnehmungssinn].2 Husserl describes the structure of perceptual meaning as the “model” of the sort of lawfulness that governs consciousness (1966, 320). To say that perception is lawful or rule-governed, for Husserl, is to connect subjectivity to the domain of objectivity via the structure of intentionality: perception is of the real world, and that world is inherently meaningful, in a way not simply determined by my thoughts about it. Indeed, this is one way of understanding Husserl’s famed “phenomenological reduction,” which is, in a sense, the very antithesis of the attempt to reduce meanings to facts as discussed above: when Husserl insists that we “bracket” all existential commitments and metaphysical presuppositions in order to focus on the contents of conscious experience as such, he is in effect insisting that we analyze the world as first and foremost a world of meaning, regardless of the status of the meaning-objects that are given as

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existing in the realm of empirical fact (e.g., tables and chairs), not existing (e.g., unicorns), or existing (subsisting) ideally (e.g., mathematical objects and functions, including addition3) (see Husserl 1999, esp. Lecture V). Meaning arises in intentionality—the “aboutness” of consciousness or the correlation between the mind’s intending (in Husserl’s technical terminology, “noesis”) and the meaning-object intended (“noema”)—and is characterized normatively in terms of success (“fulfillment”) or failure (“frustration”) of intentions.4 But Husserl’s phenomenological reduction is no retreat into a solipsistic idealism: I neither get to determine whether my intentions successfully meet the conditions (thinking of myself as a millionaire does not, alas, fulfill the thought and make me one), nor to determine what the meaning conditions are (I do not get to decide what makes one a millionaire any more than I get to decide what counts as addition). Meaning is in the world, not “in my head.” Though it is not the only one, perception is the most paradigmatic mode of such intentionality—the place where we most obviously and directly encounter meaning in (in Husserl’s terminology, in which we “constitute,” which does not mean “create”) the world. Thus, the objectivity constraint is met via the primacy of intentionality as a structure that is both rule-governed and subject to external parameters via fulfillment. At the same time, Husserl insists—in what amounts to a rejection of reductionism about meaning—that we cannot exhaustively account for the meaningfulness of perceptual experience if we limit our conception of it to facts about the objects we perceive. Perception tells us not only what is the case in our present intentions, but also what ought to be the case, in the form of implicit anticipations about our future experience.5 If I open a door to reveal only a brick wall directly behind it, my normal perceptual intentions have been frustrated rather than fulfilled. But this frustration is not simply the result of some dispositional fact about me or some empirical fact about the world; it is a frustration rooted in the way I already anticipate that the world should be—of my normal and typical ways of seeing-as.6 The account of intentionality also meets the normativity constraint via our anticipations about the meaningful world. Intentional meaning is neither reducible to empirical facts nor limited to the linguistic or the conceptual. Take the following description of lawfulness and rule-following in perception from Husserl’s 1917 inaugural lecture in Freiburg: The pure phenomena through which a possible spatial Object presents itself to consciousness have their a priori definite system of necessary formations which is unconditionally binding upon every cognizing consciousness if that consciousness is to be able to intuit spatial reality. Thus, the ideal of a spatial thing prescribes a priori to possible consciousness of such a thing a set rule, a rule that can be followed intuitively and that admits of being conceived, in accord with the typicality of phenomenal forms, in pure concepts. And the same is true of every

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principal category of objectivities. The expression ‘a priori’ is therefore not a cloak to cover over some ideological extravagance but, is just as significant as is the ‘purity’ of mathematical analysis or geometry. (2002, 132) Husserl notes both that the rule-governedness of perception can be “conceived” in terms of concepts and that it is followed “intuitively.” This again parallels Ginsborg’s account: though the child sorting colored objects may be able to correctly describe her taking-as-appropriate in conceptual terms, that taking-as-appropriate itself is not a matter of concepts. The notion of the concept is instead said to arise in accord with the “typicality of phenomenal forms,” which are transcendentally prior, or, in Ginsborg’s terms, more primitive. The primary unit of meaning at this primitive level, according to Husserl, is not the content of a language or thought or the concept (conceptuality), but the type (typicality). When Husserl says that types are “presumed in the certainty of belief” (1973, §7) or that the lifeworld “holds to its essentially lawful set of types, to which all life, and thus all science, of which it is the ‘ground,’ remain bound” (1970, 173), he is insisting that intentional analysis reveals perception to be already normatively governed in its anticipations, and—insofar as these are “essentially lawful,” tied to a rule. But the notion of a rule must be understood phenomenologically, in terms of intentional objects (noemata), rather than naturalistically, in terms of empirical facts about physical things: What now does this talk of rule or law mean phenomenologically? What follows from determining that the inadequately given region of the “thing” prescribes rules for the course of possible intuitions (which obviously means the same as possible perceptions)? To this, the answer is: the essence of such a noema of the thing inherently contains, in an absolutely discernible manner, ideal possibilities of an “unlimited progression” of coherent intuitions, and, to be sure, [it contains] them in accordance with directions that are prefigured in typically determined ways (thus, too, parallel kinds of unlimitedness in the continuous series of corresponding noeses). (Husserl 2014, 297–8, my emphasis) The thing, understood in the “natural attitude” as a material object to be studied by empirical science, is always only inadequately given in perception: for example, I cannot see all sides of it at once. But understood phenomenologically, as the meaning-object correlated with an intending noesis, the thing qua noema—qua meaning- object—is normative insofar as it essentially contains ideal possibilities—not empirical facts about what is the case.7 But while the way in which these possibilities are discovered is said to be “absolutely discernible,” the possibilities as such are only “typically

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determined”: unlike for dispositional accounts of rule-following, based on the presumption that objectivity can only be reached by reduction to facts, on this view, there is no point even in principle at which we could reduce meaning to an exhaustive list of future possibilities contained in the facts of present experience, any more than we could, for Ginsborg, in analyzing the child’s “‘ways of going on’ from initial samples” in the sorting of colored objects.8 4 Primitive Judgments, the Lifeword, and Embodied Intersubjectivity This account of the partial pre-determination of meaning via types also shows that Husserl’s account contains an analogue of Ginsborg’s Kant-inspired transcendental appeal to primitive judgments as discussed in Section 2. With the phrase “‘unlimited progression’ of coherent intuitions” in the passage above, Husserl is explicitly echoing Kant: there is always the a priori possibility of the subsumption of additional cases under a given concept which are not analytically contained within the concept (Kant 1998, A 25). The possibility in agreement here is rule-governed—in the sense of rules as “typically determined ways” of perceiving as discussed above—but not concept-governed. Although Kant’s view is that if something is a concept, then it is a rule for the understanding, on the Husserlian view I am sketching here, this is not a bi-conditional: it does not imply the further claims that all rules governing the understanding are concepts, or that that all rule-governed judgment is conceptual judgment. These latter, further claims are precisely those which Ginsborg criticizes in claiming that her notion of primitive normativity stems from a conception of judgment attributable to Kant in the third Critique.9 In contrast to the Critique of Pure Reason, where judgment is allied with the faculty of understanding and thus explicitly tied to the use of concepts, in the Critique of the Power of Judgement, Kant introduces the idea that judgment can function independently of the understanding in situations where the relevant rules or concepts are not already specified . . . not already in the understanding but rather made possible by those acts of judging themselves. (Ginsborg 2011b, 253) Acts of judgment may be more primitive than concepts, and indeed in some instances make them possible. Husserl’s account of perceptual meaning is tied to a similar, broadly normative notion of primitive, non-conceptual judgment, but conceived in the manner sketched in the previous section—in terms of rules that are only partially predetermined: If the sense of a thing is determined by the instances of givenness of the perception of it (and what else could determine the sense?), then it

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demands such imperfection, and necessarily refers us to continuously unified connections of possible perceptions that extend from any implemented perception in infinitely many directions in a systematically and firmly rule-governed manner, and, to be sure, in each direction without end, constantly dominated by a unity of sense. A horizon of determinable indeterminacy always remains in principle, regardless of how much progress we make experientially, regardless of how large the continua of current perceptions of the same thing that we have run through are. (Husserl 2014, 78, my emphasis) In effect, the special function of judgment outside the purview of full determination by preexisting concepts, which Kant reserves for separate treatment in the third Critique, is already in play for Husserl in the straightforward epistemological analysis of perception of everyday physical objects. All experiences of perceptual meaning are characterized by such “determinable indeterminacy,” in precisely the sense in which perceptions can be said to normatively follow a rule, but a rule that is, in Ginsborg’s words, “not already in the understanding but rather made possible by those acts of judging themselves.” But what, more precisely, do such “acts of judgment themselves” amount to, outside the domain of language and concepts and thus, presumably, outside the domain of judgment conceived as predication? In his later work, Husserl argues that the primitive level of intentionality exhibited in perception, on the basis of which judgments at the higher level of predication are made, is still an “act of judgment in a broader sense” (1973, 61). The most primitive level of judgment is that exhibited in perceptual experience itself, “in the passage from aesthesis, from simple sensuous awareness, to acting, evaluating, and so forth” (1973, 64). This shift from simple awareness to evaluation can be understood as the shift from seeing to seeing-as, discussed above. But Husserl also characterizes this primitive level of judgment in terms of acting—as a shift from aesthesis to kinaesthesis. The analysis of the normativity of perception as involving kinaesthesis is especially prevalent in Husserl’s well-known analyses of the lifeworld in the Crisis, where he suggests that the horizons of “determinable indeterminacy” discussed above are ultimately traceable to the movements and practical activities of the lived body (1970, §47). The possibilities for what can be presented to me in perceptual experience are partially determined by my own implicit sense of available bodily activity— of what I can do: If I ask what is implied in the fact that the thing-exhibitings belong to the altering kinaestheses, I recognize that a hidden intentional ‘if–then’ relation is at work here: the exhibitings must occur in a certain systematic order; it is in this way that they are indicated in advance, in expectation, in the course of a harmonious perception. The actual kinestheses here lie within the system of kinesthetic capacity, which is correlated

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with the system of possible following events harmoniously belonging to it. This is, then, the intentional background of every straightforward ontic certainty of a presented thing. (Husserl 1970, 161f) That “harmonious perception” should here be interpreted as “normatively governed perception” is clear from the claim, later in the passage, that in experience of the breakdown of such harmony, “the change of apperceptive sense takes place through a change of the expectation-horizon of the multiplicities anticipated as normal (i.e., as running on harmoniously)” (1970, 162). In such cases, it is not that I am suddenly perceiving a different physical object than I thought was, but rather that that object has frustrated my (often implicit, or, in Husserl’s terminology, “non-thematic”) normative anticipations with regard to its place in a nexus of possible meanings. It becomes a “different” object qua meaning-object: I now associate new meanings, and thus a new horizon of future (again largely non-thematic) meaning-possibilities, with it, and this shift both arises from and is registered in my system of bodily comportment, even when it does not rise to the level of thematic awareness as expressed in language or concepts. But it is also clear from Husserl’s later work that these normative, primitive judgments at the level of perception need not be limited to my judgments. The move to locate normativity in perception and, ultimately, in kinaestheses, also opens the way for an appeal beyond the individual embodied subject to an intersubjective, embodied community (De los Reyes Melero 2013). Kripke’s own “sceptical solution” to the rule-following paradox ultimately requires us to “widen our gaze from consideration of the rule-follower alone and allow ourselves to consider him as interacting with a wider community” (1982, 89), and it should not be forgotten that the broader context of Kripke’s book is a consideration of Wittgenstein’s views on private language. Husserl’s own accounts of the phenomenological reduction underwent a similar widening, from earlier presentations of a “Cartesian way” into the reduction, which appears to some commentators to veer dangerously close to solipsism, to later presentations of the reduction that emphasized the communal, intersubjective context of the lifeworld as the ultimate ground of meaningful experience (Cf. Luft, Introduction to Husserl 2019, lvii). Given what we have said above about a primitive level of judgment already in embodied perception, this determination by the wider community is not limited to the explicit (thematic) level of agreements and disagreements in our use of language and concepts; it occurs already, on Husserl’s view, at the more primitive level of communal embodied activity (Carr 2019). This account of communal, embodied determination is consistent with the picture we get from Ginsborg’s example of the child sorting objects. Ginsborg claims that it is enough to ground normativity to say that the child is acting in a way that she takes to be appropriate. But the later Husserlian view— attuned to the primitive role of intersubjectivity and the lifeworld—would

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insist that, even prior to linguistic or conceptual mastery, the child does not simply take her response to be appropriate out of the blue. She does so only in the context of anticipations arising from what she has previously perceived to be appropriate actions, and this is nothing other than the “determinably indeterminate” context of bodily practices—both those she undertakes herself and those she sees in the context of her community—that she takes as meaningful. In taking her sorting activity to be an appropriate practice, the child has moved from aesthesis to kinaesthesis, from seeing to seeing-as, and this constitutes a primitive grounding of normativity even if no precise boundaries of appropriateness beyond the present case have been established. Something very similar is suggested by Kripke when he reassures us, in the face of the sceptical paradox, that “in fact, our actual community is (roughly) uniform in its practices with respect to addition” (1982, 91, my emphasis). On the Husserlian account just offered, however, primitive normativity does not reduce—nor even, pace Ginsborg, “partially reduce”—to something more primitive than meaning. The recasting of primitive normativity as an embodied and intersubjective phenomenon, alongside the phenomenological conviction that meaning does not bottom out at language or concepts, thus amounts to a fully anti-reductionist view of meaning. Thus, we can add one more row to get Table 4.3. 5 Husserl’s Sceptical Solution It may seem, at this point, that we have strayed quite far from the initial formulation of the rule-following paradox, which was, after all, a paradox about Table 4.3 Four views of meaning View of Meaning

Constraints Met (and How Met)

Foundational Level

Reductionism (dispositionalism)

Objectivity (dispositional facts as inherently objective) Problem: fails to meet normativity constraint Objectivity (taking to be appropriate as actualization of a disposition); Normativity (taking to be appropriate as primitive ought) Problem: meets normativity constraint outside domain of meaning Objectivity (intentionality as rulegoverned structure of fulfilment) Normativity (intentionality as typically determined structure of anticipation) Normativity (meaning as inherently normative) Problem: fails to meet objectivity constraint

Facts

Ginsborg’s partial reductionism (quasidispositionalism)

Husserl’s anti-reductionism

Standard anti-reductionism

Primitive normativity as prior to meaning (meaning = linguistic, conceptual)

Primitive normativity as intentional meaning (meaning = perceptual/ experiential) Meaning (meaning = linguistic, conceptual)

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the use of words or concepts—a problem in the philosophy of language. But the fact that attention to the most primitive manifestations of meaning has taken us not to conceptual or linguistic analysis but to an analysis of the structures of experience is, in a way, precisely the point. While Husserl’s theory of meaning does include treatment of the philosophy of language, the considerations above show that it takes the domain of meaning to extend more widely than the domain of the linguistic, semantic, or conceptual. The phenomenological theory of meaning is thus misconceived if taken as a sub-domain under the broader umbrella of the philosophy of language. For Husserl, the theory of meaning is as much a matter of epistemology as of language. Indeed, both the philosophy of language and epistemology can be said to fall under the broader domain of the theory of meaning. The theory of meaning holds a similar priority over metaphysics for Husserl, as noted in Section III’s discussion of “bracketing” in the phenomenological reduction. Take Kripke’s insistence, noted in Section I, that responses to the rule-following paradox must answer not simply the epistemological question of how I know that I meant “plus” and not “quus,” but also the metaphysical question of in virtue of what it is the case that I meant “plus” and not “quus.” For Husserl—and here is yet another transcendental echo of Kant—these two questions are not neatly separable: the only way to make sense of the metaphysical question outside of or prior to the epistemological one would be to treat it as answerable via some appeal to the authority of empirical facts. But to do this would be to act under the very presupposition of the “natural attitude” that I have argued the phenomenological reduction rejects: the presupposition that the world consists primarily of empirical facts (and physical things) and only secondarily or derivatively of meaning. The Husserlian view I have been sketching thus amounts to what Kripke calls a “sceptical solution” to the rule-following paradox, in that it accepts that there is no straightforward, fully determined fact of the matter about meaning in any single moment of my lived experience, thereby “conceding that the sceptic’s negative assertions are unanswerable.” As Kripke notes, instead of refuting the sceptic in the manner of a “straight solution,” a “sceptical solution”—such as that in Hume’s Enquiry—seeks to show how “our ordinary practice or belief is justified because—contrary appearances notwithstanding—it need not require the justification the sceptic has shown to be untenable.” The untenable justification, in Husserl’s case, is that which seeks to account for meaning by reducing it to facts. Kripke goes on to suggest that “much of the value of the sceptical argument consists precisely in the fact that he has shown that an ordinary practice, if it is to be defended at all, cannot be defended in a certain way” (1982, 66–7). For Husserl, I have argued, the “ordinary practice” of our taking our experience as normative and meaningful is itself primitive, and in this sense we might even say that it really needs no defense. At the very least, we cannot defend it in a manner that presupposes meaning to be an exclusively linguistic or conceptual affair.

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But nor should we discount the importance of dealing with the paradox at the level linguistic meaning. With regard to Kripke’s sceptic’s scenario, then, how do I know that, in my previous linguistic usage, I meant “plus” and not “quus”? In a sense I don’t know—if knowing amounts to knowing some fact about myself or my context that would be conclusively determinative. To see this, we need only modify the passage about “determinable indeterminacy” cited above, transposing from the foundational level of intentional meaning to the higher level of linguistic meaning by replacing “perception” with “usage” and replacing “sense of a thing” with “meaning of an expression.”10 We get the following: If the [meaning of an expression] is determined by the instances of givenness of the [usage] of it (and what else could determine the [meaning]?), then it demands such imperfection, and necessarily refers us to continuously unified connections of possible [usage] that extend from any implemented [usage] in infinitely many directions in a systematically and firmly rule-governed manner, and, to be sure, in each direction without end, constantly dominated by a unity of meaning. A horizon of determinable indeterminacy always remains in principle, regardless of how much progress we make experientially, regardless of how large the continua of current [usages] of the same [expression] that we have run through are. (Husserl 2014, 78, my emphasis and modifications) In the terms of the Husserlian interpretation sketched above, I can really only say that my past usage of “plus” has been typical, and that I take my current usage to be consistent with the systematic and rule-governed horizon of possibilities determined by that past usage. But for Husserl, this is enough. If the sceptic objects that this is not enough to meet the objectivity constraint, I can appeal to the way in which my linguistic usage is now and thus far has been roughly harmonious with both the expressions and also the broader context of embodied practices of myself and my community. At this point, Husserl might well echo Wittgenstein: “It is not only agreement in definitions, but also (odd as it may sound) agreement in judgements that is required for communication by means of language” (Wittgenstein 2009, §242). Husserl would only insist on the primitive normativity and meaningfulness of those judgments already at the level of our lived experience, or, again with Wittgenstein, that “it is characteristic of our language that the foundation on which it grows consists in steady ways of living, regular ways of acting” (1993, 397). If such appeals do not convince the sceptic, it is not clear what sort of further evidence he is seeking, short of a reduction of meaning to facts. But such reductionism must pay the heavy price of violating the normativity constraint and flying in the face of the most primitive testimony of our lived experience: that the world we talk about is the world we always already live in—one that is constituted, first and foremost, not by language or concepts, nor by facts, but by meaning.

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Notes 1 For a related critique of Ginsborg’s “partial reductionism,” see Miller (2019). 2 We see the turn to perceptual meaning already in Husserl’s early work after his transcendental turn, in the period in which his relationship to transcendental idealism (and to Kant) becomes explicit, and arguably even more strongly in the period of his later “genetic” phenomenology. In this short essay, I have focused broadly on Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology across these periods, thus some ignoring important interpretive nuances that arise due to gradual revisions in his position. 3 Husserl was trained as a mathematician, and his phenomenology is Platonic insofar as it interprets all meanings ultimately in terms of essences. This might appear to be in tension with my emphasis below on intentional meaning in perception as typical rather than conceptual and “determinably indeterminate” rather than exhaustively predetermined. But what I provide below is an analysis of meaning-objects as intentional objects for a subject, not of meanings qua essences sub specie eternitatis, of which the meaning of the function of addition (as opposed to my meaning in using the word “plus”) would be one example. Kripke relies on a similar distinction in his characterization (cited above) of the sceptic’s objection as not arithmetic, but metalinguistic. The tension between the eidetic and genetic-historical aspects of Husserl’s method is an important problem for phenomenologists and is closely related to the issues discussed here, but exceeds my scope in this essay. 4 See Crowell (2013) for a detailed phenomenological account of normativity in terms of conditions of success or failure. 5 For a more detailed account of anticipations in Husserl, see Rump (2018). 6 At first blush, Ginsborg’s account—especially in her characterization of normativity in terms of a “primitive ought” and a “way of going on from initial samples”—is similar. But while she is concerned to do justice to the normativity constraint, and thus to reject a fully dispositionalist account that would “attempt a reduction of meaning to facts conceived purely naturalistically,” her insistence that the resultant account is not fully anti-reductionist, but only “partly reductionist,” relies on a reduction to “facts that are in a sense more primitive” than meaning (2011b, 230, my emphasis). In order to meet Kripke’s challenge of whether (and how) it is a fact that I mean plus (Kripke 1982, 11; Ginsborg 2011b, 231), Ginsborg construes the disposition + normative taking-tobe-appropriate package as itself a fact. In this sense, her account can be seen to offer a “straight solution” to Kripke’s sceptical paradox, whereas the Husserlian position I outline amounts to a “sceptical solution,” as explained below. 7 My claims here and below rely on what has come to be called the “east coast” interpretation of Husserl’s noema as the object intended as seen in the phenomenological attitude, as against the “west coast” interpretation of the noema as a distinct entity mediating between the intention and the object intended in a manner akin to Fregean Sinn. For an extensive defense of the former position, see Drummond 1990. 8 Ginsborg’s analysis recalls Wittgenstein’s discussion of samples in 2009, §§73–4. Though I cannot address this here, Wittgenstein’s discussion bears an important resemblance to Husserl’s account of types as discussed above. 9 Ginsborg (2006) discusses the Kantian connection in greater detail. 10 There is an important complication that I cannot address here concerning Husserl’s distinction (which differs from Frege’s) between sense [Sinn] and meaning [Bedeutung] in his middle and later work. For a recent account and references, see Rump (2018, §2).

References Boghossian, P. (1989), “The Rule-Following Considerations,” Mind 98 (392): 507–49. Carr, D. (2019), “Intersubjectivity and Embodiment,” in F. Kjosavik, C. Beyer, and C. Fricke (eds.), Husserl’s Phenomenology of Intersubjectivity: Historical Interpretations and Contemporary Applications, New York: Routledge, 249–62.

Husserl on Rule-Following 91 Crowell, S. (2013), Normativity and Phenomenology in Husserl and Heidegger, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. De los Reyes Melero, I. (2013), “The Body as a System of Concordance and the Perceptual World,” in R. T. Jensen and D. Moran (eds.), The Phenomenology of Embodied Intersubjectivity, Dordrecht: Springer, 105–20. Drummond, J. (1990), Husserlian Intentionality and Non-Foundational Realism: Noema and Object, Dordrecht: Springer. Ginsborg, H. (2006), “Aesthetic Judgment and Perceptual Normativity,” Inquiry 49 (5): 403–37. ———. (2011a), “Inside and Outside Language: Stroud’s Nonreductionism about Meaning,” in J. Bridges, N. Kolodny, and W. Wong (eds.), The Possibility of Philosophical Understanding: The Philosophy of Barry Stroud, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 147–81. ———. (2011b), “Primitive Normativity and Scepticism about Rules,” The Journal of Philosophy, 108 (5): 227–54. ———. (2012), “Meaning, Understanding, and Normativity,” Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 86 (1): 127–46. Husserl, E. (1966), Analysen zur passiven Synthesis: Aus Vorlesungs- und Forschungsmanuskripten 1918–1926, ed. M. Fleischer, Den Haag: Marinus Nijhoff. ———. (1970), The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. D. Carr, Evanston: Northwestern University Press. ———. (1973), Experience and Judgment: Investigations in a Genealogy of Logic, ed. L. Landgrebe, trans. J. S. Churchill and K. Ameriks, Evanston: Northwestern University Press. ———. (1999). The Idea of Phenomenology, trans. L. Hardy, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. ———. (2002), “Pure Phenomenology, Its Method, and Its Field of Investigation,” in D. Moran and T. Mooney (eds.), The Phenomenology Reader, New York: Routledge, 124–33. ———. (2014), Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy: First Book: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, trans. D. Dahlstrom, Indianapolis: Hackett. ———. (2019), First Philosophy: Lectures 1923/24 and Related Texts from the Manuscripts (1920–1925), eds. S. Luft and T. Naberhaus, Dordrecht: Springer. Kant, I. (1998), Critique of Pure Reason, eds. P. Guyer and A. W. Wood, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kripke, S. (1982), Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Miller, A. (2019), “Rule-following, Meaning, and Primitive Normativity,” Mind 128 (511): 735–60. Rump, J. (2018), “Making Sense of the Lived Body and the Lived World: Meaning and Presence in Husserl, Derrida and Noë,” Continental Philosophy Review 51 (2): 141–67. Wittgenstein, L. (1993), Philosophical Occasions, 1912–1951, eds. J. C. Klagge and A. Nordmann, Indianapolis: Hackett. ———. (2009), Philosophical Investigations, 4th ed., trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, and J. Schulte, revised fourth edition by P. M. S. Hacker and J. Schulte, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.

5

The Place of Language in the Early Heidegger’s Development of Hermeneutic Phenomenology Scott Campbell

In a sense, it is redundant to say “the phenomenology of language,” because the term “phenomenology” contains within itself a reference to the way in which we talk about phenomena: phenomenology is a logos about phenomena. Reading Being and Time, though, one might not notice the immediate connection to language borne by the term itself. There, Heidegger says that the Greek legein ta phainomena means “to let that which shows itself be seen from itself in the very way in which it shows itself from itself” (Heidegger 1962, 58/34). This definition includes no immediate reference to language. In his early lecture courses, however, Heidegger highlights the linguistic dimension of the Greek meaning of logos, and so he understands legein not simply as “appearing,” “showing,” or “letting show.” He claims, instead, that the original meaning of logos or legein is “speaking.” In this chapter, I focus on the role of language in Heidegger’s thinking during this early period in order to show the prominent role that language and speaking play in his development of hermeneutic phenomenology. What we see is that Heidegger thinks of phenomenology as a method of doing philosophy that involves bringing lived experience to expression through language and, more specifically, through speaking. In his very early work, Heidegger is interested in the inherent meaningfulness embedded within lived experience and how we talk about that experience. The inspiration for this chapter comes from Hans-Georg Gadamer’s claim in Truth and Method that philosophical hermeneutics, as he understands it, is an extension of Heidegger’s existential analysis of Dasein. This claim may be somewhat surprising given the place of language and discourse in Being and Time. Language and speaking are not thematized to any great extent in that text. Indeed, the most powerful modes of discourse in that text are fallen speech (idle talk) and the silent call of conscience (which is a logos), neither of which conveys the meaningful sense of dialogue that we find in philosophical hermeneutics. But Gadamer was a student of Heidegger’s during his “phenomenological decade” (1919–29), and he would have been exposed to the ways in which Heidegger wanted to develop language and discourse as an integral part of his early phenomenological project. In his later retrospective work, “A Dialogue on Language,” Heidegger calls “hermeneutics” an “adjunct word to ‘phenomenology,’” which is to say, one that completes its

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meaning, making Heidegger’s early project a hermeneutic phenomenology (Heidegger 1971, 28). But that dialogue sheds more light on Heidegger’s later thinking about language than it does on his early project. My interest is in the early Heidegger’s phenomenology of language.1 In Truth and Method, Gadamer recounts the development of Heidegger’s hermeneutics of facticity as it emerged out of Husserlian phenomenology and also as it diverged from Husserl’s focus on self-reflection. Both Husserl and Heidegger find it necessary to return to the phenomenon of life (Gadamer 2004, 249). But whereas, in Gadamer’s words, Husserl focuses on “absolutely radical self-reflection” (Gadamer 2004, 245), Heidegger focuses on the factical existence of Dasein. Of course, Gadamer is particularly interested in the notion of “understanding,” since hermeneutics is a theory of understanding according to which all understanding is historically constituted. From Heidegger, he draws the notion that understanding is fundamentally the human being’s way of existing, not by way of reflection and not in a way that must bracket everyday experience. For Heidegger, factical life cannot be bracketed. Gadamer emphasizes: “The main point of the hermeneutics of facticity and its contrast with the transcendental constitution research of Husserl’s phenomenology was that no freely chosen relation toward one’s own being can get behind the facticity of this being” (Gadamer 2004, 254). For Heidegger, understanding is embedded within the factical existence of Dasein. We always already understand experience without reflecting on it. Gadamer claims that understanding is not “as with Husserl a last methodological ideal of philosophy in contrast to the naiveté of unreflecting life; it is, on the contrary, the original form of the realization of Dasein, which is being-in-the-world” (Gadamer 2004, 250). What I hope to contribute to this story is the role of language in Heidegger’s effort to show how we bring to expression lived experience.2 Instead of reflecting on experience and then constructing propositions that correspond to that experience, Heidegger believed that in everyday life we simply talk about lived experience. We try to articulate and express what implicitly we understand simply through living, prior to self-reflection. In the first section of the chapter, I explore the problem of trying to articulate pre-predicative experience and the relationship of this problem to the notion of truth in hermeneutics. Here my guiding line is the work of Richard Cobb-Stevens, who is concerned about the status of truth in phenomenology and wants to revitalize the notion of truth through a reading of Husserl that has been refracted through “Heidegger’s brilliant recasting of Husserlian transcendentalism” (Cobb-Stevens 1982, 128). In the second section, I look at some of the references to language in the very early lecture courses, especially GA 58 Basic Problems of Phenomenology: (Winter Semester 1919/20) and GA 60 The Phenomenology of Religious Life. We see there an interest in trying to develop a language that can capture the intensity of life without reflecting on it as well as an interest in exploring a mode of language that aims to persuade the listener instead of simply describing reality. In the third section,

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I look at the relation between truth and dialogue in Heidegger’s early work, especially from a talk he gave in December of 1924 on “Being-There and Being-True According to Aristotle.” My aim here is to highlight his interest in what Aristotle says about speaking and truth. My thesis is that through his reading of truth and speaking in Aristotle, Heidegger discerns a different register of experience for hermeneutic phenomenology, and he does so by looking at the kind of pre-predicative and pre-reflective language that we find in everyday discourse. 1 On Truth and Pre-predicative Experience The connection between language and truth is of the utmost importance, not just for our understanding of phenomenology, but for human life. Richard Cobb-Stevens calls our attention to this problem when he points out the need for a revitalization of the notion of truth. In contemporary philosophy, Cobb-Stevens claims, we have abandoned the theme of representation and so no longer view truth as the correct representation of a state-of-affairs or as the correspondence between subject and object, but with this abandonment comes a measure of despair, which we still cast in terms of subjectivity and the real danger of subjective relativism. On Cobb-Stevens’s account, Husserl’s phenomenology, seen through the lens of Heidegger, provides a solution to this problem, in the form of a Husserlian hermeneutics that refuses to succumb to relativism. He says, We may conclude that Husserl’s method leads to the realization that neither the being of experience (the primal flux) nor the being of things (their fullness) can be objectified. This is because the structures of experience (meanings and essences) are the structures of fullness. “Truth,” he concludes, “is not correspondence between mental objects and real objects. Truth is simply the experience of fullness” (Cobb-Stevens 1982, 145). For Cobb-Stevens, Husserl’s language of full intentions offers an alternative to the language of objectivity, presenting truth instead as fullness. Heidegger’s approach to phenomenology, however, lends itself to naturalism and behaviorism according to Cobb-Stevens because Heidegger rejects the language of reflection. As Cobb-Stevens writes: Unfortunately, [Heidegger’s] dismissal of the entire vocabulary associated with consciousness and reflection, along with his stress on the facticity of Dasein, the priority of language, and the theme of historicity, can all be misread as a naturalistic affirmation of the priority of the empirical over the transcendental. He does not emphasize enough that the locus from which transcendental phenomenology proceeds is the structure of reflection. (Cobb-Stevens 1982, 134)

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In other words, Heidegger’s emphasis on facticity, language, and history makes it seem as though his phenomenological approach is empirical and naturalistic. By emphasizing the factical, and thus the empirical, he fails to recognize the need for delineating the transcendental structures of meaning. But we might wonder whether Heidegger is simply emphasizing facticity, language, and history or making them essential to his early thinking. To my mind, these lie at the heart of the early Heidegger’s phenomenological project.3 Cobb-Stevens would like for us to see the transcendental and reflective structures at work in Heidegger’s phenomenology, but this is possible only if Heidegger posits a transcendental ego engaging in self-reflection and reconstruction of pre-predicative experience. In her analysis of the pre-predicative, Francoise Dastur observes, The true ‘pre-predicative experience’ is therefore . . . constituted for Heidegger, and in contrast to Husserl, not by the intentionality of an ego, but by the ‘transcendence’ of Dasein, of an existence that is not closed in on itself but always originarily open to the world and to the other. (Dastur 2017, 40) There is a difference, in other words, between the vocabulary of intentionality relating the transcendental to the empirical, which we find in Husserl, and the language of originary openness to the factical world, which we find in Heidegger. Cobb-Stevens notes the more evocative language used by Heidegger, but there may be more to that evocative language than simply a change in emphasis. What we find in the early Heidegger, especially between 1919 and 1923, is a sustained focus on factical life.4 Heidegger in this early period was searching for a language that might describe the sense of immediacy, intensity and vibrancy immanent to factical lived experience. This question is at the heart of his phenomenological project: how do “the things themselves” (phainomena) and speaking (logos, legein) come together? What kind of language describes human experience as it is lived? In a lecture course from 1921–22, Heidegger goes directly through the word “life” to the phenomenon of world, a move that presages the groundbreaking analysis of world that we find in Being and Time. He says that the verb “to live” explicates itself, since we always live “in, out of, for, with, against, on, toward, from” something, and that something is the world. The language of living immediately implicates the phenomenon of the world (Heidegger 2001b, 85/65). Through this mutual implication between the verb “to live” and the phenomenon of “world,” Heidegger explores the meaningfulness of factical life. “Meaningfulness,” he says, “is a categorical determination of the world” (Heidegger 2001b, 90/68). 2 The Language of Lived Experience According to Cobb-Stevens, Husserl never intended to suggest that the sense of facticity should replace the experience of facticity. Husserl wants to know

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how it becomes possible to talk about the “thisness” of factical experience. Cobb-Stevens writes that “the only way we can talk about this experience philosophically is to spell out all of the predicative and pre-predicative senses which are deployed in the achievement of meaningful reference” (Cobb-Stevens 1982, 145). Is it possible to describe pre-predicative experience without objectifying it? Both Husserl and Heidegger think that it is possible. The key difference between them, however, is that for Husserl this description happens through predicative language, while for Heidegger it happens through pre-predicative language. This difference marks one of the key distinctions between Heidegger and Husserl on the nature of language as such. For Husserl, philosophy reconstructs pre-predicative experience through self-reflection. For Heidegger, philosophy should try to develop a mode of pre-predicative description that captures life in the process of being lived. In his early lecture course on Basic Problems of Phenomenology from 1919–20, Heidegger introduces the term “taking-notice” (Kenntnisnehmen) as a way of describing lived experience that is pre-predicative and non-propositional. Taking-notice is a way of expressing an experience, either orally or in writing—and thus through language—which tries to maintain the openness and meaningfulness that was originally experienced when it happened and as it happened. In taking-notice, says Heidegger, “What is experienced is characterized in its environmental temporality as wholeness” (Heidegger 2013, 92/118). He says further that “the momentary phases [of the original experience] are apprehended in the complete openedness of their meaningfulness” (Heidegger 2013, 93/119). The goal of taking-notice is to stay as close as possible to the original experience, even to relive the experience and to have the person to whom you are speaking relive the experience along with you. Taking-notice modifies the original experience, but it does not go so far as to objectify the experience or to make it into a theoretical or cognized object. Of course, the latter is possible; Heidegger thinks that science, for example, does devivify the immediacy of lived experience. Yet, this is not so (at least initially) with taking-notice, which we might think of as a kind of pre-predicative and non-propositional language, that is, a language that is evocative, perhaps even stream of consciousness, narrative, and exploratory instead of theoretical and objectifying. An example here will help. In Basic Problems of Phenomenology, Heidegger provides numerous examples of lived-experiences, but he uses the following one to describe taking-notice. I quote at length from this lecture course: A concrete case—a visit, looking at books together, viewing pictures, drinking tea, smoking cigarettes; thereupon, taking a walk together; the weather brightens up, the sun comes through, the sun sets, it is becoming brisk—a context of experience in which I am fully engrossed. In the evening I am asked: What did you do this afternoon?—and I recount the visit and the stroll; or in the evening I contemplate it for myself, I let it drift past me, or I write down what happened to me

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in my diary—overall, I take-notice of it by recounting, orally or in writing, or contemplatively. What is modified? Basically nothing. The taking-notice certainly just wants to recount, it wants to make present [gegenwärtigen] what has been experienced, to realize [vergegenwärtigen] it in the vitality of its having-been-experienced, and it will once again bring to givenness the context of meaningfulness in its fullness as complete taking-notice and to be sure in such a way that I live through it again, so to speak, and the person to whom I recount it intends to live it along with me. (Heidegger 2013, 90–1/115–6) Here, Heidegger expressly takes up this phenomenological question: Can language capture lived-experience without reifying or objectifying it? His answer, it seems, is yes. I believe that much of the early Heidegger’s phenomenology of language involves the attempt to develop a language that can capture the immediacy of lived experience, a language that might grasp the experience of life as it is lived. He is worried about the way in which language has the tendency to objectify lived experience, or to modify it in some way.5 Nonetheless, he is trying to develop a language, especially a way of speaking that faithfully captures the intensity of lived experience. There is for Heidegger an immediacy between phainomenon and logos that perhaps was not there for Husserl. In her analysis of pre-predicative experience in Husserl, Dastur calls our attention to the well-known seventh section of the Logical Investigations (from the Introduction to Volume II of the German Edition) in which Husserl says that language needs to be put out of play (see Husserl 2001, 179), as well as to those sections of the Cartesian Meditations in which Husserl discusses “pure” and “still mute” experiences (Dastur 2017, 37). In Heidegger’s very early work, he thought that factical life was intelligible to itself and that it even articulated itself. How does the self do this? What does it mean for me to have a sense of myself? Heidegger writes, “The having-me-myself, which is improminent in vital lifeexperiences, is not: a reflection on experience and experiencing, stepping out of itself to make the I into an object” (Heidegger 2013, 126/164). He says further that, “I have me myself in factical life-experience . . . factical lifeexperience is at times its own articulation, in pursuit of contexts of meaningfulness” (Heidegger 2013, 127/165). This notion of contexts of meaning is extremely important for Heidegger, and it is a point that Dastur sees as a key difference between Husserl and Heidegger. Whereas Husserl was focused on “the individual pre-given in originary self-evidence,” Heidegger “sees in originary experience not an individual but rather a Zeugganzheit, an ensemble of tools” (Dastur 2017, 35), which employs the equipmental language of Being and Time, but which in light of the early lecture courses, we could describe as a context of factical lived experiences. These contexts constitute the web of meaningful relationships and experiences we have in the world. For Heidegger, as Dastur points out, originary experience is not

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sensuous as it is for Husserl. Sensuous experience is not foundational for Heidegger, but rather derivative. What is originary is, as Dastur puts it, “the experience of an immediate apprehension of sense” (Dastur 2017, 36). At one point, Heidegger says that to take-notice is to ponder mindfully, but even here, one does not depart from factical experience: In factical experience, I can ponder mindfully, I can bring what is experienced to my consciousness. I can report about it, I can talk about it with another person.—The taking-notice and the giving-notice are particular modifications of factical experience—which, however, do not drop out of factical experience. They remain in the style of experiencing. That which is taken-notice of are not states-of-affairs, but rather comportments of meaningfulness. (Heidegger 2013, 164/218) Heidegger acknowledges that there is a modification that takes place between having an experience and then talking about or reporting on that experience through taking-notice of it, but as far as possible, taking-notice tries to not objectify the experience, and it tries to not reflect back on it. Taking-notice seeks only to preserve the environmental temporality of lived-experience (Heidegger 2013, 97/124). Thomas Sheehan thinks that Heidegger’s lectures on the phenomenology of religious life serve as a defining moment in his shift away from Husserlian phenomenology, for it is in these courses that Heidegger transforms the vocabulary of noesis and noema into the correspondence between “lived experience” and “modalities of the world (lived meaning)” (1986, 48). In a March 1919 letter from Husserl to Rudolf Otto discussed by Sheehan, Heidegger says that Husserl describes the phenomenology of religion as “a systematic eidetic typification of the levels of religious data, indeed in their eidetically necessary development” (Husserl 2010, 25); this focus on “religious data” is very different, as we will see shortly, from an interest in the intensity of religious experience that we find in Heidegger’s lecture courses on the Phenomenology of Religious Life. The key to this transformation is Heidegger’s insight that factical life is fundamentally temporal and historical.6 These lecture courses present the most thorough analysis of the method of formal indication in all of Heidegger’s texts, but as is well-known, that analysis is truncated. Some students at the University of Freiburg complained to the Dean that the course contained no religious content, and so Heidegger simply cut off the description of formal indication and began analyzing Paul’s epistles. Despite what appears to be a clean break between the two sections of the lecture course, there remains a relationship between them. Heidegger develops formal indication as a method whose aim is to sustain the temporality and historicality of the human being. He wants to interpret historicality from out of the factical experience of temporality: “The problem of time must rather be understood as we originally experience temporality

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in factical experience—completely apart from all pure consciousness and all pure time” (Heidegger 2001a, 65/44–5).7 It is interesting to note that the texts Heidegger chooses to interpret for this lecture course are letters and thus specific forms of communication. The main issue for Heidegger in this analysis concerns the mode in which Paul communicates (Heidegger 2001a, 80/55–6). Paul’s letters are exhortations. He is urging his audience to become Christian, to turn toward God. What is at stake in these letters is thus Paul’s preaching, i.e., how he communicates with others. For Heidegger, exhortation is a use of language in which it matters whether or not the listener believes what is being said. The case may be illustrated by contrast with propositional language. True propositions will be true whether or not anyone believes them. If there are 54 chairs in the room, then it does not matter whether I believe that the proposition “There are 54 chairs in the room” is true or not. The proposition itself is true regardless of my belief in its truth. But in the case of statements such as, “I believe in God,” the truth is determined by my belief in it and thus in how I take it up into my own life. Heidegger was interested in this kind of language. Although it will not be until subsequent semesters that he looks directly at Aristotle’s Rhetoric, we see here a focus on letters urging their audience to adopt a conviction, as opposed to straightforward propositions describing states-of-affairs. Heidegger is interested in Paul’s letters in the first place because he thinks that the early Christians actually lived in pre-theoretical religious experience, before religious life had become objectified in theological concepts. Importantly, Heidegger is not saying that he wants to abandon theoretical concepts. There is some question as to whether or not phenomenology should dispense with the concept altogether.8 What we see in these early lecture courses is Heidegger investigating factical experience in order to discern the lived world from out of which concepts develop. He refers to this as the conceptuality of the concept. He finds the conceptuality of the concept in speech, that is, in the speaking relations of people talking with each other in the world. Heidegger claims here that knowledge (Wissen) and facticity were originally experienced together, suggesting a kind of factical knowledge that is not based on epistemological truths that might be logically proven, although there is a measure of proof in what Paul conveys in his letters. Knowledge here is situated within a context of becoming (of becoming one who believes in God), and Heidegger uses here the term Werdenszusammenhang (a context of becoming) which is a context of activity with God. This kind of knowledge points to a way of being, how one carries oneself in light of one’s belief in God. As Theodore Kisiel explains, “This knowing differs radically from any other kind of knowing and remembering, defying the usual scientific psychologies; it emerges directly from the situational context of the Christian life experience” (Kisiel 1995, 182). What makes this knowledge so radically different is precisely that it cannot be verified. Indeed, it is unique to the individual knower. Moreover, it is a kind

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of knowing informed by distress and torment. Paul believes that God’s return is imminent, but this does not mean that he knows when precisely it will happen. In fact, when the early Christians ask him when it will happen, Paul does not answer. Instead, he turns the question back upon those who ask it, saying that they who ask already have the answer. They already know. They know (because of the sense of the power of God in their lives), and yet they do not know (because they do not know exactly the day when God will return). This is what places them into a distressed and tormented context of activity with God, and this context involves a knowing that is not on the order of theoretical or objective knowledge. But on what order is it? For Heidegger, it is an ontological knowing, a sense of who they are, and not an epistemological knowing. It is a knowing that informs their lives. Paul conveys in his language a sense of urgency, which is enlivened by his own experience of distress and torment. The language he uses expresses lived experience, but what he communicates is “not the polish and detachment of theory”; rather, it is “the turns and refractions of factical life in its afflictions” (Heidegger 2001a, 145/103). Kisiel notes that, in these letters, we find a wholly different register of communication: “Paul’s language has an entirely different expressive function from which a representational content cannot really be assumed” (Kisiel 1995, 188). Heidegger concludes that the early Christians lived temporality: “Christian experience lives time itself” (2001, 82/57). In their lives was manifest a sense of urgency and affliction, an intense need to turn towards God, and so they lived temporality in the sense that they lived in an intense experience of time, “an absolute affliction and need which defines every moment of the life of the Christian” (Kisiel 1995, 184). They awaited the Second Coming, but theirs was not an ordinary sense of waiting. Kisiel says that they were “holding out,” which is different from “calculated waiting” (Kisiel 1995, 184). Their waiting was an enduring that serves God and thus is manifest as an intensification of life. The early Christians proved their calling not logically but through experiencing and living this powerful sense of afflicted time. In Paul’s letters, Heidegger finds a mode of expression that is not theoretical, but exhortatory. What is at stake in these writings is the being of the early Christians, how they experienced themselves with a kind of temporal intensity, and the language used by Paul in his letters expresses that sense of temporal urgency. Importantly, what we find expressed in Paul’s letters is a radically different kind of knowledge, one that is informed by a sense of urgency and affliction about who the early Christians are. They harbored within themselves a sense of being, a sense of how they were, which was pre-theoretical. It was embedded within their lives, and it manifested as an urgent feeling (an urgent pathos) of temporality. For Heidegger, the human being is a place of openness, neither subject nor object, but in between. Dastur highlights the role of pathos or affectivity

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in Heidegger, which is itself neither subjective nor objective. The human being is “this ‘place’ where the encounter between subject and object can occur, a place of openness to the world” (Dastur 2017, 39). It is significant that Dastur highlights affectivity or pathos to mark this sense of human being, because in the early Heidegger, it is in his work on language and rhetoric in Aristotle where speaking, truth, and pathos converge. Heidegger agrees with Aristotle that the human being is a zoon logon echon, but Heidegger claims that this does not mean that the human being is a rational animal. Rather, the human being is a living being (i.e., factical life) who speaks. The early Heidegger’s phenomenology of language is thus a description of the how the human being brings its own factical experience to expression through speaking. Factical lived experience, for Heidegger, is always already meaningful. Reflection on experience is not required to make it meaningful. The task is rather an explication and articulation of that latent meaningfulness, highlighting it and thus making it prominent in its meaningfulness. As Dastur puts it, No constituting consciousness has to appropriate it [i.e., the world] or give meaning to it, and there is therefore no need to determine the act of ‘consciousness’ as a Sinngebung, a giving of meaning; instead, it is a matter of thinking the hermeneutic relation to a meaning that is always already there before me even though it also requires my participation. (Dastur 2017, 52) In contrast to Husserl’s “philosophy of the pure gaze” (Dastur 2017, 51), Heidegger proposes that the act of saying has a priority over that of seeing, and this is distinctive to Heidegger’s hermeneutic phenomenology. 3 A New Register of Experience for Phenomenology In a talk given in December 1924 entitled “Being-There and Being-True According to Aristotle,” as well as in his lecture course on Aristotle’s Rhetoric (Summer Semester of 1924), entitled Basic Concepts of Aristotelian Philosophy (Heidegger 2009), Heidegger endeavors to explain the concept of truth in light of life and language. We see in these texts three key elements of the early Heidegger’s work coming together: (1) a focus on life and the intimate relationship between living and being, (2) the profound sense of logos as speaking and living in dialogical relationships with others in everyday life, and (3) the notion of truth as ale¯ theia. In the confluence of these interests, one finds a very different notion of the relationship between language and truth than what we see in the history of philosophy. Through speaking, truth finds its original determination; if that is the case, then it is through speaking that one finds the origin of hermeneutic truth. This hermeneutic truth emerges not through propositions that articulate pre-predicative experience, but instead when, through speaking, one makes prominent the

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meaningfulness embedded within pre-predicative experience. As such, truth here is not propositional truth, but rather the truth of existence, the truth of human Dasein. It is not clear from Being and Time to what extent discourse permeates Dasein’s Being-in-the-world. In Being and Time, “discourse” and, in particular, “communication” are treated as fundamentally deceptive, due to the way in which predication levels down the meanings of words. To highlight the contrast between these two views of language, let us look at what Heidegger says about language and communication in Being and Time before then returning to what he says about discourse in his earlier work. To prepare the way for the analysis of discourse in that text, he first looks at “assertion” and the way in which communication derives from it. This is significant because, as he points out, throughout the history of philosophy it has been thought that truth is located in the assertion. Here he identifies three significations of the term assertion: (1) pointing out, (2) predicating, and (3) communicating. To assert something is to point it out, and this pointing-out, which is the primary signification of the term, comes from the Greek apophasis, “letting an entity be seen from itself” (Heidegger 1962, 196). Pointing something out is to identify something and thus to have a particular entity in view, but not in the sense of saying something about that entity. Predication, to say something about an entity, is actually the second signification of assertion, and, he says, it depends on the first. So, pointing something out is not the same as predicating it. He uses the example, “The hammer is too heavy.” To say this is to point the hammer out—and, of course, it is to predicate it, in a sense. But to say the hammer is heavy is to point out that entity, the hammer, insofar as that entity belongs to a context of relations (hammering, using nails, fixing something, building something, dwelling in what you built, all of which is connected to the human being). This context of relations is the world, and so to assert something about the hammer in this way is to point it out as an instrument in the world, as something people use and need in everyday living. On the other hand, to predicate something is not just to point it out in terms of its usefulness in daily activity. Rather, predication gives it a definite character. Of course, predication does point something out. So, the second signification of assertion is grounded in the first. However, to predicate something and thus give it a definite character narrows the content of the assertion. What is manifest but not explicit in the first sense of assertion is made explicit in predication. In predication, we “take a step back” with respect to what is manifest— but not explicit—in just pointing something out (Heidegger 1962, 197). And in this taking-a-step-back, the subject—the hammer—is, he says, “dimmed down,” which is to say, it is seen in its “definite character as a character that can be determined” (Heidegger 1962, 197). In the first signification, the hammer is something we use to do something with. In the

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second signification, the hammer is something about which something is said. Thus, predication is founded on pointing out. One might think that it would be the other way around, that because we can give things a definite character we are then able to point out how they are used in everyday life. The fact that Heidegger does not say that is important. His claim is that communication originates in this context of relations and then involves a restricting of that context, a dimming down of what is being talked about. The third signification of assertion is, he says, communication. In German, to communicate is to share with (mitteilen). Communication is related to and depends on the first two significations of assertion. Communication is, then, “letting someone see with us what we have pointed out by way of giving it a definite character” (Heidegger 1962, 197). Thus, what is communicated is something that can be shared; it is something that people have in common. But because it can be shared, it can turn into hearsay. In other words, it can be removed further and further from its original context (i.e., from pointing out). In Heidegger’s more technical language, when we communicate, what is communicated is no longer ready-to-hand; it is now present-at-hand. It is no longer situated within a context of relations. The existential–hermeneutical “as” of circumspective interpretation, by which we point things out as we use them in everyday life, is leveled down to the apophantical “as” whereby we get a view of something in a definite way. This process takes place in all communication. In order to share something with another person, that which is shared must be given a definite character, and once it has a definite character, the context of relations from which it originally arose gets pushed back. The problems emerging from this process are evident in what Heidegger says about idle talk. His analysis of idle talk in Being and Time is based on the idea that the apprehension achieved in communication is not the same as understanding what is being talked about. One might apprehend what someone says, and one might call this communication, but apprehending the meaning of a term is not the same as understanding the meaning intended by the speaker. What is apprehended lacks meaningful context. To be sure, one may have some idea of what someone is saying when he or she speaks. The interlocutors may even have the same object in view, and in that sense, they do share something in common. Apprehending the meaning of an expression or having in view the same object may fulfill the criteria for communication, but it does not constitute genuine understanding of what is being talked about. A failure to understand occurs, Heidegger says, because “this discoursing has lost its primary relationship-of-Being towards the entity talked about” (Heidegger 1962, 212), since one has prioritized, instead, simply “what someone says.” When that happens, a bit of understandable information, without meaningful context, gets passed along to others. It then becomes gossip, but not just the kind of gossip one finds in the newspapers. It is not the kind of gossip that no one believes. It takes on an authoritative character and becomes the

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kind of gossip everyone believes, and it becomes more and more believable the more it gets passed along from person to person because it gets easier and easier to understand. This kind of communicating is groundless, but that does not prevent it from becoming something that everyone believes. On the contrary, because it is groundless, it is easy to understand. This level of understanding comprehends everything. It lacks the discipline to make subtle distinctions, and, as such, can understand anything and everything. Notice that this lack of genuine understanding is not the same as intentionally trying to deceive someone. Deception is a separate issue. The problem here pertains to an average understanding, the kind of apprehension we tend to employ in everyday life, which in effect produces an illusion of understanding. Such misdirected understanding discourages us from asking more questions. Since we seem to understand what is being talked about, we do not feel the need to inquire into the matter further. The cause of this idle talk is well known. Dasein is in a world and tends to understand itself in terms of the world in which it lives. Dasein is Being-in-the-world, and it must comport itself with other people. As such, we tend to understand things according to what other people have said. Idle talk is public, and Dasein is dominated by the public domain. We tend to interpret and understand things the way other people interpret and understand things, and this gives us the illusion of understanding what is being talked about. What Heidegger calls idle talk in Being and Time is a description of everyday communication. It is the way that Dasein communicates in average everydayness. For this reason, it has been taken to be simply gossip. Everyday communication involves chattering on and on about something without really thinking about it or understanding it in a genuine way. Now, in some sense, that reading of discourse as idle talk, gossip, or chatter is justified. The problem, though, is that such an interpretation has given rise to the idea that such superficial modes represent the only idea of everyday discourse in Heidegger’s early work. But that is not the case. The early lecture courses demonstrate a much more positive account of everyday, non-theoretical discourse and conversation. In one of those early lecture courses, Heidegger writes, with his own emphasis: The Being-in-the-world of the human being is basically determined through speaking. To speak with the world, about it, from it, is the fundamental way of life of the human being in his world. Thus the human being is determined precisely through logos. (Heidegger 2009, 18/14–5) Heidegger does mention Aristotle’s Rhetoric in Being and Time, calling it “the first systematic hermeneutic of the everydayness of Being with one another” (Heidegger 1962, 178/138). This reference appears, however, not in the sections on discourse but rather in Section 29 on Being-there as state-of-mind.

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Instead of viewing rhetoric as a practical or political skill, Heidegger understands it as the use of oratory to influence mood. Unfortunately, even in this context, he connects the everydayness of Being-with-one-another to the inauthenticity of Dasein as the they-self. But as Dastur notes (Dastur 2017, 39), moods exhibit the openness of the human being, prior to the human taken as subject or object. Through moods, we experience that fundamental openness. Of course, this is mood conceived not as a psychological state but rather as a shared attunement to the world. It is remarkable to read in his analyses of rhetoric how little the early Heidegger debases or degrades speaking as idle talk. While the notion of idle talk is not absent from these texts, the most prominent feature of speaking is by far the extent to which it permeates our ways of being with one another in a shared world (in the same way that understanding, on Gadamer’s reading of Heidegger—noted above—permeates our way of Being-inthe-world). Heidegger believed that the Greeks had a much more profound understanding of life and of Being than we do today. Exploring the Greek thinkers, here Aristotle and Plato, was a way to retrieve that original and primordial understanding. Through them, he plumbs the depths of “the discursive speech of everyday existence, of the Being-with-one-another of human beings” (Heidegger 2007, 222). In everyday discourse, there is a mode of truth that is different from the truth that has been handed down to us in Aristotelian logic. We find here an extraordinary recasting of Aristotle’s theory of propositional truth, one that has not yet been emphasized in the literature about this course. Aristotle says in Chapter 4 of On Interpretation that a proposition involves speech in which there is truth or falsity (Aristotle 2001, 4). Here, speech is a composite term, as opposed to a simple term, but as Thomas Aquinas adds in his commentary on On Interpretation, a proposition must also be “perfect,” which means that it expresses a complete thought (Aquinas 1962, I, 5, #17). A proposition is thus perfect speech that contains truth or falsity, which means that it is a composite term expressing a complete thought in which there is truth or falsity. In the same chapter, Aristotle mentions that there are also composite terms expressing a complete thought that are not propositions, since they do not contain truth or falsity. Some sentences are not propositions because they cannot be either true or false. Questions, commands, exclamations, prayers, and other kinds of what we can call speech acts are not describing a state-of-affairs but are, rather, actions. With this kind of perfect speech one is actually doing something. Heidegger puts the point this way: “Not every mode of discursive speech is a showing or a letting-be-seen-as; rather, our everyday, natural mode of discursive speech has an aim altogether different than that of a pure showing of the things themselves” (Heidegger 2007, 221). This means that in everyday discourse, such as we find in Aristotle’s explorations of rhetoric, what we find is a mode of speech that does not contain truth (or falsity). If the only kind of speech that harbors truth is demonstrative speech, then

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everyday speaking does not admit of truth. Recall that in his reading of phenomenology in Being and Time, he says that the logos of phenomenology is a letting-show. If it is demonstrative speech that lets-show, and if we only find truth in speech that lets-show (that is, in propositions and judgments, which are demonstrative), then the notion of logos or discourse in Being and Time is not the same that we find in these analyses of everyday speech and discourse. But arriving at that conclusion does not take account of Heidegger’s radicalization of the notion of the proposition and of the concept of truth in these early lecture courses. The conclusion that Heidegger reaches in his lecture on “Being-There and Being-True According to Aristotle” is an understanding of Dasein as Beingin-the-world. He writes, Dasein means Being-in-the-world—that is our fundamental finding. There is not first of all a subject, which is enclosed in and for itself as in a box, with an object outside. Rather, the fundamental finding and first level of reference is: Being-in-a-world. (Heidegger 2007, 231) It is remarkable that he attributes this conclusion to an analysis of the speech of everyday existence. He notes here the three distinctive occasions in which this everyday mode of discursive speech is used: “political speech, speech before the court, and festive (celebratory) speech” (Heidegger 2007, 222). He writes that, “these modes of speaking, as they are present in everyday living, are merely the forms of the various ways of living which primarily constitute our Being-with-one-another” (Heidegger 2007, 222). My contention is that he uses this register of everyday discursive speech in order to highlight a dimension of existence that is different from what Husserl calls the pre-predicative but also different from the propositional or predicative and which manifests a truth that is different from what Aristotle finds in propositions and judgments. Aristotle says that questions, exclamations, commands, and what we might call other speech acts are not propositions because they cannot be either true or false. They are not describing a state-of-affairs. To this register of language, i.e., perfect speech that does not contain truth or falsity, Heidegger includes the discursive speech of everyday existence. This is a remarkable re-interpretation of Aristotle’s position, but it fits with his effort to develop a language that is pre-predicative and non-propositional. Of course, this mode of speech does concern states-of-affairs, but on Heidegger’s reading, it is not describing a state-of-affairs, i.e., it is not a demonstration or a proof of a stateof-affairs. Here he looks to the three pisteis of the rhetorical situation: pathos, ¯e thos, and logos, all of which “speak for the matter spoken about” (Heidegger 2007, 223). The Greek term pistis can be translated as proof, belief, or stateof-mind; in the New Testament, it means faith. In the rhetorical situation, the speaker must be attentive to the mood of the listener (pathos); she needs

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to demonstrate that she is reliable and trustworthy and knows what she is talking about (e¯ thos); and then she must bring forth logos, “the third possibility that speaks for the thing [which] is the manner of showing in this mode of discursive speech” (Heidegger 2007, 223). The three occasions for speaking (the political, the judicial, and the festive) along with the distinctive means of speaking at these occasions (pathos, ¯e thos, and logos) are all modes of discursive (as opposed to demonstrative or propositional) speech. In all of them, the speaker is trying to shape the opinions of her audience. For this very reason, she does not let the matter be seen directly. Hence, the political, the judicial, and the festive “cannot have the sense of letting things be seen as they themselves are” (Heidegger 2007, 222). Heidegger continues, Rather, the point is to bring the hearer to a certain mood from out of which a specific conviction grows. Thus, the primary way of speaking is meaningful as a talking-into (a convincing), but talking into in a good sense. (Heidegger 2007, 222) Heidegger is using Aristotle’s theory about the proposition to say that this mode of discursive everyday speech should fall in the same category as questions, exclamations, and commands. This kind of speech is thus not true or false in the sense that Aristotle intends, and so it does not show anything. But there is more to discursive speech as Heidegger is describing it than just questions, exclamations, and commands. It includes opinions, and while opinions can certainly be true or false, on Heidegger’s account, since shaping common opinion belongs to everyday discursive speech, then it should be counted as perfect speech that does not contain truth or falsity in Aristotle’s sense. Thus, there is a measure of truth in discursive speech, but it is not propositional truth; it is another kind of truth. He draws the following conclusion, and here I quote at length: The essential point for us here is that these three ways of discursive speech concern themselves with the states-of-affairs of everyday living, and thus precisely with the world closest to us. With their specific means of shaping common opinion, these modes of discursive speech cultivate human existence such that the most immediate everyday Dasein moves about in the first place in certain opinions about the world and itself. But these specific opinions can still manifest a genuinely created kernel of truth from out of themselves. (Heidegger 2007, 223) This is not the same sense of idle talk that we find in Being and Time. Instead, we find here modes of speech that cultivate human existence and manifest a genuine measure of truth.

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Heidegger acknowledges, of course, that we do find truth in propositions and judgments. Moreover, this can happen in discourse, for “Within this discourse, there is the distinct possibility that a logos will become true which has the character of letting-something-be-seen-as: apophainesthai” (Heidegger 2007, 224). But this kind of truth involves a different kind of logos, one that is “primarily operative in theoretical knowing” (Heidegger 2007, 224). Heidegger is searching for the ground of this truth. On his account, the truth and falsity of propositions derives from the more fundamental truth and falsity of Dasein. As he writes in Being and Time, “Dasein is already both in the truth and in untruth” (Heidegger 1962, 265/223). In the lecture on “Being-There and Being-True,” Heidegger takes up the notion of truth by first looking at concealment and hiddenness, noting three kinds of concealment, namely: (1) through common opinions, (2) through ignorance, and (3) through validity. How does validity conceal? Heidegger explains that validity conceals when an original discovery has become something that everyone now understands without thought, questioning, or original insight.9 Each of these modes of concealment then has a corresponding unconcealment. For Heidegger, we live mainly in concealment and deception, a fact he actually attributes to language itself: “The factical Dasein of speaking as such . . . is the actual source of deception” (Heidegger 2005, 35/26). More importantly, though, we see that Heidegger’s understanding of truth as ale¯ theia emerges here through the analysis of the concealments built into language. In the Appendix to this same lecture, we find the three modes of unconcealment or disclosure that correspond to the three modes of concealment found in discursive everyday speech. They are, respectively: (1) the incomplete, yet genuine, insight disclosed through common opinions, (2) the disclosure of new realms of being, and (3) the struggle against idle talk, which the Greeks experience through sophistry and rhetoric. We find here a different and more radical notion of truth than what we get from the tradition. It is the truth of human existence, not propositional or predicative truth. It is a disclosure that struggles against concealment and deception, not the correspondence between subject and object. It traces back to Aristotle, though not to the notion that relates subjects to objects. Heidegger notes here what Aristotle calls being-true, ale¯ theuein, which is a hexis te¯s psuche¯ s, a habit of the soul: “the soul disposes over specific possibilities of uncovering the world and uncovering human life itself” (Heidegger 2007, 226). I think that what we find here is a new phenomenological register and a new sense of truth that is based upon it.10 That new register is pre-predicative experience that is nonetheless charged with meaning and can be discussed without self-reflection. That experience can be explicated, it can be expressed, without resorting to propositions and judgments. It is the register of experience that, as noted above, is expressed through perfect speech which does not express truth or falsity in the traditional sense but which extends beyond questions, exclamations, and commands. It is lived

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experience that is made prominent, highlighted, or set into relief through discursive everyday language. Kisiel describes this register of human experience in a number of different ways. He calls it the “habit of living, that prereflective ‘understanding of being’ that Heidegger throughout a long career of thought sought to indicate in its temporal dynamics and to define in its structure” (Kisiel 2002, 175). Elsewhere Kisiel calls it “that understanding which is first of all a way of life issuing from the familiarity of existence before it is a mode of knowledge” (Kisiel 2002, 93). Heidegger’s focus is not on seeing essences, but rather on articulating and explicating what we implicitly understand through living. Kisiel says further: “The simplest perception is already expressed and interpreted by the prior understanding we have of it, which determines how we perceive” (Kisiel 2002, 99). Kisiel aims to show the phenomenological shift from the intuition (Husserl) to understanding (Heidegger), which is the shift toward Heidegger’s hermeneutic expression of factical life. Heidegger accomplishes that shift through a sustained focus on the expression of factical existence through discursive speech. This is why he says in Being and Time that it is the “existential understanding” which grounds a “phenomenological ‘intuition of essences’” (Heidegger 1962, 187/147). In Heidegger’s view, this register of truth that relates to pre-predicative lived experience, and thus to human existence, precedes the proposition. In the course on Plato’s Sophist (Heidegger 1997) from the winter semester of 1923–24, Heidegger notes that the philosophy of language needs to go deeper than the proposition for its foundation. Speaking is not a matter of simply outlining a series of propositions as a way of showing what things are. Hence, he challenges the very structure of the proposition, explaining, The way runs precisely not from the subject, over the copula, to the predicate but, instead, from the pre-given whole to the setting in relief of what we afterwards call the predicate, and thereby for the first time to a genuine making prominent of the subject. (Heidegger 1997, 601/416) The proposition or judgment derives from the experience of a given whole which is then set into relief or made prominent. We see in this insight a very similar structure to the way he describes phenomenology in Basic Problems of Phenomenology as a matter of taking-notice, which is also a matter of making prominent pre-predicative experience. Likewise, in the Phenomenology of Religious Life, Heidegger details the way in which Paul uses a language of expressive as opposed to theoretical concepts to convey the immediacy and urgency of the lived experience of the early Christians in an effort not to describe reality but to exhort the early Christians to make a decision about their lives. In both cases, phenomenology is matter of trying to express this new phenomenological register. The major advance in Heidegger’s analysis of rhetoric is to explicate the sense of truth that emerges from that relationship

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between speaking and life, and that is truth as uncovering, unconcealment, or disclosure (ale¯ theia). Interestingly, there is a related motif that we find in the early Heidegger (Heidegger 1997) that is then reprised in Being and Time and then again in the Origin of the Work of Art. It is the idea that we do not hear abstract sounds; rather, we hear meanings. In the lecture course on Plato’s Sophist (1923–24), he describes “unarticulated unitary being” (Heidegger 1997, 599/415), which is a way of referring to pre-predicative experience, and he claims that what we hear in this unarticulated unitary being is something like “the creaking wagon on the street” (Heidegger 1997, 599/415). For Heidegger, we do not hear pure sounds. What we hear in everyday life are meanings. We find essentially the same example in Being and Time (1927), where he writes: “What we ‘first’ hear is never noises or complexes of sounds, but the creaking wagon, the motor-cycle. We hear the column on the march, the north wind, the woodpecker tapping, the fire crackling.” He adds that “It requires a very artificial and complicated frame of mind to ‘hear’ a ‘pure noise’” and that this is “the phenomenal evidence that in every case Dasein, as Being-inthe-world, already dwells alongside what is ready-to-hand within-the-world” (Heidegger 1962, 207/163–4). Then in the “Origin of the Work of Art,” he writes that in the thingliness of the thing, we never first perceive sensations. What we perceive are articulated meanings: We never really first perceive a throng of sensations, e.g. tones and noises, in the appearance of things . . . rather we hear the storm whistling in the chimney, we hear the three-motored plane, we hear the Mercedes in immediate distinction from the Volkswagen . . . . In order to hear a bare sound we have to listen away from things, divert our ears from them, i.e., listen abstractly. (Heidegger, Origin of the Work of Art, 151–2) For Heidegger, from his early work up to the 1950s, the phenomenological object is always already an interpretation, articulated being; that is, it is always already hermeneutic, replete with meaning. The early Heidegger’s hermeneutics of facticity is in many respects a development of Husserl’s phenomenology, but it is not a seamless one, and there are key differences between the method of phenomenology in Husserl and Heidegger.11 Both Husserl and Heidegger believed that it was possible to fashion a language that could capture the vitality of lived experience, but they thought of that language differently. My focus in this essay has not been on Husserl, but we can recognize that Husserl, especially in his later work Experience and Judgment, thought that predicative language could bring to light the inherent meaningfulness in pre-predicative experience. Heidegger, on the other hand, explored a way of thinking about language that was itself pre-predicative. Heidegger viewed phenomenology as an effort to express or highlight pre-predicative lived experience through discursive

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everyday speaking in a new phenomenological register. We might say that this register is in between Husserl’s notion of mute pre-predicative experience and the propositional. Still, it draws on Husserl’s effort to develop a language that can capture the intensity of lived experience in everyday life. In the first section of this essay, I drew on Cobb-Stevens’s account of the relationship between Husserl and Heidegger in order to highlight Heidegger’s development of Husserl’s phenomenology and the extent to which truth is at stake in that development. But that development is not without key differences, and so I aimed to highlight the difference between Husserl’s reflective and predicative elucidation of pre-predicative experience and Heidegger’s effort to develop a pre-predicative register of language. In the second section, I tried to show how this effort manifested in the early lecture courses, especially in his interpretations of religious life, where we see this expressive yet pre-predicative register of communication in Paul’s letters. In the final section, I wanted to highlight Heidegger’s remarkable reinterpretation of everyday, discursive speech in terms of Aristotle’s notion of the proposition and how this fits with his effort to develop a pre-predicative language of human experience. In all of this, we see the notable difference between what Heidegger says about discourse and communication in Being and Time and what he says about discourse and everyday language in his earlier work. In Being and Time, much of the phenomenological analysis of language shows discourse to be inauthentic, relegated to the speech of idle talk, and yet prior to Being and Time, Heidegger had opened up a whole new register of language. It is the register of pre-predicative hermeneutic experience, always already articulated and expressed in the discursive speech of everyday life. Further work on the early Heidegger’s phenomenology of language could take up this positive notion of everyday discourse to develop an understanding of authentic discourse, which we do not find in Being and Time. Notes 1 Chad Engelland sees a phenomenological continuity from the early to the later Heidegger. While he notes that in the early Heidegger, we see the imposition of language on pre-linguistic understanding, an imposition which is absent from the later works, he finds that in Heidegger both early and late, the basic impetus is there to let phenomena show themselves from themselves. Thus, throughout his career, he “struggles to find language adequate to the phenomenon of phenomena” (Engelland 2009, 185). I find in Heidegger’s early project an effort to develop a language that can capture moods and pathei in a way that Engelland does not, nonetheless, I think my analysis is consistent with his belief that Heidegger was always trying to work out a language that was appropriate to the phenomena themselves and that this is at the heart of his phenomenology. 2 For a clear and thorough exposition of Husserl’s influence on Gadamerian hermeneutics, see Dermot Moran (2011). Moran shows clearly Gadamer’s indebtedness to Husserl’s notion of the life-world as the inspiration and predecessor to his own understanding of the way that we always live within pre-given horizons of meaning. Moran writes, “Gadamer’s conception of communities living within the horizon of traditions that provide the very pregiven context for all understanding is already richly documented in Husserl” (Moran 2011, 93). Moran notes, though, that for Gadamer, Husserl’s a priori

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method and notion of eidetic variation were not able to grasp the finitude and historicity of human existence. He notes, too, that “Husserlian phenomenology failed to address properly the phenomenon of language” (Moran 2011, 93). The notion of truth that emerges from Heidegger’s understanding of phenomenology, we would have to say, is neither subjective nor objective, since is precedes that distinction. But it is also not the notion of fullness that Cobb-Stevens mentions. For Cobb-Stevens, Husserl and Heidegger offer complementary views of phenomenology, and this seems quite right. For Cobb-Stevens, Heidegger’s pragmatic and more evocative interpretation of Husserlian categories helps us to discern the notion of truth as fullness in Husserl’s nonrelativistic hermeneutics. But truth as ale¯ theia, the emergence from concealment into unconcealment, retains within it such a strong sense of negativity, concealment, and deception (and this only becomes more apparent in Heidegger’s later work), that I cannot see how we can ascribe fullness to Heidegger’s understanding of truth in phenomenology. Still, there is a complementarity to the two accounts, because Cobb-Stevens is right, Heidegger’s phenomenology is an interpretation of Husserl and relies upon it. In some form, Heidegger never abandoned phenomenology, but he did abandon the objectivity and fullness of truth. He replaced it with a notion of truth that was more dangerous, more prone to relativism, and more subjective, except that Dasein is not a subject. To my mind, we need both phenomenologies: we need the sense of fullness we get from Husserl, and we need the radical reinterpretation of that sense of truth that we get in Heidegger’s hermeneutic phenomenology. The first one fends off relativism, while the second one opens up riskier but also fruitful areas of human existence. Indeed, the concept of facticity as we find it in Being and Time lacks the same prominence as we find in the notions of facticity and factical life as those are presented in the early lecture courses. But the basic structure of it is still there. In Being and Time, facticity is discussed in conjunction with the notion of thrownness. As thrown, Dasein is there in the world, and facticity is meant to suggest this “thereness,” this “that-it-is” as a feature of Dasein’s existence which can be grasped but not simply seen or beheld (Heidegger 1962, 174/135). Earlier in the text, Heidegger remarks that facticity is always “dispersed” or “split up” into various activities. Similarly, in the early lecture courses, Heidegger uses the notion of facticity to describe the immediacy of life in its intensity and vibrancy, and yet it also retains the sense of dispersion mentioned in Being and Time. In the lecture course on Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle: Initiation into Phenomenological Research (Heidegger 2001b), Heidegger uses the term ruinance to describe an array of dispersions in human life, which make their way into Being and Time under the rubric of fallenness. Eric Nelson notes that for Gadamer the expression “hermeneutics of facticity” is paradoxical because it marks the attempt to interpret that which cannot be interpreted, since facticity, according to Nelson 2000, “indicates that which refuses, resists, reverses interpretation and meaning” (Nelson 2000, 153). Nelson summarizes: “the hermeneutics of facticity is about the tension between communication and the ineffable. This ineffability is already found in the immanence of life itself” (Nelson 2000, 153). For a relatively recent discussion of the relationships between and among phenomenology, historicity, factical life, and religious experience, see Anna Jani (2016). Interestingly, Jani concludes that we find in these courses a way of thinking about authenticity or, in her words, “a comprehension of authentic life in all its historicity” (Jani 2016, 40). Leslie MacAvoy would like to minimize the significance of formal indication. It does not play a major role, at least explicitly, in any of Heidegger’s texts other than this one on the Phenomenology of Religious Life, and on MacAvoy’s account, it owes so much to Husserl’s theory of empty intentions (“it is the emptiness of the indication that gives it the sense of being towards the concrete without directly giving it” MacAvoy 2010, 84) that it does not seem like a good place to highlight the difference between Husserl and Heidegger. MacAvoy concludes, “if I am right about what is at stake in hermeneutics in Heidegger’s sense, then I think it must be acknowledged that the groundwork is to some

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extent laid in Husserl’s phenomenology” (88). She then claims that “If formal indication is a version of empty intention, and if formal indication is ‘hermeneutic,’ then perhaps there is something ‘hermeneutic’ about empty intentions” (88). This is an important point, and it is worth looking more deeply into the extent to which Husserl’s phenomenology prepares the ground for hermeneutics. See Sokolowski (2000, 97–102). Heidegger calls this third one the most dangerous concealment because it is no longer subject to question. See Heidegger (2007, 225). Jesús Adrián Escudero draws a sharp line here, perhaps too sharp of a line, between Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology and Heidegger’s hermeneutic phenomenology, but the point is made, when he writes: “In sum, reflexive phenomenology has access to reality through theory, whereas hermeneutic phenomenology draws a clear-cut distinction between the theoretical and the phenomenological attitudes” (Escudero 2015, 108). Husserl’s focus on the life-world may very well be less theoretical than Escudero implies here. Nonetheless, Heidegger’s hermeneutics of factical life aimed at being non-reflexive because his focus, in Escudero’s terms, was on “the symbolically structured world in which life always already finds itself. In this sense, the world is not a receptacle that contains the totality of perceived things. It is filled with meaning from the start” (Escudero 2015, 108). In a lecture course from the summer of 1925, History of the Concept of Time, Heidegger offers his most sustained account and criticism of Husserlian phenomenology. (It is remarkable how little mention is made of Husserl in the lecture courses leading up to this one). Leslie MacAvoy’s account of this course shows clearly the ways that Heidegger was moving away from his mentor. Heidegger’s first objection was with the notion of intentionality, which, based on a notion of consciousness drawn uncritically from the tradition of philosophy, is too theoretical. It becomes “a detached stance wherein intentional objects are construed as presented to consciousness in judgments” (MacAvoy 2013, 139). Heidegger’s second objection concerns the first moment of the phenomenological reduction, which does not take account of the reality of consciousness because it suspends the natural attitude and, in doing so, misses factical life, which is a phenomenon that cannot be bracketed. Lastly, Heidegger objects to the second moment of the phenomenological reduction, which suspends the individuality of the ego; the transcendental ego is not individuated or mine.

References Aquinas, Thomas (1962), Commentary on Aristotle’s Peri Hermeneias, On Interpretation, finished by Cardinal Cajetan, trans. Jean T. Oesterle, Milwaukee, WV: Marquette University Press. Aristotle (2001), “On Interpretation,” in Richard McKeon (ed.), E.M. Edghill (trans.), The Basic Works of Aristotle, New York: Modern Library. Cobb-Stevens, Richard (1982), “Hermeneutics without Relativism: Husserl’s Theory of Mind,” Research in Phenomenology 12: 127–48. Dastur, Françoise (2017), Questions of Phenomenology: Language, Alterity, Temporality, Finitude, trans. Robert Vallier, New York: Fordham University Press. Engelland, Chad (2009), “The Phenomenological Motivation of the Later Heidegger,” Philosophy Today 53 (SPEP Supplement): 182–9. Escudero, Jesús Adrián (2015), Heidegger and the Emergence of the Question of Being, trans. Juan Pablo Hernández Betancur, London: Bloomsbury. Gadamer, Hans-Georg (2004), Truth and Method, rev. trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall, London: Bloomsbury. Heidegger, Martin (1962), Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, San Francisco, CA: Harper Collins. ———. (1971), On the Way to Language, trans. Peter D. Hertz, New York: Harper & Row.

114 Scott Campbell ———. (1977), “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in David Farrell Krell (ed.), Basic Writings: From Being and Time (1927) to The Task of Thinking (1964), 139–212, San Francisco, CA: Harper Collins. ———. (1992), GA 20 History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena, trans. Theodore Kisiel, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. (1997), GA 19 Plato’s Sophist, trans. Richard Rojcewicz, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. (2001a), GA 60 Phenomenology of Religious Life, trans. Matthias Fritsch and Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. (2001b), GA 61 Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle: Initiation into Phenomenological Research, trans. Richard Rojcewicz, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. (2005), GA 17 Introduction to Phenomenological Research, trans. Daniel Dahlstrom, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. (2007), “Being-There and Being-True According to Aristotle,” in Theodore Kisiel and Thomas Sheehan (eds.), Brian Hansford Bowles (trans.), Becoming Heidegger: On the Trail of his Early Occasional Writings, 1910–1927, 211–34 Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press ———. (2009), GA 18 Basic Concepts of Aristotelian Philosophy, trans. Robert D. Metcalf and Mark B. Tanzer, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. (2013), GA 58 Basic Problems of Phenomenology: Winter Semester 1919/1920, trans. Scott M. Campbell, London: Bloomsbury. Husserl, Edmund (2001), The Logical Investigations, Volume 1, trans. J.N. Findlay, ed. Dermot Moran, London: Routledge. ———. (2010), “Letter to Rudolf Otto (1919),” in Thomas Sheehan (ed.), Heidegger: The Man and the Thinker, 23–6, London: Routledge. Jani, Anna (2016), “Historicity and Christian Life-Experience in the Early Philosophy of Martin Heidegger,” Forum Philosophicum 21 (1): 29–41. Kisiel, Theodore (1995), The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time, Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. (2002), Heidegger’s Way of Thought: Critical and Interpretive Signposts, eds., Alfred Denker and Marion Heinz, London: Continuum. MacAvoy, Leslie (2010), “Formal Indication and the Hermeneutics of Facticity,” Philosophy Today 54 (Supplement): 84–90. ———. (2013), “Heidegger and Husserl,” in François Raffoul and Eric S. Nelson (eds.), The Bloomsbury Companion to Heidegger, 135–41, London: Bloomsbury. Moran, Dermot (2011), “Gadamer and Husserl on Horizon, Intersubjectivity, and the LifeWorld,” in Andrzej Wiercinski (ed.), Gadamer’s Hermeneutics and the Art of Conversation, International Studies in Hermeneutics and Phenomenology, vol. 2, 73–94, Münster: Lit Verlag. Nelson, Eric Sean (2000), “Questioning Practice: Heidegger, Historicity, and the Hermeneutics of Facticity,” Philosophy Today 44 (SPEP Supplement): 150–9. Sheehan, Thomas (1986), “Heidegger’s ‘Introduction to the Phenomenology of Religion,’” in Joseph Kockelmans (ed.), A Companion to Heidegger’s “Being and Time”, 40–62, Washington, DC: Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology and University Press of America. Sokolowski, Robert (2000), Introduction to Phenomenology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

6

Logos, Perception, and the Ontological Function of Discourse in Phenomenology A Theme from Heidegger’s Reading of Aristotle Leslie MacAvoy

What is the relationship between language and perception? If perception is shaped by language or discourse, then what should we make of the role of discourse in phenomenology? To explore this topic, I examine Heidegger’s interpretation of Aristotle’s notion of logos in order to shed light on his concept of discourse (Rede) and the function it performs in his phenomenology. While much recent scholarship on discourse in Heidegger is concerned with whether it is linguistic or non-linguistic, I argue, first, that the Aristotle interpretation provides evidence that although discourse is related to language, it is more importantly connected with meaning. Second, I show that Heidegger uses the Aristotle interpretation to shift the site of logos to perception itself, resulting in the distinctive view that the sight that grasps phenomena as meaningful is an interpretive taking something as something. Heidegger’s interpretation of Aristotle deepens our understanding of the intertwining of language and perception and clarifies how discourse enables the disclosure of phenomena by articulating the structures of intelligibility in virtue of which they can be seen. In the final section, I suggest that these structures have an ontological dimension. 1 Discourse In Being and Time Heidegger says that discourse is equiprimordial with understanding and state of mind (Befindlichkeit), both of which are modes of disclosedness (Heidegger 1962, 203/161).1 Disclosedness refers to the openness to the world as an intelligible and structured space of meaning, which characterizes Dasein’s being. In Being and Time and elsewhere, Heidegger emphasizes that the world is a structure of significance, and Dasein’s ‘worldly’ or existential character is such that it necessarily engages with things in terms of meaning (Heidegger 1962, 118–21/86–7). An understanding of this meaning saturates Dasein’s comportment in the world in all of its various projects and activities, and informs its self-understanding or understanding of its being.

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Discourse contributes to Heidegger’s elaboration of disclosedness. The section explicitly dedicated to discourse in Being and Time is broad-ranging, but there are three areas of that discussion that are most important for making sense of discourse as a distinctive notion. First is the claim that discourse articulates intelligibility. That is, although all modes of disclosedness relate in some way to the intelligibility of our being and of being-in-the-world, the particular role of discourse is to articulate this intelligibility. This is perhaps the most important and most difficult point in the section in large part because of some ambiguity concerning the sense of the term ‘articulation.’ While it could mean expression, it is not obvious that it only means that. Heidegger writes: Discourse is the Articulation of intelligibility. Therefore, it underlies both interpretation and assertion. That which can be Articulated in an interpretation, and thus even more primordially in discourse, is what we have called ‘meaning’. That which gets articulated as such in discursive Articulation, we call the ‘totality of significations.’ This can be dissolved or broken up into significations. Significations, as what has been Articulated from that which can be Articulated, always carry meaning. (Heidegger 1962, 203–4/161)2 This passage indicates, first, that while both discourse and interpretation articulate meaning, the articulation of intelligibility performed by discourse is a condition of that performed by interpretation.3 Discourse articulates the totality of significations. If this whole can be ‘broken up’ into significations, this suggests that discourse articulates by parsing overall intelligibility into meaningful parts. If interpretation depends on discourse, which involves this prior articulation of a whole, then interpretation must articulate by focusing on one signification and carving it out of that whole.4 The second area concerns the relationship between discourse and language. Heidegger claims that discourse is the existential-ontological foundation of language, and that “discourse is existentially language” and gets expressed as language (Heidegger 1962, 204/161). These claims suggest an affinity between discourse and language, but the text is ambiguous. The fact that Heidegger sees fit to distinguish between discourse and language suggests to some readers that perhaps they are not the same. Furthermore, he claims that significations articulated by discourse are put into words, claiming that “to significations, words accrue” (Heidegger 1962, 204/161). Since language clearly has to do with words, such passages suggest that discourse is prior to language in some way and perhaps even non-linguistic. Disagreement about how to read Heidegger on this point has given rise to what Carman and others following him have called the linguistic and pragmatic models of discourse.5 The linguistic model basically equates language and discourse, while the pragmatic model tries to do justice to its pre-linguistic aspect by locating the articulation of the totality of significations in something other

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than language, namely the practical comportment and concern with things that characterizes Dasein’s being-in-the-world. On this view, the articulation that occurs in discourse amounts to a kind of discriminating or differentiating between things or their features that occurs in the course of our activity.6 An objection to this view is that it has difficulty accounting for the expressive-communicative dimensions of discourse that Heidegger mentions when he discusses the constitutive moments of discourse as speaking (Reden). This third important area of Heidegger’s discussion emphasizes the activity of speaking and what is signified in that activity. Heidegger identifies four features: (1) what is talked about, i.e., the subject or topic; (2) what is said in the talk, i.e., what is said about the topic; (3) the communication which results in a shared understanding; and (4) a self-expression in which the speaker makes known something about his/her state-of-mind (Heidegger 1962, 204–6/161–2). The linguistic model can account for this aspect of Heidegger’s discussion, but some interpretations make it central to support what might be called an expressive-communicative model of discourse.7 The challenge for interpreters has been to make all of the elements of Heidegger’s account fit together, and they principally make this attempt by relying on the text of Being and Time alone. In what follows, I will not directly engage with these debates, but I think these dimensions of Heidegger’s notion of discourse make much more sense when connected to his interpretation of Aristotle’s concept of logos, particularly as it appears in the lectures of the 1920s.8 There are two aspects of Heidegger’s discussion that I emphasize.9 First, the elaboration of logos in relation to language or speaking is instructive because of what Heidegger highlights in making this connection. Second, his elaboration of logos in relation to perception shows that perception involves articulation and therefore is in some sense discursive. In advancing this thesis Heidegger shifts the locus of logos from judgments to perception itself. This move supports the claim that phenomenology can yield basic ontological categories. This is only possible if the phenomena show themselves in terms of the discursive forms yielded by the articulation of intelligibility. Analysis of the phenomena, then, should make it possible to disclose those ontological forms. 2 Logos and Language The concept of logos in Greek thought, particularly in Aristotle, is a touchstone of Heidegger’s lecture courses in the 1920s. He comes back to it again and again, usually translating logos as Rede or discourse.10 In Being and Time he offers a fairly minimal treatment of logos in the context of a consideration of the roots of the term ‘phenomenology’ and points out that logos lets something be seen (Heidegger 1962, 49–63/27–39). But the earlier lecture courses offer a more developed discussion and emphasize the sense of logos as discourse or speech, leaving little doubt that logos is not meant to be understood as a non-linguistic or extra-linguistic phenomenon.

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In the lecture from 1923–24, Introduction to Phenomenological Research, Heidegger’s consideration of Aristotle’s concept of logos emphasizes the claim that logos is phoˉ neˉ seˉ mantikeˉ or “audible being that means something” (Heidegger 2005, 10/14). Thus, logos is a voice (Stimme), which is to be distinguished from other sounds made by living things by the fact that it means something (Heidegger 2005, 10/14–5). Following Aristotle, he says that a voice is meaningful if it contains ‘fantasy’ (phantasia)—that is, if through it or by means of it something is perceived or seen (Heidegger 2005, 11/15).11 Thus, phoˉ neˉ becomes phoˉ neˉ seˉ mantikeˉ and hence logos, if it signifies by allowing something to be seen. This feature is further linked to the very nature of the human being and the way the human being is in the world: Insofar as a human being is in the world and wants something in that world and wants it with himself, he speaks. He speaks insofar as something like a world is uncovered for him as a matter of concern and he is uncovered to himself in this ‘for him’ . . . . Language is the being and becoming of the human being himself. (Heidegger 2005, 12/16)12 Thus, speaking and logos are connected to the nature of the human being in that they effect the disclosedness in virtue of which there is a ‘world.’13 In the lecture course from the following semester, The Basic Problems of Aristotelian Philosophy, Heidegger specifies again that logos is speaking in a discussion of Aristotle’s conception of the human being as zooˉ n logon echoˉ n.14 Given the focus, the discussion emphasizes what distinguishes human speech (logos) from the vocalization of animals (phoˉ neˉ) (Heidegger 2002, 19). Heidegger argues that Aristotle views phoˉ neˉ and logos as different yet determinate ways of being in and encountering the world (Heidegger 2002, 47).15 Animal vocalization is an indicating (Anzeigen) that involves calling (Locken), and warning (Warnen) (Heidegger 2002, 53–5). Thus, phoˉ neˉ indicates something about the animal’s feelings or affective states, which it communicates to others through its vocalizations. In this regard, it is expressive and communicative. Once again, Heidegger indicates that logos defines the way the world is there for us at all and therefore makes human being-in-the-world distinctive (Heidegger 2002, 57).16 Following Aristotle, Heidegger claims that we approach the world with an eye toward the ends that we seek to fulfill, and therefore we encounter things in terms of their usefulness or serviceability, as pointing beyond themselves toward those ends. This means that we engage with things in terms of the references (Verweisungen) they bear (Heidegger 2002, 58). In Being and Time, this referentiality or pointing toward ends is characterized as a type of signification. Initially reference (Verweisung) is the term used to denote the ‘in order to’ structure of equipment—e.g., that the pen can be used in order to write (Heidegger 1962, 97/68). In this context the reference is essentially the relation between the equipment and what it is for. Ultimately though,

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Heidegger expands this notion to point to the relations between various items of equipment that belong together in practical contexts, as well as relations with materials, products, people who might be users or consumers of those products, the aims to be accomplished in their use, and so on. This relational character typical of reference is a kind of signifying. Heidegger writes that: they [these relationships] are what they are as this signifying [Be-deuten] in which Dasein gives itself beforehand its Being-in-the-world as something to be understood. The relational totality of this signifying we call ‘significance’. That is what makes up the structure of the world . . . . (Heidegger 1962, 120/87) Thus, the world is an intelligible space of meaning and is opened up for us in this way by logos. That Heidegger discusses logos in relation to phoˉ neˉ indicates that he clearly has in mind something like vocalization and speaking. However, the concern to distinguish logos from phoˉ neˉ also points to the feature of speech or speaking that is particularly important, namely that logos effects the disclosedness in which the world is there for us as a structured space of meaning wherein things show up as intelligible in terms of significations. In Being and Time Heidegger refers again to Aristotle’s notion of zooˉ n logon echoˉ n and writes that the significance of the human being as the entity that talks is not the vocal utterance as such, but “rather that he is the entity which is such as to discover the world and Dasein itself” (Heidegger 1962, 208–9/165). The connection drawn between logos and speaking in these lectures makes it implausible to maintain that discourse in Heidegger is a non-linguistic phenomenon. Why, then, does Heidegger make claims in Being and Time that suggest a distinction between discourse and language? One possibility is that when Heidegger speaks of language in Being and Time, he tends to refer to it as something like a ‘totality of words,’ especially when he remarks that significations precede words.17 In making this point, he seems to be objecting to an approach to language that treats it as a collection of ‘word-things’ or names that have been abstracted from any context. Against this, he argues that words or names can only have a meaning or signify because they are dependent upon the concrete, existential activity of discourse. Again, his reading of Aristotle is instructive on this point. In Introduction to Phenomenological Research, Heidegger comments on the distinction Aristotle draws between the way logos refers to the world and the way words understood as names do, and emphasizes that logos points out “the existing entity as existing,” whereas “meaning something in the case of a name is merely entertaining it in a formal sense” (Heidegger 2005, 16/22). In other words, names or ‘word-things’ signify in abstraction from existence, while logos involves immediate reference to entities in the surrounding world. The crucial thing about discourse as opposed to language understood as ‘word-things’ is

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not that discourse is non-linguistic, but that the signification it involves is concrete and existentially grounded. 3 Logos and Perception As noted above, logos is “audible being that is meaningful,” and it is meaningful if something is perceived or seen through it (Heidegger 2005, 11/15). This claim points to a connection between logos and perception, which can be elaborated by identifying several discrete claims that, building upon one another, emerge in Heidegger’s interpretation of Aristotle. (1) Logos enables perception. While at one level this means that perception occurs through logos, Heidegger’s point runs deeper insofar as he claims that (2) perception itself articulates. This implies that perception is itself discursive. For this reason, (3) perceiving can be considered speaking. Each of these claims will be unpacked further in order to demonstrate the deep intertwining of logos and perception. The force of Heidegger’s interpretation of Aristotle here is to shift the locus of logos from judgment to perception and hence to our lived experience. This move has important phenomenological implications because it means that our very experience of the world is already discursively articulated, which in turn entails that an analysis of it can yield the ontological forms that structure that experience. 3.1 Logos Enables Perception As noted, the treatments of the term ‘phenomenology’ in the lectures of the 1920s anticipate the treatment found in Being and Time, wherein Heidegger examines the roots of the term ‘phenomenology’ in phainomenon and logos.18 In these contexts, the point is that logos lets something be seen, indicating that logos enables perception (Heidegger 1962, 56/33). The kind of perception involved is informed by Aristotle’s account of aistheˉ sis in De Anima. In Introduction to Phenomenological Research, Heidegger notes that Aristotle distinguishes three sorts of things perceived: (1) sensory qualities such as color or sound, (2) motion, and (3) objects that coincide with some perceived sensory quality (Heidegger 2005, 5/8). This third type of perception (aistheˉ sis kata symbebeˉkos) is of particular interest to Heidegger because it captures how we encounter things in lived experience (Heidegger 2005, 5–6/8–9, 8/11). It discloses phenomena,19 and because of it, we hear ‘the singer’s song’ instead of just sounds (Heidegger 2005, 6/8–9).20 This idea is echoed later in Being and Time where Heidegger indicates that such a disclosure of meaningful phenomena is dependent on discourse (Heidegger 1962, 207/163–4). Which discourse performs this function? In the Aristotle interpretation, Heidegger focuses principally on logos apophantikos or ‘ostensive talk’ (Heidegger 2005, 15/21; 2002, 17). In Being and Time logos apophantikos is associated with assertion, which is identified as a derivative form of interpretation that typically has the structure of a judgment. On this view, assertions are

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propositions that have an ‘S is P’ form, such that they point out the subject, S, as being P and communicate that proposition to another so that the view that ‘S is P’ comes to be shared. So described, assertions seem like unlikely candidates for enabling the perception of phenomena in which Heidegger is interested, but he suggests that the tradition has distorted Aristotle’s view of logos apophantikos and has transformed it so that it has come to focus on judgment and theoretical assertions (Heidegger 1962, 196/154, 201–2/159). The discussion of logos apophantikos in Introduction to Phenomenological Research proceeds in remarkably factical and existential terms that effectively rehabilitate the notion. Logos apophantikos does allow things to be perceived by pointing them out, but this pointing out is not abstract or detached, and it is not really about making a judgment about some state of affairs in the world. It is instead concrete and immediate, and it takes place prior to judgment. It occurs in conversation (Heidegger 1999, 7), and it is a “sort of talking with the world, by means of which the existing world is pointed out as existing” (Heidegger 2005, 15/21).21 Suppose, for instance, someone yells ‘Fire!’ Heidegger claims logicians often construe such expressions as judgments, i.e., as an assertion that ‘there is a fire,’ which would be true or false based on whether or not there actually is a fire (Heidegger 2005, 15/21). But this distorts Aristotle’s meaning. As an instance of apophantic discourse, ‘Fire!’ points out the fire that threatens to burn down the house and injure or kill the inhabitants, and it communicates something about how we ought to be in the world, i.e., that we ought to run for safety, call the fire brigade, or whatever. Heidegger’s discussion of Aristotle’s logos apophantikos takes the assertion out of the realm of abstract theoretical language and traditional logic, and repatriates it to the realm of lived discourse. Properly understood, logos apophantikos allows us to perceive the fire and the threat it poses. It discloses something about the existing world and enjoins us to comport toward it or engage with it in one way or another. In this way, it discloses and allows us to see the situation. The sort of seeing involved here is based upon the aistheˉ sis mentioned above, and it is what Heidegger might call ‘umsichtig,’ i.e., a seeing that takes in the surrounding situation in the manner associated with circumspective concern.22 As Heidegger elaborates later in Being and Time, to see in this sense is to understand; it is to comprehend the sense of the situation and the significance of the things encountered there (Heidegger 1962, 98/69, 186–90/146–9). So logos, even logos apophantikos, arises in our engagement with the world and orients us toward things in the world. 3.2 Perception Is Discursive All of this supports the view that logos enables perception, but the position seems to go further toward the claim that perception itself is discursive because it involves articulation. This argument is central to shifting the locus of logos from judgment to perception. My argument proceeds along two

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lines: first, to show how perception involves articulation by showing how the structure of ‘taking as’ emerges out of the offsetting evident in perception, and second, to show how the relations of synthesis (binding; putting together) and diairesis (separating; taking apart) typically associated with judgment are discovered in this ‘taking as.’ The first prong of the argument begins with Heidegger’s claim that if logos lets something be perceived, it is because perception involves a kind of offsetting. Heidegger writes: Aistheˉ sis is as such a process of offsetting something from something else (distinguishing). In selecting something, what is selected is as such offset from something else … . Something can be perceived in such a way that, while existing together with others, it is set off from them. The krinein [judging, discriminating] is not formal; rather, in this process of setting something off from others, what is offset becomes accessible and grasped as here. (Heidegger 2005, 19/26)23 To see or perceive involves focusing on something and this focus requires distinguishing or differentiating the focal item from other things. To perceive the pen laying on the desk, I have to distinguish it from the rest of the objects on the desk. To hear the baby crying requires distinguishing that sound from a full range of sounds occurring simultaneously that could each, in principle, become the focus—the wind blowing, the dog barking in the distance, etc. This offsetting is a form of articulation in that the thing perceived is identified through being differentiated from the larger whole that surrounds it (Heidegger 2005, 19/26). Heidegger goes on to say that when something is offset or articulated in this way, it is taken as something (Heidegger 2005, 23/31). In Being and Time, taking something as something is called interpretation, the pre-predicative seeing in which something is grasped in terms of its meaning (Heidegger 1962, 189/149). Interpretation involves articulation, specifically the articulation of a particular signification from out of a totality of significations. But the totality of significations is in turn articulated by discourse. Discourse articulates this totality by parsing the whole into meaningful parts, and interpretation articulates by grasping one of those parts. If interpretation carves at the joint, discourse determines where the joints are. Because interpretation articulates a signification from out of a totality of significations, it is grounded in the more fundamental articulation of intelligibility enacted by discourse (Heidegger 1962, 204/161). Of particular interest here is the claim that perception itself articulates and involves taking something as something. This is simply a feature of the way we experience the world, and is characteristic of all of our perception (Heidegger 2010, 121/144). In the Logic lecture of 1925–26, Heidegger points out that to try to strip away this ‘as’ dimension would amount to

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trying to experience pure sensation and would distort the way we normally experience things (Heidegger 2010, 122/145). This suggests that taking something as something is to be associated with the third type of aistheˉ sis discussed above. Thus, perception is interpretive, and things are brought into the realm of our meaningful experience insofar as they are taken up into this as-structure. Heidegger suggests that bringing things into the ‘there’ as something or other is the primary function of discourse.24 The second prong of my argument considers the place of the Aristotelian notions of synthesis and diairesis in this account in order to further develop the discursive dimension of perception. Heidegger often mentions synthesis and diairesis when discussing logos in Aristotle,25 and taken together they provide some indication of how he understands discursive articulation, namely as involving simultaneous binding and separating. Heidegger thinks Aristotle’s analysis of synthesis and diairesis is overly formalized and focuses too much on sentences (Heidegger 2010, 134–5/159–61). Nevertheless the insight that logos is structured along these lines can be recovered by relocating synthesis and diairesis in the revealing of phenomena by showing how they are operative in the perception of taking or seeing as (Heidegger 2010, 120/142) such that “to exhibit anything is to take it together and take it apart” (Heidegger 1962, 201/159). To begin, we should consider the place of synthesis and diairesis in the offsetting involved in perception. In a particularly interesting passage in Introduction to Phenomenological Research, Heidegger notes that in taking something as something, the ‘as’ both links the thing with what it is taken as, and contrasts the thing with other things. For instance, black is ‘other than’ (anders als) white. In this way, black is set off from white in being other than white. He writes: ‘White’ is in itself something other than ‘black.’ In this manner of setting one thing off from another, the ‘than’ or ‘as,’ the ‘being-other-than’ or ‘not-being-as,’ is made explicit, whereby the being-other need not itself be thematized. The theme is the color itself, grasped with a distinctive emphasis, and set off as such. The critical ‘than’ or ‘as’ springs forth in the field of perceptibility: blue other than red, blue as not red. That is not, however, the full ‘as,’ to which, in addition the ‘as’ as demonstrative belongs. This doubling of the ‘as’-character is covered up by language. The apophantikos-as is evident in all speaking. But in all speaking the critical ‘as’ is also present. (Heidegger 2005, 23/31–2)26 The ‘full as’ is both synthetic and diairetic. In taking something as something, the demonstrative as performs the synthetic function because to take X as Y is to bind X and Y. But to take X as Y is also simultaneously to differentiate X from other things that are not Y. This is the critical as, which corresponds to the diairetic function of the as-structure. Both elements are

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operative in perception and are mutually necessary to one another. Though the example does not pertain to the aistheˉ sis of objects we have been discussing, the point would hold for it. To perceive some object as a flower both requires taking it as a flower (synthesis) and differentiating it from other things, i.e., it is not a leaf, not a bud and so on (diairesis). The point can also be extended to the kinds of ‘taking as’ that Heidegger uses in Being and Time. In taking something as a pen, the object is bound to the possibility of being used as a writing implement and differentiated from or contrasted with other possible uses, e.g., being used to hold a place in a book or to stir sugar into one’s coffee. Heidegger’s account of how synthesis and diairesis occur in perception shifts in the Logic lecture and highlights the interpretive dimension in a way that anticipates the account in Being and Time more. He maintains that whenever we take something as something that in terms of which one makes sense of something must be brought together and taken together with what is being made sense of. This is the synthesis part. At the same time this bringing together and taking together entails that both of them—the whence of the sense-making and the thing to be made sense of—are separated and must be kept separate in the act of sense-making. This bringing together and taking together is possible only by keeping them separate. (Heidegger 2010, 125/149) To take something as something requires moving from the thing to be made sense of to the framework of meaning and practices in terms of which it can be made intelligible (Heidegger 2010, 123–4/146–7). So one has to connect the thing to the framework or background understanding, and from there one can return to the object to disclose it as one thing or another. This ‘returning’ move is the separating (Heidegger 2010, 125/148). So to take X as Y still requires binding X to Y, but X must first be bound to the whole totality of significations in which Y figures and then Y has to be separated out from that totality. For example, in taking up the pen to write, I disclose it as a pen. But if I do that, it is because the object is disclosed as a pen in relation to my background understanding of the task at hand, the practice of writing, the paraphernalia used for writing, and so on. In commenting in Being and Time on the place of binding and separating in the phenomenon of the ‘something as something,’ Heidegger writes that in accordance with this structure, something is understood with regard to something: it is taken together with it, yet in such a way that this confrontation which understands will at the same time take apart what has been taken together, and will do so by Articulating it interpretively. (Heidegger 1962, 202/159)

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Thus, the binding is effected by what Heidegger calls understanding—the disclosing of the framework of meaning that constitutes intelligibility and the projecting of the thing into the framework. The thing to be made sense of is disclosed in relation to the totality of references to which it belongs. The separating is effected by interpretation, which moves back to the thing perceived such that it is grasped in terms of its signification in relation to that whole. In taking something as something, the particular signification is carved out of this whole and thus in some sense separated from it. Although the accounts in Introduction to Phenomenological Research and Logic differ, they are not incompatible. The second account provides more background for what enables the first to happen. If I take the object as a pen and not a bookmark, it is because of the tasks I have at hand, the situation I am in, and my understanding of it. Faced with a different situation, say one in which I am interrupted while reading and need to mark my place in the book, I may disclose the pen as a bookmark and not as a writing instrument. In sum, Heidegger takes synthesis and diairesis—which Aristotle identified as crucial elements of logos but had situated in judgment—and relocates them in perception. Perception itself becomes the site of logos and proceeds on the basis of an articulation that is, ultimately, connected with taking something as something. This structure involves an articulation between the thing interpreted and the framework in relation to which it is interpreted. Here the issue is how the thing interpreted fits with the whole, i.e., how to make sense of it in relation to that whole. But this whole is itself also articulated in the sense that it is composed of or jointed into parts that are coordinated in a structured way. Discourse articulates intelligibility by articulating the totality of significations. Therefore, it has to do with the articulations within such wholes. 3.3 Perceiving Is Speaking If logos not only enables perception but also operates in perception such that perception itself can be said to articulate and thus to be discursive, then one might maintain that perceiving is in some way speaking—which is in fact just what Heidegger claims in Introduction to Phenomenological Research. In the interpretation of Aristotle’s De Anima in that text, and immediately after making the point that perception involves a process of offsetting, Heidegger writes that in the primordial act of perceiving, in its manner of setting something off against something else, there already is a manner of speaking . . . . The speaking is one with the manner of perceiving. Speaking is already at work in this distinguishing. (Heidegger 2005, 20–1/28)27 Heidegger goes on to discuss communication and how the world becomes accessible to several people in a shared way by means of logos. While this

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might suggest that the logos occurs in communication and not in perception as such, Heidegger begins the very next paragraph with the claim that “if logos is still at work here, then it is even more at work where the perceiving proceeds naturally as aistheˉ sis kata symbebeˉkos”—in other words, in the perception of objects (Heidegger 2005, 21/28).28 So the ‘speaking’ here is not just in the communicating, but in the perceiving. Though there is some vacillation in the remainder of the section,29 most of Heidegger’s discussion of Aristotle here seems to maintain that perception is tied to language and speaking, though as suggested above not necessarily to vocal utterance: Aistheˉ sis is present in the sort of being that has language. Whether or not it is vocalized, it is always in some way speaking. Language speaks not only in the course of perceiving, but even guides it; we see through language. (Heidegger 2005, 22/30)30 Heidegger’s discussion of logos in his reading of Aristotle in the lectures of the 1920s sheds important light on his notion of discourse and the articulation of intelligibility it involves. It is also important for understanding how the location of logos is shifted from judgment to perception. These lectures show Heidegger developing a view in which discourse is deeply intertwined with perception such that we live in and through the fabric woven of their intertwining. Because of this, we dwell in the world as an articulated space of meaning. 4 Toward the Ontological Function of Discourse Why does it matter that logos and perception are intertwined? If logos plays such a significant role in perception, then this should be important for phenomenology. As noted above, Heidegger unpacks the term ‘phenomenology’ by looking at its roots in phainomenon and logos. In his discussion, Heidegger arrives at the conclusion that phainomenon means that which shows itself in itself while logos means that which lets something be seen. While this might suggest that logos does not play a role in how phenomena show themselves, the analysis conducted here suggests that if phenomena show themselves in the world, then they must show themselves through the structures of intelligibility or meaning that make up the world. Thus, the showing of phenomena is itself discursive. If logos lets something be seen, it is not just that we see the phenomena through the logos, but that the phenomena show themselves in and through the logos. This indicates that logos shapes the phenomena in determining the forms in which they show up, i.e., the forms into which things are articulated and in terms of which they are intelligible. The articulation of these forms is effected by discourse. The analysis in the previous section shows that our perception articulates things meaningfully such that we are already

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interpreting them by taking them as something or other. In doing so, we see them in terms of and with reference to a totality of significations articulated by discourse. The analysis shows that to take something as something already involves two kinds of articulation—one associated with interpretation and the other with discourse. If discourse has to do with articulating intelligibility by articulating the totality of significations, then it is involved in segmenting reality into meaningful parts while interpretation selects one of those parts and connects it to the thing interpreted. The articulation effected by discourse is analogous to a parsing of reality. This might happen in language, but it does not have to. The ambiguity concerning the relationship between discourse and language discussed above is due to the fact that Heidegger derives his notion of discourse from logos. But what he is particularly concerned to highlight is the way that logos is responsible for the structure of significance that constitutes the world of our lived experience and the intelligibility of that experience. Two considerations suggest that the structure of meaning, which discourse aims to articulate, has an ontological dimension. First, Heidegger indicates that whenever Dasein engages with an entity in its comportment, Dasein operates with an understanding of that entity’s being. This means that to see an entity is to perceive its being. So if I take the pen as a pen when I write with it or if I take it as a bookmark when I use it to hold my place in a book, I understand the being of that entity. Regardless of whether I take it as a pen or a bookmark I understand it as ready-to-hand. Readiness-to-hand is a kind of ontological category, and we demonstrate an understanding of this category of readiness-to-hand whenever we engage with equipment. Although this implies that we see the being of things, we do not generally focus on that fact. We focus on the thing and not the ontological understanding that informs our engagement with it. The goal of Heidegger’s phenomenology is to draw out that background understanding and bring it into the range of our phenomenological seeing. Consider his discussion of equipment. If the pen is disclosed as ready-to-hand, that means it is disclosed as an ‘in-order-to’ that refers to a ‘towards-which’ and a ‘for-the-sake-of-which’ and so on. Heidegger’s entire discussion of Dasein’s being-in-the-world operates at the level of disclosing these structural elements. These elements are not what we focus on in our engagement with things, but that engagement belies an understanding of the structural inter-relation of these elements. That is, we understand the articulations between these different elements, and our worldly experience is intelligible because it shows up for us in this structured way. This totality of significations has an ontological dimension to it. This structured whole is given in advance and gives an intelligible form to our world. A second reason to think that there is an ontological function to discourse is that discourse can provide the basic forms in which it is possible to articulate anything understandable. Here the shifting of the locus of logos from judgment to perception appears to be especially significant. As already

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noted Heidegger maintains that Aristotle’s view of logos apophantikos was understood as assertion and handed down through the philosophical tradition in a way that turns out to be problematic. It results in philosophical focus on judgments, propositional structure, and categories of signification determined by that structure (Heidegger 1962, 209/165–6). To combat this, Heidegger says that it is necessary to take discourse in a broader sense as an existentiale with the aim of inquiring into the “basic forms in which it is possible to articulate anything understandable” (Heidegger 1962, 209/166). The forms in question are clearly ontological. To regard discourse as an existentiale means, I take it, relocating it back in lived experience, discerning how it operates in the way we see and understand things, then performing phenomenological analyses in order to be able to articulate these discursive forms that give our experience intelligible shape. If phenomenology is ontological, then its aim is to disclose these forms by elucidating the way they structure our experience. Notes 1 In citing Heidegger, I will reference the English translation first and the pagination after the slash refers to the German original. Both sources, where consulted, are given in the same entry in the bibliography. 2 Heidegger uses two terms for ‘articulation’: Artikulation and Gliederung (and their cognates). I have retained Macquarrie and Robinson’s convention of capitalizing Articulation when it translates ‘Artikulation.’ Rede ist die Artikulation der Verständlichkeit. Sie liegt daher in der Auslegung und Aussage schon zugrunde. Das in der Auslegung, ursprüngliche mithin schon in der Rede Artikulierbare nannten wir den Sinn. Das in der redenden Artikulation Gegliederte als solches nennen wir das Bedeutungsganze. Dieses kann in Bedeutungen aufgelöst werden. Bedeutungen sind als das Artikulierte des Artikulierbaren immer sinnhaft. (Heidegger 1962, 203–4/161) 3 This is what Inkpin (2017) calls the ‘underlying determination’ account. He is concerned about it because he thinks it undermines the ‘progressive determination’ account, which is the view that the order in which Heidegger presents the modes of disclosedness in Being and Time represents a sequence of progressive determination in which discourse comes after interpretation. I do not share his concern because I am not persuaded by the progressive determination account. 4 For a fuller discussion of articulation in relation to discourse and interpretation, see MacAvoy (2019). 5 Carman (2003, 220–32). See also Inkpin (2017). 6 For instance, Dreyfus calls this ‘telling’ as in ‘telling the difference between X and Y′ (1991, 215). 7 Both Carman (2003) and McMullin (2006) might be seen as offering versions of this model. McMullin puts more emphasis on communication than expression. For Carman’s account, see especially 205–7, 215–6, and 236–50. 8 Inkpin (2017) has also recommended interpreting discourse in connection with logos, but he has focused on Section 7B of Being and Time, which I do not think provides enough resources for this task. 9 A third point that Heidegger emphasizes in his interpretation of Aristotle more generally, but which is beyond the scope of this paper, is the notion of aleˉ theia in relation to truth.

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Heidegger on Logos in Aristotle 131 ———. (2002), Grundbegriffe der Aristotelischen Philosophie. GA 18. Hsg. von Mark Michalski. Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann. ———. (2005), Introduction to Phenomenological Research. Translated by Daniel O. Dahlstrom. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press; 1994. Einführung in die phänomenologische Forschung. GA 17. Hsg. von Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann. Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann. ———. (2010), Logic: The Question of Truth. Translated by Thomas Sheehan. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press; 1976. Logik: Die Frage nach der Wahrheit. GA 21. Hsg. von Walter Biemel. Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann. Inkpin, Andrew (2017), “Being Articulate: Rede in Heidegger’s Being and Time,” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 25 (1): 99–118. MacAvoy, Leslie (2019), “Heidegger, Dreyfus, and the Intelligibility of Practical Comportment,” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 50 (1): 68–86. McMullin, Irene (2006), “Articulating Discourse: Heidegger’s Communicative Impulse,” Southwest Philosophy Review 22 (1): 173–83.

7

We Are a Conversation Heidegger on How Language Uncovers Katherine Withy

For Heidegger, phenomenology consists in seeking the logos of the phenomena, where the logos “lets something be seen (phainesthai)” (Heidegger 1962, 32).1 To take the logos as the object of phenomenology is thus to let be seen how the logos lets be seen: how language uncovers. In this paper, I develop a unified account of how language uncovers, drawing from a variety of Heidegger’s texts over different periods—granting, of course, that he changes both his mind and his emphasis at various points. I take as my guiding thread the analysis of discourse in Being and Time, following Heidegger’s own directive in 1953–54 to “read Section 34 in Being and Time more closely” (Heidegger 1971a, 42) in order to better understand his much later views on language.2 In the spirit of “ways not works,” I sometimes (with acknowledgement) extend Heidegger’s views in the direction in which I suspect the truth lies. Overall, I argue that viewing language as a site of phenomenological uncovering leads us to see it not as a stockpile of word-tools or as a static framework of meaning but as a dynamic and creative conversation. 1 Asserting I begin with what appears to be the simplest and most ordinary phenomenon of language-use: asserting. As Heidegger analyzes it, asserting accomplishes three things: it points out, it predicates, and it communicates (Heidegger 1962, 154–5; 1982, 209–10; 2009, 43; 2010b, 112–3). Thus if David says, “John, I’m only dancing,” he communicates (mitteilen) in the sense that he shares (teilen) something with (mit) John. What he shares is not propositional content but an interpretive orientation towards the entity he is talking about: his dancing. David’s asserting points John towards this particular entity, and in a particular regard: as only dancing.3 If the asserting succeeds, it orients John toward David’s dancing in its only-ness. It does so by pointing out that particular act of dancing and by predicating only-ness of it in a way that communicates to John. Asserting thus amounts to “letting someone see with us what we have pointed out by way of giving it a definite character” (Heidegger 1962, 155). David’s dancing may indeed be only dancing, or it may not be. But even if what he says is false or in some way misleading, the asserting still uncovers.

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It uncovers because it reveals David’s dancing to John in some new way— whether because John had not previously been attending to the character of David’s dancing, or because he now comes to see it as only-dancing, or even as dancing-that-David-wants-him-to-to-think-is-only-dancing-but-in-fact-isnot.4 In all these cases, John comes to see something that he did not before. David, in contrast, must already have been open to his dancing in its (apparent) only-dancing-ness, or else he could not have said what he said to John. Before the entity talked-about can be communicatively uncovered to an interlocutor in asserting, it must first be uncovered to the speaker in some other mode of comporting (Heidegger 1982, 208; 1962, 156; 2010b, 120). In David’s case, the prior comporting in which his dancing shows up to him as only dancing might be that very dancing itself, or an act of reflecting, or something else entirely.5 Whatever it is, this prior comporting guarantees that David’s asserting does not uncover the entity for David himself but only for John.6 This is one way in which language uncovers: Asserting uncovers some entity, in some determinate respect, for another. 2 Discoursing Of course, we do lots of things with language other than asserting (Heidegger 1962, 161). Not all uses of language are predicative (and so, not all derive from interpretation and its as-structure (Heidegger 1962, 154)). Were he interested in the pragmatics of language, Heidegger might have explored some of these other uses. But since he is interested in how language uncovers, Heidegger instead introduces a new category of uncovering that captures how all the various ways of using language reveal. He calls it “discourse” (Rede). Discourse has four structural moments: (1) what is spoken about, (2) what is said, (3) the communication, and (4) what is made known (Heidegger 1962, 161–2; 1985, 263). What is spoken about (1) in discoursing can be the subject of an assertion. Or, we might assert something of some entity while really talking about something else—as when saying something of the finances is really a way of talking about the marriage. Often, we do not assert at all but still discourse about something. A command (Heidegger 1962, 162), for example, might be about gender roles. However we discourse about some entity, we always (2) say something of that entity, not necessarily by affixing a predicate to it but by revealing it intelligibly to an interlocutor. We might reveal that the marriage is in trouble, or that we think masculinity works like this. When David tells John that he is only dancing, he may not be talking about his dancing so much as saying, through that assertion, that John has no reason to be jealous. In saying this, David (4) makes known much about himself. Heidegger says that what is made known in discoursing is one’s “current way of finding oneself” and that this way is “indicated in language by intonation, modulation, the tempo of talk, ‘the way of speaking’” (Heidegger 1962, 162,

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translation modified; cf.1985, 263; 2010a, 82). He has in mind the fact that our voice (Stimme) expresses our moods (Stimmungen). This idea has its roots in Aristotle, for whom voice (phoˉ neˉ) indicates pleasure and pain (Pol. 1253a10; Heidegger 2009, 33). All animals, including us humans, communicate pleasure and distress through voice: in shrieks of pain, warning cries, coos, and purrs. Unlike other animals, however, we have logos, which means that we can communicate using not only sounds but also meanings. When we do so, our voice becomes a sort of subtext in our communicating, indicating our current affective condition. Thus, in his utterance, David’s voice communicates (as I am imagining it) his joy, worry, and inebriation. But having logos means that we can also express, beyond our current affective state, what is beneficial and harmful (Pol. 1253a15; Heidegger 2009, 41). For Heidegger, what is beneficial and what is harmful is so in relation to our project of living out our life as who we are (Heidegger 1962, 144). For someone who is a partner in a romantic relationship, for example, some things will further the project of being a romantic partner (e.g., opportunities to have fun together), while others will detract from it (e.g., infidelities), and others will be indifferent to it (e.g., dancing with other people). So, things are meaningful in terms of their benefit or harm to our project of being who we are. When we encounter the beneficial and harmful, however, we do not do so neutrally. Beneficial things show up to us as important, necessary, or exciting, while harmful things show up to us as discouraged, forbidden, or frightening.7 These various soliciting or repelling valences are the ways in which things can and do matter to us (Heidegger 1962, 137). We find ourselves situated in a context of mattering, in which various things can and do show up to us as required, possible, off-putting, or shameful, given who we take ourselves to be. I suggest that the context of mattering in which we find ourselves, given who we take ourselves to be, is made known in discoursing with the logos, just as the mood in which we find ourselves is made known in the voice. Thus, when David tells John that he is only dancing, his vocal delivery might make known that he is joyous, worried, and drunk, but in speaking he also makes known that he finds himself in a context of mattering, on the basis of his relationship with John. David is moved to speak as he does because of the way he finds things mattering to him—because certain things are forbidden and others permitted, because certain things call for explanation or apology, because certain things make him afraid because they threaten his relationship with John. This whole context of mattering is made known in the very fact that he says this of this entity at this time in this way with this voice. In this way, David’s discoursing (4) makes known how he finds himself.8 It is because David’s asserting makes known that he finds himself in a certain context of mattering, qua someone in a romantic relationship, that the assertion can be about the relationship rather than about his dancing in a narrow sense. Similarly, it is because discoursing makes known in this way

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that seemingly innocuous assertions can function as “dog whistles”—and that even the simplest spoken gestures (“I’m sorry”; “I love you”) can be so meaningful. By making known the context of mattering in which they find themselves, and so who they take themselves to be, speakers “ex-press” themselves or “speak themselves out” (aussprechen sich) (Heidegger 1962, 162; 2009, 14): “In speaking about something, Dasein speaks itself out, expresses itself [ausspricht sich], as existent being-in-the-world, dwelling with and occupying itself with entities” (1982, 208). It is in this sense that the world, qua the context of mattering, “expresses itself [ausspricht] as discourse” (Heidegger 1962, 161). Discoursing articulates (artikulieren) or expresses “the intelligibility of beingin-the-world” (Heidegger 1962, 161; cf. 1985, 268). Thus we have another way in which language uncovers: Speaking makes known to another both my mood and the world, or context of mattering, in which I find myself.9 3 Comporting As I noted, David might have spoken out his world without asserting— perhaps by making a request, or expressing a wish (Heidegger 1962, 162). In certain circumstances, remaining silent is the most powerful way to discourse.10 Or, sometimes a touch or a gesture says more than words can say. Indeed, there are many nonverbal modes of communicating. We say that our choices speak volumes, that we should worry about what our hairstyle says about us, and that “[t]he apparel oft proclaims the man” (Hamlet). That we say such things suggests that bodily movements, touch, appearance, clothing, habits, and choices are ways of discoursing. Consider David. He has dyed red hair, wears striking stage makeup and flamboyant outfits; he moves lithely, and he smokes Gauloises cigarettes. All of these features tell us a great deal about what does and does not matter to him, and so about whom he takes himself to be. He takes himself to be a creative, fashion-forward artist, and as such, he finds that theatrical selfpresentation is important, that sartorial creativity is required, that norms of gender presentation are not unimportant, that looking cool is more important than being healthy, and so on. Our appearance, body, and choices make known how we find things to matter and so who we are (cf. Blattner 2006, 103). Others can easily read off how things matter to us from what we wear, how we move, and what we habitually do. This legibility is the reason that clothing, movements, and habits are often the focus of teenagers trying to figure out who they are, as well as recently promoted employees, aspiring politicians, and anyone moving into a new socioeconomic group. But to count as a mode of discoursing, these ways of communicating must not only (4) make known how we find ourselves but also (2) say something (1) about some entity.11 (I discuss (3) communicating in Section 5). They do so precisely by (4) making known what matters. At a minimum, David’s red hair tells us (2) what matters to him, (1) as who he is. But it also says

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something about men’s hair color (that it need not be natural), about gender norms (that they are violable), and about what it is to be a glam-rocker (that one should present oneself theatrically and transgressively). Precisely what David’s look is saying about which entity is something that fashion analysts might debate. There is some ambiguity because hair color, like other nonlinguistic modes of discoursing, makes known first of all how the speakers finds themselves, and only through that making known does it say something about something. Linguistic modes of discoursing, such as asserting, work in the other direction: they say something of some entity, and only through that saying do they make known what matters to the speaker. Thus David’s appearance clearly expresses that norms of gender presentation are violable for him, and through that expression says something about the status of those norms, while the assertion, “Norms of gender presentation are violable” clearly makes a claim about those norms while revealing only a little, and only vaguely, about what matters to the speaker. For the same reason, nonlinguistic modes of discoursing can only say of entities how they matter to the speaker (pace Blattner (1999, 72)). Such modes are thus limited in what they can say of which entities. That linguistic modes of discoursing have a greater expressive scope explains why language use seems to have a certain privilege or paradigmatic status among modes of discoursing. Note that this privilege, however, rests on valuing (2) saying things (1) about entities other than how they matter. While linguistic modes of discoursing are better at uncovering entities, nonlinguistic modes of discoursing are better at disclosing self and world. From a phenomenological– ontological perspective, the latter is the deeper uncovering. But, as modes of discoursing, both disclose world and discover entities (cf. Taylor 1985, 219–20). Because it discloses and discovers in this way, discoursing is one element of our disclosive being-in-the-world, equiprimordial with understanding and finding (Heidegger 1962, 161).12 These three elements together constitute our openness, which means that everything we do is (a) understanding, (b) finding, and (c) discoursing. Even in standing on a street corner, David unmistakably (c) expresses (b) what matters to him (a) on the basis of whom he takes himself to be. The architectonic structure of the existential analytic requires that all comporting be discursive. As Heidegger later says: “We are always speaking, even when we do not utter a single word aloud . . . even when we are . . . attending to some work or taking a rest” (Heidegger 1971c, 189). Thus: All comporting, including speaking, (4) makes known to another the context of mattering (world) in which I find myself and uncovers (1) some entity, (2) in some determinate respect. Since this formulation encompasses the previous two, consider it the first way in which language uncovers. And what if David gets all dressed up but has nowhere to go? Does his outfit still speak if there is no one to hear it? It does (cf. Blattner 1999, 73; contra Carman 2003, 230, and McMullin 2013, 170). “[A]ny discourse is discourse to others and with others. It therefore makes no difference for the essential

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structure of discourse whether a fixed address directed to a specific other is of current interest or not” (Heidegger 1985, 263).13 That no one hears what David’s clothing says is a shame, but it shows only that wearing clothes alone is a deficient form of discoursing—just as being alone is a deficient mode of being-with-others (Heidegger 1962, 120). 4 Housing To make known how he finds himself, David’s appearance must be legible, and to be legible it must make use of a language. The language that it uses is the language of fashion. Like the languages of art, music, love, and the body, this language is a tool that we use in order to communicate (Heidegger 1962, 161). A language-tool is likely a complex of shared norms governing what-means-what and how different meanings can go together. That is to say: a language-tool has both a vocabulary and a grammar, and these are public. The language of fashion, for instance, dictates that various items and styles of clothing mean different things about persons and how they find themselves. The language also governs how these semantic components can be put together intelligibly (i.e., what goes with what to form a coherent “look”), and what sorts of violations transgress the norms but still “make a statement,” what sorts are faux pas, and what sorts are simply unintelligible. Body language also plausibly has semantic content governed by a grammar, which is deployed for instance in narrative ballet and misdeployed when we send “mixed signals.” Of course, much more would need to be said to establish that nonlinguistic modes of discoursing such as bodily movements make use of genuine languages, and especially that those languages have grammars. Heidegger does not explore this question because he is interested not in how language-tools work as tools but in how they uncover. He finds that there is a sort of uncovering that belongs to language-tools themselves, independently (as it were) of their use by speakers. Consider that a natural language such as English allows us to communicate only by semantically constraining what we can say with it: we can speak only of the things that we can use the vocabulary to name, and only in ways that the internal structure of that vocabulary permits. We can put this semantic constraint positively by saying that our language predetermines the possible ways in which an entity can be intelligible to us. In Heideggerian terms: language pre-discovers entities. In fact, language pre-uncovers not just any given entity but entities as such and as a whole—it pre-discloses an entire world or system of intelligibility. This is to say that a language houses a set of ontological commitments, which gives us in advance a configuration of intelligibility. Heidegger puts the idea that language pre-discloses world in three ways. In Being and Time, the intelligibility housed in language is the public world of das Man (Heidegger 1962, 168; 2009, 45), and Heidegger emphasizes the tyranny of das Man over the sense that things make. In his later work,

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Heidegger stresses the necessity of pre-disclosing and pre-discovering in language. He claims that “language speaks” (Heidegger 1971c, 190ff; 1971e, 216), in the sense that, by pre-discovering and pre-disclosing, it “tells us about the nature of a thing” (Heidegger 1971b, 146; cf. 1971e, 216). Finally, Heidegger also puts the point by saying that “language is the house of being” (Heidegger 1998, 239; cf. 1971a, 5; 1971f, 132).14 This is a second type of way in which language uncovers: As a semantic tool, the language that we speak already takes a stand on how things can be intelligible, pre-disclosing a world. As a result, a language pre-discovers entities. This makes language an entity with distinctive ontological power (like Dasein, world, and the work of art). I have formulated the point in terms of “the language that we speak” because Heidegger holds that we each speak just one language. This is not necessarily the language of a nation-state or region, although Heidegger’s nationalism often led him to speak as if this were the case. Heidegger thought, for instance, that one can “speak ‘German,’ yet talk entirely ‘American’” (Heidegger 1996, 65), in the sense that one can use the vocabulary and grammar of the German language and yet move wholly within an American ontology, which is technological and capitalist. It is this ontology that determines which language we speak. And since we can only operate with one ontology, we can only ever speak one language or live in one house of being. If Heidegger is right, however, I think that he is so only at the level of our most basic take on what it is to be (to be is to be resource, or to be created, or to be substance). Having only one such take does not preclude us from having many different stands on what this sort of thing is or who I am, which we have by virtue of the various languages that we speak. We speak not only national or regional languages but also, as I have argued, body language(s), the language(s) of fashion, the language(s) of music, the language(s) of love, and others. These will contain many and varied ontological commitments. Just as English has different commitments than does Japanese, so too the way that body language carves up the world (e.g., friend vs. foe, intimate vs. respectful) differs from the way that fashion does (e.g., professional vs. casual, contemporary vs. retro). If this claim is correct, then language is either a very capacious shared house or an entire neighborhood of houses, in and out of which we are all constantly moving.15 If being a “house of being” in this way is what makes something a language, then that status is conferred not on what possesses a vocabulary and a grammar but on what pre-discloses the world and pre-discovers entities by harboring ontological commitments. Among those ontological commitments will be commitments about what matters and how, which is in fact what allows the language to be used to (4) express how speakers find themselves in contexts of mattering, and so to disclose their world. The language’s pre-discovery of entities, in turn, allows it to be used to (2) say something (1) about something. Thus it is because of the way language-tools themselves uncover that they are that through which we achieve the distinctive uncoverings of discoursing.

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5 Sharing There is one dimension of discoursing’s uncovering that I have yet to explore: (3) communicating (Heidegger 1962, 162). Notice that in order for a speaker successfully to express how they find themselves, an interlocutor must give them uptake. This necessity makes hearing an essential component of discoursing (Heidegger 1962, 163; 1985, 265f; 2009, 32; 72). To hear a speaker is to take on board how they find themselves. When this self-finding is the affective state expressed by the voice, giving uptake amounts to coming into a shared disposition or mood (Heidegger 2009, 39). Thus the worry in David’s voice unsettles John, just as a bird’s warning call makes other birds fearful. Sharing such a mood is not a matter of being in the same physiological or psychological condition but of finding ourselves together in a shared context of mattering. The context is richer when we discourse with the logos, as David does when he tells John that he is only dancing. Saying this brings John into the context of the shared world of their relationship, foregrounding what does and can matter to the two of them, relationship-wise. We saw above that the act of asserting communicates by bringing an interlocutor into a shared orientation toward some entity, such as David’s dancing. We see now that instances of discoursing, in contrast, communicate (mitteilen) by sharing (teilen) with (mit) the interlocutor(s) a context of mattering, or world.16 This communicating is a further way in which language uncovers: Speaking shares the speaker’s world with another or others. I limit this claim to speaking for now, but in the following section, I give reason to think that all comporting communicates in this way.17 First, let me note that this feature of discoursing associates it closely with our being-with-others. It is in discoursing that our existential being-withone-another is explicitly expressed (Heidegger 1962, 162) or enacted, as the existentiell sharing not merely of a concrete situation but of a meaningful world (Heidegger 1985, 263). It is through this communicative worldsharing that David and John are with-one-another (Heidegger 1962, 162), both as discursive interlocutors and as romantic partners, and that the birds are with-one-another (Heidegger 2009, 39) as a flock. As communicative, “speaking is, according to its being, the fundament of koinoˉ nia” (Heidegger 2009, 36). Koinoˉ nia is community, sharing, participating together. What we participate in together is disclosing the world, which is always thus a withworld (Heidegger 1962, 114): “I have the world there with the other and the other has the world there with me, insofar as we talk something through— koinoˉ nia of the world” (Heidegger 2009, 43). We can share worlds with anyone with whom we can speak, and we can speak with anyone with whom we share a language. In “A Dialogue on Language,” Heidegger worries that he and his Japanese interlocutor cannot communicate with one another because they live in different houses of being. The problem is not one that a translator could solve but an intractable problem of differing deep ontologies. Heidegger laments that “a dialogue

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from house to house remains nearly impossible” (Heidegger 1971a, 5). But recognizing the multiplicity of languages that we speak allows some sort of dialogue, and so genuine being-with, to occur. The language of rock music, for example, is spoken across very different cultures, especially by young people. If this sounds like everyone coming to speak the language of American popular culture, then consider that some parts of body language are apparently universally spoken and understood by all human beings. We can even plausibly share languages with nonhuman animals and so converse across species barriers—not only when a gorilla learns sign language but when our pets read our facial expressions, body language, and tone of voice (and vice versa), or when a horse and trainer communicate (Hearne 2007). If these are genuine communications, then our discursive interlocutors come from different nations, classes, cultures, and species. Our pets may not have the logos and so we may not be able to share with them how we find ourselves in a context of mattering, but we can share how we find ourselves mooded (I’m excited!), and in doing so, we can (imperfectly) say things about entities (Walks are great!). We can, at a minimal level, discourse and so bewith any entity that has voice, and we can share worlds with anyone who has the logos. This massively increases the scope of being-with and the reach of our community, beyond Heidegger’s petty nationalism and world-historical lineages. We are not trapped in homogenous houses of being but dwell in rich and diverse cosmopolitan neighborhoods. 6 Poetizing When in (3) communicating we bring another into our world, we resemble Aristotle’s orator, who brings a crowd into a shared mood and a shared sense of what matters (Rhet., 1962, 138–9; Heidegger 2009, 78ff). In Heidegger’s middle period, the orator becomes the poet. Poetry is a distinctive form of discoursing because the world that it communicates and so brings us to share is in some sense novel. Even early on, Heidegger thought that poetry could “bring about the release of new possibilities of the being of Dasein” (Heidegger 1985, 272), because in poetry “the communication of the existential possibilities of finding can become an aim in itself” (Heidegger 1962, 162, translation modified; cf. Taylor 1985, 233). This approach to poetry downplays the fact that, as “a telling in the manner of a making manifest that points” (Heidegger 2014, 29), poetry (2) says something (1) about something, and instead it emphasizes that poetry (4) expresses how the speaker finds themselves in a world and so (3) brings hearers into a shared world.18 By prioritizing the “overarching resonance of the poetic telling” (Heidegger 2014, 18), Heidegger takes poetry to work in the way that nonlinguistic modes of discoursing work rather than in the way that linguistic modes of discoursing work.19 Accordingly, we understand poetic discoursing by seeing how “the poet speaks from out of an attunement” (Heidegger 2014, 73) and brings their audience into that attunement—“transporting [them]

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out toward the gods and . . . into the Earth,” and thereby opening up a new world (Heidegger 2014, 123–4). The poet founds a new fundamental attunement by modifying the house of being—a task that is accomplished through the poetic word (Heidegger 2014, 30; 2000, 58f).20 “Words” (Worte) are not single word-signs (Wörter) belonging to a language-tool but instead complete units of meaning that say in a single stroke the fundamental attunement of the poetizing. One of Hölderlin’s words, for instance, is “Full of merit, yet poetically, man dwells upon this earth” (Heidegger 1998, 272; 1971e, 213).21 A word such as this exemplifies or embodies the world that the poem inaugurates (compare a Kuhnian exemplar).22 In uttering the word, the poet speaks out a new world or new fundamental attunement. This speaking is “heard” first of all by that which embodies the current world of intelligibility: the current language-tool, which pre-discloses world. This house of being is modified by the poet’s word, which is “built into the foundational walls of the language of a people” (Heidegger 2014, 31). From there, the word reconfigures the world pre-disclosed by the language. The language-tool’s vocabulary and grammar might remain the same but the overall configuration of intelligibility is changed. (This is presumably how Germans came to talk American while still speaking German (Heidegger 1996, 65)). In this sense, the poet dialogues with language: language “speaks” in its pre-disclosing, the poet talks back through the word, and language “hears” or gives this uptake, reconfiguring the world housed in it.23 This, then, is a fourth way in which language can uncover. It can disclose a new world: The poetic word modifies the house of being, transforming the predisclosing and pre-discovering of language, and thereby founding a new shared world. An example or two will clarify this type of uncovering. Heidegger himself holds up Hölderlin as exemplary poet, on the grounds that he founded a new world as a destiny for the German people of the 1930s (Heidegger 2014, 128; 2000, 63; 224) by bringing them to the fundamental attunement of holy mourning in readied distress (Heidegger 2014, 94). To find a more readily graspable example, one might think of David Bowie, whose poetic word, “Ziggy Stardust,” “presaged the dread, decadence and eroticism of a new era” and could be said to have inaugurated the world of glam rock.24 (Most, however, attribute the founding of glam rock to Marc Bolan of T. Rex, whose poetic word was his englittered appearance on BBC’s Top of the Pops in 1971).25 Other candidates include Elvis Presley, whose pelvic gyrations exemplified and embodied the world of rock and roll, and the Beatles, whose haircuts say at once the whole irreverent youth culture that they inaugurated. In each case, the poetic word changed what did and did not matter and, by placing itself into body language, the language of music, the language of fashion, and so on, that word changed what people could and did say with their bodies, clothing, hair styles, choices, and habits. These poetic words reshaped houses of being. If the Beatles’ haircuts, Elvis’ dancing, and Bowie’s and Bolan’s costumed performances are poetic words, then poetizing can take place in nonlinguistic

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modes of discoursing. In order for nonlinguistic modes of discoursing to be poetic, however, it must be the case that they (3) communicate or share the speaker’s world with others, since this is a precondition of accomplishing their poetic work. This is reason to think that not only does speaking share the speaker’s world with another or others, but more generally, comporting shares the speaker’s world with another or others. Obviously, not everyone watching Bowie’s performances “heard” what he was “saying” and followed him into the world of glam rock. Many of the older generations either misunderstood what he said or found him utterly unintelligible. But plenty of “glitter kids” gave uptake to Bowie’s world-founding, and the worlds of youth culture, music, and fashion were changed forever. 7 Listening Bowie’s cultural power lay in his ability to determine and shape what his audience took to matter—what was fashionable, what was cool, what was masculine, what was fun, and so on. The poet, like the orator, “has genuine power over being-there . . . genuine dominion over the persuasion of human beings in the way that they are with one another” (Heidegger 2009, 74). Indeed, Heidegger typically thinks our position as hearers of (3) communicative discourse as submissive—whether we are in the thrall of a poet or an orator or instead “listening away” to das Man (Heidegger 1962, 271), who “dominates” us (Heidegger 1962, 126) and keeps us “in bondage” (Heidegger 1985, 266; cf. 1962, 163).26 Our lives are certainly shaped by fashions and trends, and by icons and influencers who move the cultural conversation forward while we respond by idly repeating what we have already heard them say (Heidegger 1962, 168). It is a mistake, however, to model the relationship of speaker-and-hearer in discoursing on that of the orator or the poet to an audience. Discoursing can involve such uneven power relationships only because it first of all expresses and constitutes mutuality. Discursive expressing and hearing is necessarily reciprocal, in that both my interlocutor and I are both speakers and hearers (Heidegger 2009, 72). I hear the poet and give uptake to their poetic word when I learn to speak with the modified language-tool, expressing how I find myself in the new world that they have founded, on the basis of taking myself to be a type of person that the poet has newly made possible. Thus, I hear David when I put on platform boots and glitter to express my glam identity. But in so doing, I am also speaking—and David (or his representative) now hears me. I get uptake from him and others and this is our co-belonging in the world of glam rock. Of course, there is still an unequal power relationship. It was David who made possible the identity that I am expressing and David who shaped the sartorial and other languages through which I express myself. Further, David (or his representative) could refuse to give my self-expressing uptake, withholding recognition of my expressing-how-I-find-myself and whom-Itake-myself-to-be. In that case, I have not only failed to express myself as

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glam, I have failed to be glam. But while David has a lot of power over me, a structural reciprocity exists by virtue of the fact that we are both speaking and hearing. In the paradigmatic case, I am not discoursing with the poet or orator but with someone who is in a position similar to my own. When David tells John that he is only dancing, he may be trying to manipulate him or to engage in some other micro-exercise of power. But John can do the same in response, in a kind of push-and-pull. Our discoursing can involve “non-compliance, not listening, opposition” (Heidegger 1985, 266), “refuting, confronting” (Heidegger 2009, 33), “not-hearing, resisting, defying, and turning away” (Heidegger 1962, 163). But that is precisely because “listening to one another, in which being-with cultivates itself, is more accurately a compliance in being-with-one-another, a co-enactment in concern” (Heidegger 1985, 266). The shared world that arises out of discoursing is not imposed on one person by another but arises out of our mutual back-and-forth. Imagine that after David tells John that he is only dancing, John hears his worry and is attuned to what matters in the context of their relationship and so responds, “Of course, David. I know. Have fun!”. The two together have shaped the world of their relationship as one of trust and respect, in which certain things count as betrayals and others do not. What does and does not matter in the world of their relationship is something that they work out together, continually and in small increments, every time they speak and hear. In this way, discoursing articulates the world not only in the sense of expressing it (artikulieren) but also in the sense of structuring or ordering (gliedern) the field of matterings. “Discoursing or talking is the way in which we articulate ‘significantly’ [das >bedeutende< Gliedern] the intelligibility of being-in-the-world” (Heidegger 1962, 161). In all discoursing, and so all comporting, we mutually shape the shared world of mattering: Comporting shapes our shared worlds. 8 Having Logos If all our comporting shapes our shared worlds, then there is a sense in which we are all poets. Our very being-in-the-world is poetic. But this claim should not be heard as an adverbial claim about the manner in which we go about being-in-the-world. Our very being-in-the-world, or being open to meaning, is poetizing (Heidegger 2002, 46; 2014, 34), in the sense that our finding, understanding, and discoursing constantly modify the house of being, transforming the pre-disclosing and pre-discovering of language. As Hölderlin says, “poetically man dwells” (Heidegger 2000, 64; 1971e).28 This, then, is the primary way in which language uncovers: Comporting shapes our shared worlds. Everything that we do uses a language-tool of some sort to reshape what matters. All of the other ways in which language uncovers are subordinate to this. The poetic word is a particularly powerful instance of this mode of uncovering, while the pre-disclosing of world and

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pre-discovering of entities in our language-tools is the precondition of it. How does comporting shape our shared worlds? It (4) expresses how we find ourselves in a way that (3) shares that world of mattering with others who give it uptake. Nonlinguistic modes of discoursing thereby (2) say something about (1) some entity, while linguistic modes of discoursing accomplish (3) and (4) by (2) saying something about (1) some entity, paradigmatically in asserting (and also in the poetic gathering of the fourfold). If the shaping the world through comporting is the primary way in which language uncovers, then our sense of what it is to have logos is changed (cf. Aristotle, Nic. Eth. 1102a28). To have logos is not primarily to be rational, or to possess a vocabulary and grammar, or to make meaningful sounds or apophantic statements. It is, rather, constantly to be modifying our houses of being by dialoguing with our language-tools (Heidegger 1971c, 209; 1971e, 216). We do this, moreover, in and through dialoguing with others, with whom we thereby share a community or polis (Pol. 1253a7). Beingin-the-world is being-ahead-of-oneself being-already-in-our-world amidstinnerworldly-entities dialoguing with language by conversing with others. To have logos is to be in dialogos (cf. Taylor 1985, 234). Thus, Hölderlin: “we are a dialogue [Gespräch]” (Heidegger 2014, 62) or a conversation (Heidegger 2000, 56; cf. 1971d, 78).29 In this act of conversing—in this event of language that we are (Heidegger 2014, 63)—world, self, and entities are uncovered.30 Notes 1 Page references to Being and Time are to the pagination of the eighth German edition, which is included in the margins of English translations. I modify all translations of Heidegger’s texts, where necessary, to read ‘being’ instead of ‘Being’ for ‘das Sein,’ ‘entity’ instead of ‘being’ for ‘das Seiendes,’ and ‘Dasein’ instead of ‘the Dasein’ for ‘das Dasein.’ I transliterate all Greek words. 2 Thus, I disagree with readers who hold that there is a radical shift or “clean break” (e.g. Dastur 2013, 225) in Heidegger’s thinking of language after Being and Time. 3 “I’m only dancing” might instead predicate “only dancing” of the speaker (“I”), but I prefer to hear it as a version of the predicative statement, “This dancing is only dancing,” since it is clearly the only-ness that David wishes to bring John to see. 4 For more on how false statements can uncover entities—and on asserting as uncovering, generally—see Carman (2015). 5 Note that I am making the weak claim that some other mode of comporting must be prior to any given asserting rather than the strong claim that there is some single mode of comporting that is prior to any act of asserting. There is debate about which position Heidegger holds. This debate overlaps with another, concerning the sense in which asserting is necessarily theoretical as opposed to practical (see e.g. Golob (2015) and Schear (2007)). 6 Surely there are cases in which speaking newly uncovers an entity for the speaker. Talking cures rely on this. More generally, we often think that we come to see new things, or to see things in new ways, when we put them into words. Heidegger appears to acknowledge this fact (Heidegger 1962, 32, 2009, 15–6), which is perhaps due to the fact that speakers always in some sense speak to and hear themselves (Heidegger 1985, 265; 2009, 14, 72). 7 Put differently: we usually first encounter solicitings (this looks tasty) rather than affordings (this is for eating). This explains why finding offers our “primary discovery of the

Heidegger on How Language Uncovers 145 world” (Heidegger 1962, 138), even if the affordings opened up by projecting onto some ability-to-be are logically prior to solicitings (only things that are for eating can look tasty). I did not yet see this clearly in my (2019). The case in which we encounter affordings without solicitings is the mood of angst (Heidegger 1962, 186). 8 Taylor Carman translates Heidegger’s ‘Bekundung’ (‘making known’) as ‘intimation’ and suggests that Heidegger is echoing the distinction Husserl draws . . . between the purely expressive capacity of words and their . . . ‘intimation’ (Kundgabe) of the subjective attitudes and intentions situating those meanings in their pragmatic context. (2003, 226)

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This association fits well with my interpretation. ‘Intimation’ also suggests a greater possibility of failure than does ‘making known,’ which fits the phenomenon well— although, in a Cavellian spirit, I am much more impressed by the fact that we typically succeed in making known what matters to us than by the fact that sometimes we fail. To see how discoursing also articulates in the sense that it structures intelligibility (a point which Carman (2003, 231) has criticized other interpretations for neglecting), see §7. Heidegger is fond of emphasizing how communicative silence can be (e.g. Heidegger 1962, 164f; 1985, 267; 2014, 65), including in the call of conscience (1962, 273). See Knowles (2019) for an analysis of the Greek roots and fascist affinities of Heidegger’s valorization of silence. Kukla’s Heidegger-inspired account of ostension also holds that we say something about something “using language, gesture, touch, signs, and symbols, and anything else that can be communicative” (Kukla 2017, 106). Later in Being and Time, Heidegger replaces discoursing in this triad with falling, but he still holds that discoursing expresses what finding, understanding, and falling disclose (Heidegger 1962, 349). Consider that David’s outfit speaks to a prospective audience—as does his body language when, for instance, he mimes songs in front of the mirror. Even when he slouches on the couch in a way that he would never do in public, his body language (deficiently) communicates—and this is precisely why he slouches only when alone. That Heidegger is making the same point both early and later is clear from the fact that, shortly after claiming that language is the house of being in (1998), he claims that the sections on das Man in Being and Time include “a reference, thought in terms of the question of the truth of being, to the primordial belonging of the word to being” (1998, 242–3). See also (1971f, 137), which invokes the house of being and “what one says” in one breath. For a thorough interpretation of language as the house of being—and one which appeals to the unacknowledged source of this phrase in Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra—see Wrathall (2011). Compare Wittgenstein: language is “an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, and of houses with additions from various periods” (1997, 8). (I thank Dave Cerbone for referring me to this passage). I address how language is modified over time in §§ 6 and 7. This contrast can be used to distinguish assertings qua derivatives of interpreting from assertings qua instances of discoursing. McMullin (2013) offers a similar interpretation of the communicative dimension of discourse. See also Taylor’s account of language as creating a public space (1985, 259). This account of poetry as bringing hearers into a shared world belongs to Heidegger’s thought in the 1930s. Later, Heidegger will emphasize that the poetic word allows some entity to show itself superlatively as a “thing” by “gathering the fourfold” (e.g. 1971c). Heidegger is quite clear on this point: what poetry says of entities is determined by “the voice [Stimme] of the telling,” which is “attuned [gestimmt]” (Heidegger 2014, 73) and is itself “determined by the fundamental attunement of the poetry” (2014, 18, 86).

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Heidegger on How Language Uncovers 147 Hearne, V. (2007), Adam’s Task: Calling Animals by Name, New York: Skyhorse Publishing. Heidegger, M. (1962), Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson, New York: Harper-Collins. ———. (1971a), “A Dialogue on Language,” in P.D. Hertz (trans.), On the Way to Language, 1–56, New York: Harper & Row. ———. (1971b), “Building Dwelling Thinking,” in A. Hofstadter (trans.), Poetry, Language, Thought, 143–62, New York: Harper & Row. ———. (1971c), “Language,” in A. Hofstadter (trans.), Poetry, Language, Thought, 187–210, New York: Harper & Row. ———. (1971d), “The Nature of Language,” in P.D. Hertz (trans.), On the Way to Language, 57–110, New York: Harper & Row. ———. (1971e), “. . . Poetically Man Dwells . . .” in A. Hofstadter (trans.), Poetry, Language, Thought, 211–29, New York: Harper & Row. ———. (1971f), “What Are Poets For?” in A. Hofstadter (trans.), Poetry, Language, Thought, 89–142, New York: Harper & Row. ———. (1982), The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. A. Hofstadter, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. (1985), History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena, trans. T. Kisiel, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. (1996), Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister”, trans. W. McNeill and J. Davis, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. (1998), “Letter on Humanism,” in W. McNeill (ed.) and F.A. Capuzzi (trans.), Pathmarks, 239–76, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. (2000), Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry, trans. K. Hoeller, Amherst, NY: Humanity Books. ———. (2002), “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in J. Young and K. Haynes (trans. and eds.), Off the Beaten Track, 1–56. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. (2009), Basic Concepts of Aristotelian Philosophy, trans. R.D. Metcalf and M.B. Tanzer, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. (2010a), Being and Truth, trans. G. Fried and R. Polt, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. (2010b), Logic: The Question of Truth, trans. T. Sheehan, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. (2014), Hölderlin’s Hymns ‘Germania’ and “The Rhine”, trans. W. McNeill and J. Ireland, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Knot, G. (1990), “Bowie’s Many Faces are Profiled on Compact Disc,” Chicago Tribune, https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1990-06-10-9002170173-story.html, accessed 23 June 2019. Knowles, A. (2019), Heidegger’s Fascist Affinities: A Politics of Silence, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Kukla, R. (2017), “Ostension and Assertion,” in Z. Adams and J. Browning (eds.), Giving a Damn: Essays in Dialogue with John Haugeland, 103–30, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. McMullin, I. (2013), Time and the Shared World: Heidegger on Social Relations, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Schear, J.K. (2007), “Judgement and Ontology in Heidegger’s Phenomenology,” New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy 7: 127–58. Taylor, C. (1985), Human Agency and Language: Philosophical Papers I, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Withy, K. (2019), “Finding Oneself, Called,” in C. Hadjioannou (ed.), Heidegger on Affect, 153–76, Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Wittgenstein, L. (1997), Philosophical Investigations, second edition, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe, Malden, MA: Blackwell. Wrathall, M. (2011a), “Discourse Language, Saying, Showing,” in Heidegger and Unconcealment: Truth, Language, and History, 118–55, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. (2011b), “The Revealed Word and World Disclosure: Heidegger and Pascal on the Phenomenology of Religious Faith,” in Heidegger and Unconcealment: Truth, Language, and History, 156–73, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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The Phenomenology of Poetry Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei

Some phenomenological accounts of language privilege poetry or literary language more generally as a special form of revealing or disclosure of the world, one distinct from ordinary language. Literature in such accounts is recognized not only as an object of phenomenological study, but as exhibiting a phenomenological quality of its own, as disclosive in ways analogous to phenomenological philosophy. Husserl recognizes an intrinsic phenomenology in modern literary description. He compares phenomenological reflection with aesthetic reflection, affirming in a letter to Hugo von Hofmannsthal that the world as aesthetically observed by the literary writer may become pure phenomenon, just as it does for the reflecting phenomenologist (Husserl 1994, 134–5). Heidegger echoes this judgment in Basic Problems of Phenomenology when he claims that in Rainer Maria Rilke’s novelistic description of the remaining walls of a torn down house, “the world first becomes visible by what is thus spoken” (Heidegger 1982, 172). Merleau-Ponty too views modernist literature as operating similarly to phenomenology by attending to “the meaning of the world . . . as that meaning comes into being” (Merleau-Ponty 2002, xxiv). While in What is Literature? Sartre complains about the obscurity of poetic imagery, he insists that literature, at least in prose, could “reveal certain aspects of the universe” (Sartre 1988, 72). Sartre’s novel Nausea can be interpreted as a phenomenological undertaking, illustrating a breakdown of the natural attitude for its protagonist, exposing the experienced world as structured only in its correlation to a meaning-giving consciousness. Despite such homage to fiction, phenomenological or post-phenomenological studies of literature are more preoccupied with poetry than with other forms of literary language. Heidegger attended to Rilke’s novel only briefly, otherwise devoting his interpretations to poetry. Preeminent among Heidegger’s poets was of course Friedrich Hölderlin, whose novel Hyperion, though known to Heidegger early on in his career, is hardly ever mentioned in his many philosophical interpretations of the poet.1 Following Heidegger’s association of poetry with unconcealment, Gadamer assesses the relation of poetry to truth, and treats the interpretation of poetry as a core hermeneutic task. Maurice Blanchot radically transforms this approach in discussing poetry and the poetic image within his thematization of the space of literature.

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Gaston Bachelard engages phenomenology to register the reverberation of poetic imagery in readerly experience. Poetry in these interpretations is not merely the object of tribute, but manifests a unique linguistic event, one which may issue distinctly phenomenological insight. This essay will consider the phenomenology of poetry in terms of both the phenomenological analysis of poetic language as a distinctive linguistic event, and as a hermeneutic approach to poetry itself wherein are found something akin to phenomenological operations. The first part will trace the attention to poetic language and accounts of its special nature sustained in the thoughts of Heidegger and Gadamer, considering more briefly Blanchot and Bachelard. The second part will be devoted to the discussion of phenomenological moments within poems, considering works by William Carlos Williams, Elizabeth Bishop, Rilke, and Wallace Stevens. That poetry can also strain some aspects of the theory of revealing proposed in standard phenomenological accounts of language will become apparent. 1 Poetic Language and Phenomenological Disclosure In late phenomenology, poetry is understood to foster a distinctive linguistic event, a disclosure that is both divergent from ordinary language and associated with a form of truth. Such disclosure has ontological implications for Heidegger, who distinguishes poetic language as essential language from a merely instrumental function. Though profoundly influenced by Heidegger’s approach to poetry, Gadamer will also relate poetic language to human dialogue, a communicative dimension that will be acknowledged in later phenomenological aesthetics. While Heidegger’s poetics of disclosure can be seen to be radically adapted in Blanchot’s theory of the space of literature, the communicative nature of poetic language so emphasized by Gadamer resounds in Bachelard’s theory of the reverberation of poetic imagery within the reader. Heidegger’s ever-evolving approach to language does not maintain any consistently phenomenological method—is even “contrary to all philosophical method” if that means a systematic analysis—yet he maintains a phenomenological orientation, conceiving language as an original mode of bringing-to-appearance (Powell 2013a, 2). Being and Time (1927) of course had already diverged from the traditional phenomenological study of consciousness or intentionality, and instead described the human being or “Dasein” as a relational structure of concern (Heidegger 1962). Phenomena—and, most encompassingly, world—are disclosed through Dasein’s dispositions, understanding, and discourse. Language was considered preliminarily as discourse in that work, or as “the articulation of intelligibility or understandability . . . the condition of possibility for a world that makes sense” (Powell 2013b, 185). Heidegger’s focus thereafter shifted from Dasein to language itself as the medium and structure of disclosure. Language—and particularly poetic language—took a central place in Heidegger’s philosophy, displacing even the human subject as the one who speaks.

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The central significance of poetic language becomes evident in the essay, “The Origin of the Work of Art” (1934–35), and must be understood in light of Heidegger’s overall view therein of language and of the artwork. Heidegger suggests that language, by naming beings, first brings beings to appear as what they are. This bringing-to-appear-as, moreover, discloses beings in their Being. There is a further claim that language takes part in or accomplishes Being—or, as Heidegger says, “founds” Being. The artwork is conceived as a manifestation of the revealing originally accomplished in language. Poetry is preeminent among the arts, for all other arts presuppose the “clearing of what is, which has already happened unnoticed in language” (1971b, 74). While art in general discloses, disclosure itself (along with establishing) is enabled by the naming power of the word. Kant had granted poetry the highest ranking among the arts, since it could express aesthetic ideas, but Heidegger goes further to attribute to poetry the very essence of art. Unlike ordinary language, moreover, poetry makes this noticed, for it is “the saying of the unconcealedness of what is” (Heidegger 1971b, 78). Poetry is a disclosing that brings even “the unsayable as such into a world” (Heidegger 1971b, 78). Insofar as the artwork in general and poetry in particular reveals, uncovers, or brings (beings) to appear, it is associated with truth. Truth here is formulated through an interpretation of the ancient Greek concept of aleˉ theia, which Heidegger reads as indicating an unconcealment or revealing of that which had been covered over, and to which he joins the notion of foundation or establishment through language.2 Heidegger’s multiple theses come together in the claim that: “The nature of art is poetry. The nature of poetry, in turn, is the founding of truth” (Heidegger 1971b, 75). This claim, of course, will be countered by Adorno’s discussion of the illusory character of art (Adorno 1992) and by Blanchot’s association of poetry with the void of the image (Blanchot 2004), to be discussed below. In the decades following “The Origin of the Work of Art,” poetry is explored as a source for a new orientation for philosophical thinking in the context of what Heidegger views as the crisis of modernity. The poetry of Hölderlin takes center stage in Heidegger’s interpretations in the 1930s and 1940s. These interpretations sometimes entail a reprehensibly nationalist distortion of Hölderlin, whose poetry is related to an essential moment in what Heidegger describes as the history of Being.3 His later lectures and essays of On the Way to Language (Unterwegs zur Sprache) largely avoid this onto-historical narrative, though it should be said that even there Heidegger’s choice of Stefan George and Gottfried Benn courts similar political complications.4 Here, Heidegger attends to language as a phenomenological event, with poetry as the illuminating occasion of language. In “The Nature of Language,” Heidegger considers the possibility of reflecting on the experience of language, posing George’s poem “The Word” (“Das Wort”) as the medium of such reflection. Heidegger will contrast poetic experience with the

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ordinary unreflective use of language. Normally “our relation to language is vague, obscure, almost speechless” (Heidegger 1971a, 58), for in order to use language successfully, it is necessary that we ordinarily do not ponder it, that language becomes the invisible mechanism for speech. “Only because in everyday speaking language does not bring itself to language but holds back are we able simply to go ahead and speak a language, and so to deal with something and negotiate something by speaking” (Heidegger 1971a, 51). In contrast, poetry can occasion an experience of language itself, an experience “which has never yet been spoken” (Heidegger 1971a, 59). Because poetic language may afford an experience of linguistic newness or originality, and yet may sometimes also fail the poet, it may compel the poet to reflect on the experience of language. George’s poem, for example, addresses the relation of words to things, or words as the virtual place where the thing not only appears as, but comes into being as, what it is. Language is not only the content or subject-matter of some poetry, then, but it is an original event to which the poet is said to give a special listening. George’s speaker refers to “wonder from afar or dream” (“Wunder von ferne oder traum”) as a treasure that vanishes, and must be renounced, when the word fails the poet. The speaker concludes: “So I sadly learned to relinquish/No thing may be where word breaks off” (“So lernt ich traurig den verzicht:/Kein ding sei wo das wort gebricht”) (George 1968, 466–7). Heidegger interprets this renunciation as a transformation in the poet’s understanding of the relation between words and things. Such renunciation, if it means an “abdication in the double sense of refraining from speech, keeping silent, and giving up power,” can be associated with Heidegger’s later idea of Gelassenheit, loosely translated as letting-be (Bruns 1989, 104). Our ordinary view of language would take word and thing as positive entities, words as vocal or written signs signifying beings taken as simply present. George’s speaker could be said to renounce this view of language in coming to recognize that things are not simply there to be identified or signposted in language, but rather come to be as they are in and through the naming of words. Once again, Heidegger describes linguistic naming as revealing and instituting something as what it is: “only where the word for the thing has been found is the thing a thing” (1971a, 62). The word “establishes the given being as a being” (Heidegger 1971a, 63). The experience the poet has undergone with language is the intimate experience of the relation between being of things and words, the discovery “that only the word makes a thing appear as the thing it is, and thus lets it be present” (Heidegger 1971a, 65). If things themselves are for the traditional phenomenologist correlates of acts of consciousness, here the poet recognizes things as correlates of the poetic word. What in formal phenomenological terms might be described as the description of a fulfillment of intentionality on the part of consciousness would be for Heidegger an ontological realization on the part of poetic language. While the classical phenomenologist would bracket questions about the ontological status of things, regard them as phenomena, and reflect on their

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mode of givenness, Heidegger proposes a deeper ontological formulation of the relation between word and thing inhering in the special “event” that takes place through and as language. The word grants being to the thing, but does not have being in the same way that a thing has. The word as being-granting has no being in the way the articulated sounds or printed letters do. Despite the physicality of language, its phonetic nature, and its status as a system of signs, language is, essentially, not the positive phenomenon studied by linguistics but an event of revealing to which a dimension of withdrawal—of non-appearing—pertains. The word, Heidegger argues, only “gives” being; it “shows what is there and yet ‘is’ not” (1971a, 88). The German existential clause, “es gibt,” means literally “it gives” (something or other). In Heidegger’s interpretation, “es gibt” suggests how language, in giving or granting, itself withdraws. Thus, the event of language is a revealing that withdraws from the revelation. If such withdrawal is itself not a given phenomenon, neither is the unspoken source from which language arises. In “The Way to Language” Heidegger proposes an alternative to the classical linguistic model of language as an instrument and an externalization of human intellect in signs. Language has a diversity of elements—speaking, speakers, what is spoken about, and speech itself—but an implicit source unites them. Heidegger argues that “everything spoken stems in a variety of ways from the unspoken” (1971a, 120). Heidegger suggests, for example, that listening is in fact a condition for speaking. The latter presupposes something undisclosed to be disclosed and receptivity to the disclosure. Heidegger depicts “essential” or original language not as the assertion of a speaking subject, but as a kind of listening that lets something be shown, lets something be said. To say something, or to speak about something, is a means of showing or letting appear. Saying is thus related by Heidegger to a more primordial showing, the letting come to appear, the bringing into appearance or realization of phenomena. In keeping with his thesis in “The Origin of the Work of Art,” saying is a gathering manifestation that lets what is abide within itself as what it is. Heidegger’s perhaps mystifying formulation that “language speaks” (“die Sprache spricht”) is here meant to displace any subject-centered or even humanistic account of language (1979, 32). Insofar as “the saying of language unfolds as the ways in which the things of the world show themselves,” language exceeds intentionality (Powell 2013b, 194). At the same time, Heidegger will understand language as bound up with human speech, and as defining the human being, writing elsewhere that “humankind is in language” (Heidegger 1980, 62). Some hermeneutic implications for a view of poetic language as both harboring and issuing from the unspoken can be seen in his discussion of Georg Trakl’s poetry (Heidegger 1971a, 159–98). Heidegger there can be taken to suggest that there is a single source at the origin of poetic language which governs its message, that the poet speaks a singular unspoken statement. Heidegger dismisses any reference to the poet’s experiences, intentions, or

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emotions, instead prospecting for the unspoken source of language itself. The expressions of pain in the poetry—even the lamentations in Trakl’s “To One Who Died Young”—are not to be taken in a lyrical sense, as expressing human subjectivity or feeling, but as a form of essential listening. Expressions of loss in that poem become an “aletheic space . . . within which Being and man [sic] are gathered together” (Pimentel 2019, 222). While Heidegger admits ambiguity in Trakl’s verse, he argues that the “multiple meanings” in Trakl’s words can be brought to a “unison” to be “determined by poetry’s innermost site” as understood by the thinker (Heidegger 1971a, 192). Thus, Heidegger assures his reader that the “multiple ambiguousness of the poetic saying does not scatter in vague equivocations [but] arises out of a gathering, that is, out of a unison which, meant for itself alone, always remains unsayable” (Heidegger 1971a, 192). As I have pointed out elsewhere, there are echoes here of the resoluteness with which Dasein is to gather itself in Being and Time (Gosetti-Ferencei 2012, 212). If Dasein is to respond decisively to a moment of vision, Heidegger argues in respect to Trakl’s poetry: The ambiguity of this poetic saying is not lax imprecision but rather the rigor of him who leaves what it is as it is, who has entered into the ‘righteous vision’ and now submits to it. (Heidegger 1971a, 192) The transformative unification of ambiguity, the gathering into a univocal saying, is a sign of poetic resoluteness: “The peerless rigor of Trakl’s essentially ambiguous language is in a higher sense so unequivocal that it remains infinitely superior even to all the technical precision of concepts that are merely scientifically unequivocal” (Heidegger 1971a, 192). While granting to poetry an unprecedented philosophical recognition, Heidegger’s theory copes uneasily with the ambiguity he admits may be inherent in much poetic language (1971a, 193). His theory has been criticized for failing to acknowledge the many ways in which poetry can undermine univocity. Critics have challenged the idea that as revealing, poetry also founds or institutes truth, and they have defended aspects of subjectivity that may be expressed in poetic language.5 Both Heidegger’s specific interpretation of Trakl and his more general dismissal of the speaking subject are vulnerable to two objections: that “speaking is essentially tied to minds” (Wild 2012, 55), and that poetry communicates something important about them. While we will not rehearse these criticisms here, we will see that Gadamer offers an appropriation of Heidegger’s approach to language that at least indirectly addresses some of these difficulties. Like Heidegger’s theory of poetic language, the hermeneutic phenomenology of Hans-Georg Gadamer relies upon the identification of language and being.6 Like his predecessor, Gadamer explores the naming power of the word as a form of linguistic revealing. Poetic language “expresses something

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in such a way that what is said is like a discovery, a disclosure of something previously concealed” (Gadamer 2007, 129). Language exceeds the effable, and its revealing is also always coupled with what is hidden or remains unrevealed. Poetry, it is argued, manifests this in a play of disclosure and hiddenness and thus offers the most profound experience of language. Yet there are important departures from Heidegger’s view. While Heidegger derives linguistic communication from the revealing nature of language, Gadamer retains the primacy of the social dimension. Gadamer agrees that language exceeds intentionality, but he views language as dialogical and understands poetic language too within this framework. While Heidegger recognizes with some ambivalence the resistance of poetry to a singular meaning, Gadamer celebrates the playfulness of poetic language and its proliferations of meaning.7 Gadamer describes the inexhaustible ambiguity of poetic language as sustaining multiple interpretations. In his treatment of Celan, Gadamer recognizes the poet as releasing the “multidimensionality of the associations of meaning which is suppressed by practical unity of intention in logically controlled, one-dimensional everyday speech” (Gadamer 1997, 167). For Gadamer all speech has a dialogical nature, and even everyday speech is not merely reducible to the transfer of information, for dialogue facilitates understanding in a broader sense. Language—involving not only words but the situation of having something to say and letting something be said— presupposes that we do not already know everything already, or that what we do know could be understood differently. Speech as such could be understood as an answer to an implicit question. We can come to understand the world through language, then, because it is not already given as wholly disclosed to us, and its disclosure can be interpreted in multiple ways. Gadamer recognizes, however, that the dialogical nature of language undergoes a special “modification” in the poetic communication (Gadamer 2007b, 37). The hermeneutic situation of poetry is distinct in that in we do not regard it as motivated speech—we do not look for an intention behind the word. For Gadamer, the poem is a text in a preeminent sense. As written, a poem is not a reminder of an original performance of thinking, for the “text speaks in its own right, so that we feel no need to refer back to the original act of speech, the living word” (Gadamer 1986, 142). While constituted in and through its performance, the poetic text also transcends any individual occasion of such, enjoying “greater reality than any of its potential realizations can ever claim for itself” (Gadamer 1986, 109). The poetic text is a kind of “saying” that, like a witness statement or testimony, is autonomous and complete. We take it for total, as not needing “to add anything beyond what is said in order to accept it in its reality as language” (Gadamer 1986, 110). Poetic language therefore “bears witness to itself and does not admit anything that might verify it” (Gadamer 1986, 110). In poetic saying, it would be meaningless and senseless to look for verification; nothing outside the literary text is brought to bear on whether it is true.8

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In order to explain the self-sufficient realization of poetic language, Gadamer invokes the eidetic reduction and the phenomenological suspension of what he calls the “the position or positing of actuality,” along with the neutralization of “the positive and the posited” (Gadamer1986, 112). Gadamer is adamant that this suspension does not mean that when we experience a literary presentation, we are experiencing merely a weakened consciousness or its enfeebled positing. On the contrary, any comparison with ordinary experience in the natural attitude is simply eliminated, and the “realization that occurs . . . raises what is said above the particularity of what is usually called ‘reality’” (Gadamer 1986, 112). It is in this respect that “we construct the world of the poem from within the poem itself” (Gadamer 1986, 113). Poetry does not merely describe but “is the existence of what it intends” (Gadamer 1986, 113). Gadamer describes the non-external referentiality and realization of poetry as the “identity of meaning and being,” comparable to a sacrament (1986, 69). While Heidegger aims to avoid any language of consciousness and its faculties, Gadamer describes the achievement of poetry as imaginative presencing. Poetry awakens intuition by suspending direct correspondence to reality and provoking a virtual or ideal realization. For Gadamer, poetry in particular enables “intuition of a world” (1986, 164). When it is language alone that lets something be there, the ideal of production is most clearly fulfille . . . . Poetry is something that is made in such a way that it has no other meaning beyond letting something be there. (Gadamer 1986, 119) Gadamer understands poetic mimesis not along the lines of imitation or representation in the classical sense, but on the model of eidetic intuition. He points out that mimesis allows for a recognition of something we have seen or known before. What we recognize in the literary presentation is encountered in a wholly different circumstance, and yet we identify it as familiar, for we register the common element of differently encountered manifestations. In a dramatic reversal of Plato’s critique of poetry and art, Gadamer declares that “what imitation reveals is precisely the real essence of the thing” (Gadamer 1986, 99). On phenomenological grounds, mimesis is given epistemic validation, insofar as “mimesis is a representation in which we ‘know’ and have in view the essential content of what is represented” (Gadamer 1986, 119). Gadamer likens poetic realization to a presentation that achieves fulfilment. For in a literary or artistic representation, what appears is “emphatically there” (Gadamer 1986, 119). We recognize this particular manifestation as that which it represents. And the presentation achieves a liberation from contingency: Where something is recognised it has liberated itself from the uniqueness and contingency of the circumstances in which it was encountered. It is a matter neither of there and then, nor of here and now, but it is

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encountered as the very self-same. Thereby it begins to rise to its permanent essence and is detached from anything like a chance encounter. (Gadamer 1986, 120) We ought then to consider poetic mimesis not as a representation after the fact but as an original presentation freed from empirical contingency. Each presentation is unique and contributes to the “essence” of the subject-matter. Gadamer frequently attends to the structural and formal aspects of poetry that allow poetry to withdraw from reference, resist sliding into prose, and create a stay for otherwise fleeting or transient experience. In this way, poetic language not only brings beings to appear but brings the nearness and familiarity of the world itself to our notice. Poetry brings about a “hold upon nearness,” expressing what normally evades notice (Gadamer 1986, 113). Because, as Wittgenstein writes, the familiar quality of the world “goes unnoticed—because it is always before one’s eyes” (Wittgenstein 1997, 43), this bringing to notice may involve a “shattering and demolishing of the familiar,” though one that can also come as a “joyous . . . shock” (Gadamer 2007, 130). Thus, although the hermeneutic nature of poetry is different from that of ordinary language, it too answers a kind of question. Poetry always answers the “question” of the familiarity of things. Language is what makes a world familiar to us, makes us at home in it. The word of the poet does not simply continue this process of . . . “making ourselves at home.” Instead it stands over against this process like a mirror held up to it. But what appears in the mirror is not this world, nor this or that thing in the world, but rather this nearness or familiarity itself in which we stand for a while. (Gadamer 1986, 114–5) Poetry mirrors the world’s very nearness or familiarity and allows us to linger within it. The strangeness of language in poetry, with its inextricable weaving of sound and sense, brings us into this nearness itself and enables us to notice the relationship of the world to words. For Gadamer, this has existential implications—however tenuous that term may be in the wake of Heidegger’s critique of existentialism.9 The poetic word “by being there bears witness to our own being” (Gadamer 1986, 115) and “speaks to the self-understanding of every person” (Gadamer 2007, 129). The work of art, and poetry in particular, involves “a mysterious intimacy that grips our entire being, as if there were no distance at all and every encounter with it were an encounter with ourselves” (Gadamer 2007, 124). The phenomenology of poetry we have discussed so far has influenced French philosophies of literature, which we can address here only briefly. While Sartre (1988) favored prose over poetry, claiming that straightforward language, devoid of imagery, could transparently disclose the world, poetry

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figures prominently in theories that describe literary language in spatial terms, as opening up virtual or imagined space. While also attending to fiction, poetical works and the poetic image as such are significant in Blanchot’s The Space of Literature, among other works. Bachelard’s Poetics of Space is devoted to poetic language, specifically its conveyance of the image. Yet these accounts of poetry diverge—in different directions—from the idea of language as revealing being. The phenomenological dynamic Heidegger identifies in poetic language— particularly its moment of withdrawal in bringing-to-appear—resounds in Blanchot’s theory,10 yet in a radically altered form. Blanchot’s relation to Heidegger has been described as one of “indirection” (Fynsk 2013, 266), as “uncanny and profound” (Bruns 1989, 106), and in any case such that literary art would be “divorced . . . from any philosophy of truth or Being” (Hill 2005, 990). Rather than language as the shelter of Being, Blanchot offers an inversion of such ontology, with the virtual place of literary language described as a void, an “outside,” and evoking absence and infinite deferral (Blanchot 2004, 228). With the notion of the space of literature, Blanchot evokes a radical alterity, such that the world that is poetically disclosed is of a virtuality wholly withdrawn from the real: Through the work there takes place in time another time, and in the world of beings that exist and of things which subsist there comes, as presence, not another world, but the other of all worlds, that which is always other than the world. (Blanchot 2004, 228) In contrast to theories which align poetry with the founding of truth, for Blanchot literature directs us to the imaginary, to what he describes as the “shadow of events, not their reality, to the image, not the object, to what allows words themselves to become images, appearances—not signs, values, the power of truth” (Blanchot 2004, 24). Poetic language not only exceeds the intentionality of the poet and reader but also the reach of the world. As Levinas writes of Blanchot’s literary space, “any such place is impossible to reach” (Levinas 1975, 19). The idea of “the other of all worlds” made present through literature may seem far removed from any phenomenological approach, for what is experienceable appears only within what Husserl identified as a “world horizon” or the outer totality comprising all actual as well as possible experience. Husserl recognized that literature, as it were, effects a neutrality modification in its presentations. Blanchot radicalizes this move such that literature brings about “the neutrality and the fading of the world” through the presentifying absence of the poetic image (2004, 254). While for Heidegger the poetic word in bringing the thing into being discloses the unspoken source of language, for Blanchot the poetic image discloses “the thing as distance,

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present in its absence, graspable because ungraspable, appearing as disappeared” (Blanchot 2004, 256). Thus, poetic language reveals “the strange heart of remoteness as the life and the sole heart of the thing” (Blanchot 2004, 256). Literature’s presentation of such remoteness has been read a liminal exposure of the world horizon itself.11 Fascination with the image also motivates Bachelard’s poetics of space, in which we find arguably the most explicit application of phenomenology to poetry. Bachelard aims to identify “the onset of the image in an individual consciousness” and “to seize its specific reality” (Bachelard 2004, xix). For Bachelard the study of poetry must be phenomenological such that it achieves an “illumination of a subject who is struck with wonder by poetic images” (Bachelard 1992, 1). Phenomenology is praised for its ability to seize upon what has only ephemeral presence in conscious experience, and to render images “a durable, subjective value” (Bachelard 1992, 1). Rather than Blanchot’s investment in the non- or other-worldly nature of the poetic image, Bachelard is interested in the presenting, evocative force of poetic creativity: “By obliging us to retrace our steps systematically and make an effort toward clarity of givenness with respect to a poet’s given image, the phenomenological method leads us to attempt communication with the creating consciousness of the poet” (Bachelard 1992, 1). The images under consideration in The Poetics of Space (1958) are those that manifest spatial intimacies of the psyche, which Bachelard regards as evolved through primal embodied experience. Bachelard is interested in the quality of our experience of such poetic images and in their intersubjectivity. A form of communication, he argues, takes place through contact between the poet’s image and the “soul” (l’âme) of the reader. Addressing what he calls the “entire paradox of a phenomenology of the imagination,” Bachelard asks “how—with no preparation—can this singular, short-lived event constituted by the appearance of an unusual poetic image, react on other minds and in other hearts . . . ?” (2004, xix). It is only in plumbing these depths that we can explain how the “grip that poetry acquires on our very being bears a phenomenological mark that is unmistakable” (Bachelard 2004, xxiii). This is of course an unorthodox phenomenology. Although he is not entirely clear about this “phenomenological doublet,” Bachelard identifies how in two ways the poem affects the reader. Through its resonances (presumably with other images, with memories, with knowledge of the world) the image is dispersed on multiple planes of our experiential life. Through reverberation, the image seems to go straight to our own creative origins, to give greater depth to our own existence. Reverberation brings about for the reader “a veritable poetic awakening” (Bachelard 2004, xxxiii). As such the experience of reading poetry is an experience of bringing to realization, “with the poet’s help, poetic intentionality” (Bachelard 2004, xxxiii). Such

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intentionality, while defamiliarizing, is also joyous. Bachelard describes poetry as an experience in which “wonder is coupled with the joy of speech” (Bachelard 2004, xxxiii). How the poetic image reverberates in our souls— how it creates wonder—has to do not so much with an epistemic state of consciousness but with “language in a state of emergence, in which life becomes manifest through its vivacity” (Bachelard 2004, xxxiii). 2 Phenomenological Moments in Modern Poetry We can now turn to some examples of poetry that may be seen to occasion moments of phenomenological insight. The idea of poetry as bringing-toappear or revealing phenomena ordinarily covered over, the bracketing of the natural attitude, eidetic intuition, and reverberation, for example, can be seen manifest within or through works by William Carlos Williams, Elizabeth Bishop, Rilke, and Wallace Stevens. We will address modern poetry in particular not so much for its historical convergence with phenomenological philosophy, but rather in light of thematic and structural affinities.12 Challenges to phenomenological ontology—the inversion of bringing-to-appear, the radicalization of being’s withdrawal, the resistance to truth-founding— can be also be suggested by the modern poem. To begin with, we have seen how poetry diverges from ordinary speech such that what Gadamer would call the familiar “nearness” of things may be exposed—and perhaps transfigured—by the novelty of their poetic conveyance. In what Heidegger described as average everydayness, we fail to notice the very familiarity of the world around us. Poetry can be seen to enact a revealing such that what is ordinarily unnoticed, though near to us, is brought to appear. We become aware not only of phenomena but also of our forms of attention to them endowed by language itself. Among the provocations of modernist poetry is its radical simplification, such that an object or place may be rendered through sparse linguistic means, attention then drawn to its very perception or noticing. William Carlos Williams, the preeminent example of such abstraction, maintained the “simplicity and innocence” of poetry by describing commonplace things in plain language, “focusing on what is close rather than on what is remote” (Perricone 1998, 57). Indeed, Williams’ poetry has drawn scholarly comparisons with Heidegger for aiming to arrive at an original or primal language of things.13 In Williams’ poetry ordinary experiences may be illuminated in a verbal still-life of minimal elaboration. If the phenomenologist aims to go straight to the things themselves, Williams too famously wants “No ideas but in things” (Williams 1986, 1:263). His poem, “The Red Wheelbarrow,” famously features only the titular object “glazed with rainwater/beside the white chickens,” and upon which “so much” is said to depend (Williams 1986, 1:224). In Williams’ “This is Just to Say,” the speaker conveys an ambivalent apology for having eaten the plums in the icebox (1986, 1:372).

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In a work simply entitled “Poem,” a cat climbs on a piece of furniture and steps into a flowerpot: As the cat climbed over the top of the jamcloset— first the right forefoot carefully then the hind stepped down into the round of the empty flowerpot.

(Williams 1986, 1:352)

The apparent simplicity of this poem merits attention. Over the course of four stanzas, each line bearing no more than three words, an event is realized that involves an unfolding series of moments. The initial “as” has an ambiguous effect, however, suggesting the temporal coincidence of the cat’s climbing over with what follows in the next three stanzas, with the other temporal indicators “first” and “then” marking the cat’s movements in sequence as it moves to occupy the empty flowerpot. That initial ambiguity, and the truncation and persistent enjambment of the lines, all force a slowing of the reading process, so that what Gadamer called the reader’s realization of the poetic event seems to parallel the movement of the cat as it comes, step by step, to take its place in the vessel. As the cat’s cautious footing parallels the reader’s experience of imagining, “Poem” provokes reflection on the resonances between an observer and what is observed, between language and the object or event it brings to appear. Williams’ attention to the ordinary is such that “the more one concentrates on objects, the more one becomes lost in them and the more those objects speak for themselves” (Perricone 1998, 59). In his most accomplished poems there are no grand themes, no symbolism that would prevent the immediate contact with reality for which Williams aimed. The poetry does not indulge lyrical sensitivities; it appears to favor the object over any subjective rendering; and yet Williams explained that his poetry was “to refine, to clarify, to intensify” for the reader “the exact moment that he [sic] is” in the present (Williams 1986, vol. 1, 178). Along with the object itself, disclosed in “Poem” are the temporality and temperament of attention to the present moment, which go unnoticed in our everyday experience of the familiar world. In this way, and Heidegger’s turn against anthropocentrism notwithstanding, the disclosure of presence through language is both an encounter with what is closest to us, and with ourselves.

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Of course, Bachelard, reading Williams’ “Poem,” would have taken interest in the spatial image of the empty flowerpot, its “round” supporting an image of the cat curling into its interior and thus evoking vicarious containment for the observing human subject. The cat’s coming to appearance in that virtual space would invoke, in Bachelardian terms, the work of imagination, its image reverberating across the reader’s own implicit memories of taking shelter in the world. While it is with Heidegger’s theory that Williams’ self-understanding as a poet most obviously converges— Williams writes that “when we name it, life exists”—Williams also explicitly attributes this naming power to the imagination (1970, 115). If Heidegger rejects any emphasis on human faculties, Williams insists that it is through imagination that poetry, by naming, can realize things in their phenomenal immediacy. We may look to other modern poems for moments of phenomenological revealing. Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry has been described as invoking “the threshold of waking, lucidly fusing two orders of consciousness,” yet it is also characteristic of Bishop that “she sets some part of the world before her and studies it with a describing eye, an interrogating mind” resulting in “stunning accuracies of perception” (Wilbur 1980, 11–2). These tendencies seem to intersect in Bishop’s poem “The Armadillo,” which considers an annual religious festival to a locally revered saint, presumably in Brazil, in which paper lanterns “flush and fill with light” as they ascend to the sky (Bishop 2004, 103–4). The spectacle itself affords an occasion that sharply departs from everydayness. While the ritual releasing of the fire balloons is expected for “the time of year,” the view becomes celestial as the speaker traces the wandering ascension: Once up against the sky it’s hard to tell them from the stars— planets, that is—the tinted ones: Venus going down, or Mars The speaker goes on to describe the beautiful but also dangerous fire balloons, conjuring a scene suggestive of a liminal reality. The otherworldly scene evoked by the ascending lights is interrupted by the speaker’s recounting of an earthly awakening, that “last night” one fire balloon fell and crashed into a cliff. The usually hidden wildlife was exposed by this event, and their appearance becomes the speaker’s main preoccupation. Two owls have fled their burning nest and other animals, an armadillo and a rabbit, appear suddenly. As in Bishop’s poem “The Moose,” in which the titular animal suddenly appears to the passengers on a bus, the turn to these earthly creatures is one of departure from the everyday: Hastily, all alone, a glistening armadillo left the scene,

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rose-flecked, head down, tail down, and then a baby rabbit jumped out, short-eared, to our surprise. So soft!—a handful of intangible ash with fixed, ignited eyes. Here phenomena are brought to appear, or as Gadamer would say, made present for the reader, through striking language, as in the “glistening armadillo” which leaves the scene “rose-flecked” by reflections from the fire. The young rabbit is perceived as correlative to an imagined human touch (“So soft!”), and in light of human observation (“short-eared, to our surprise”). Yet despite these tactile and cognitive human overtures, the animal remains elusive. For even as an imagined “handful” the rabbit is “intangible,” mere “ash” which would dissipate in the hand, and its eyes, though ignited, are “fixed” incommunicatively. The armadillo, in contrast, remains, with its head and tail down, entirely obscure to the humans to whom it has been disclosed, evoking what Heidegger calls the concealment remaining at the heart of disclosure. The poem’s final stanza contrasts, perhaps warningly, the “too pretty, dreamlike mimicry” of the ritual lanterns with the “falling fire and piercing cry / and panic” they have wreaked (Bishop 2004, 104). If poetry too is a dreamlike mimicry, its revelation is more benign—more of a letting-be—than human intervention in the material world. Gadamer emphasizes that poetic disclosure need not pertain only to worldly things, but may also reveal our relation to ourselves and illuminate our understanding. A connection between things and our knowledge of them is evoked near the end of Bishop’s long poem “At the Fishhouses” (2004, 64–6). In the ordinary or colloquial language which often characterized Bishop’s later poems,14 the speaker instructs about the taste of the seawater: If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter, then briny, then surely burn your tongue. In these lines a hypothetical sequence of evoked sensations is supported both by temporal markers—“first,” “then,” “then”—and the alliteration of “bitter,” “briny,” and “burn.” On the basis of the speaker’s knowledge, the reader is directed to imagine such experience, and this becomes the basis for a further elaboration of imagining in the final six lines of the poem. Here the speaker offers a wide-ranging, extended metaphor in which the imagined bitter, briny, burning water is compared to the imagination of the flow of human knowledge: It is like what we imagine knowledge to be: dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free, drawn from the cold hard mouth of the world, derived from the rocky breasts

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forever, flowing and drawn, and since our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown. The metaphorical transfer from the flow of sea-water to the historical flow of human knowledge would seem to lie beyond any phenomenological disclosure of being, as what comes to appear is disclosed only as the realm of imagination and thought. Yet the imagined taste of saltwater had been evoked in the context of a long elaboration, above in the poem, in which the ordinary life of fishermen, the objects which occupy them, had been juxtaposed in their “apparent translucence” to the inhuman, “opaque” sea: All is silver: the heavy surface of the sea, swelling slowly as if considering spilling over, is opaque, but the silver of the benches, the lobster pots, and masts, scattered among the wild jagged rocks, is of an apparent translucence like the small old buildings with an emerald moss growing on their shoreward walls. The speaker then considers the inhuman element, the sea: “Cold dark deep and absolutely clear,/element bearable to no mortal,” but only “to fish and to seals.” One such seal visits the speaker in this place “evening after evening,” regarding the speaker with curiosity, mediating as it were between the vast indifferent water and the human subject. The speaker asks the reader to imagine dipping a hand in the cold stinging water, and then, in the passage cited above, tasting it. Like the momentary if repeated contact with the seals, the concrete and fleeting—and for the reader merely imagined human experience—is here presented as a momentary contact with an underlying reality—“drawn from the cold hard mouth/of the world” (Bishop 2004, 64–6). What Gadamer described as the dialogic or hermeneutic context of poetic language invokes both the questionability of phenomena to a human speaker or reader and a world not fully disclosed already. In Rilke’s poem “Das Rosen-Innere” (“The Rose Interior”) the speaker’s interrogative address to the phenomena—the inward spaces of some open roses—enacts a shift from ordinary perception of the object as it would take place within the natural attitude. Here is the poem: Das Rosen-Innere Wo ist zu diesem Innen ein Außen? Auf welches Weh legt man solches Linnen? Welche Himmel spiegeln sich drinnen in dem Binnensee

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dieser offenen Rosen, dieser sorglosen, sieh: wie sie lose im Losen liegen, als können sich selber kaum halten; viele ließen sich überfüllen und fließen über von Innenraum in die Tage, die immer voller und voller sich schließen, bis der ganze Sommer ein Zimmer wird, ein Zimmer in einem Traum. (Rilke 2003, 569) The Rose-Interior Where is to this inside an outside? On what pain does one lay such linen? Which heavens are mirrored there inside the inward lake of these open roses, these careless ones, see: how loose in their looseness they lie, as if never could a trembling hand disperse them. They can scarcely hold themselves; many allow themselves to overfill and flow over with inner space into the days, which ever close more and more fully, until the whole summer becomes a room, a room within a dream.15 The initial line poses a question asking after the outside of the inside of the roses, an interrogative that both marks a shift from empirical perception and brackets the ordinary ontological status presumed of things present. For an interior without an exterior cannot be merely physical, but must also be metaphorical. The speaker’s next question—upon what pain might one may lay such linen—suggests just such a metaphorical register, and directs the reader from the object of perception, the open roses, to the perceiving consciousness. The speaker of Rilke’s poem then addresses a kind of interior space made by the opening of rose petals, imagining this interior reflecting the sky. But since the heavens too are interrogatively evoked—it is asked which heavens are reflected there—the image has a dual signification, providing what

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might be in Bachelardian terms an image of the imagination itself. By the end of this brief poem, the rose interior is recognized as a virtual space encompassing summer and the imagination, or in which the whole of summer can be contained as in a dream. The subject of the poem is the process of imagining, through the perception of the roses, the inner life of the seer, and seeing in the roses an internal dimension, one that will be reflected in Rilke’s later concept of Weltinnenraum or world’s inner space.16 Rilke’s poetry has drawn phenomenological attention on a number of grounds including its absorbing reflection on the experience of perception and apparent recognition of essences.17 What one scholar calls the “representation of intuitive-immediate grasp of the essence of things” in Rilke’s poetry can be considered analogous to Husserl’s notion of eidetic intuition (Hamburger 1971, 87). As we recall, Gadamer attributes the recognition of essences to literary-poetic mimesis, potentially allowing for eidetic intuition in poetry’s presencing of things. For Hamburger, Rilke’s poetry is phenomenological in a more formally Husserlian sense. She compares Rilke’s insight into the essence of the color blue in “Blaue Hortensie” (“Blue Hydrangea”) to Husserl’s treatment of the “what content” of the phenomenon of color, where the phenomenologist abstracts from the color of a particular thing and seizes an “identical generality” (identische Allgemeine) of the specific color. Just as Husserl supports imaginative variation as a means to yield the essence of a phenomenon, in Rilke’s study of the flower, the speaker varies the perception across that of other imagined phenomena in order to seize the specific blue. Yet as I have shown elsewhere, Rilke’s procedure preserves the specificity of that poetic moment in a way that would be incompatible with the generalization sought by Husserlian phenomenology.18 The grasping of essences occurs in the poem indirectly, through metaphor and its manifold imagery. Blaue Hortensie So wie das letzte Grün in Farbentiegeln sind diese Blätter, trocken, stumpf, und rauh, hinter den Blütendolden, die ein Blau nicht auf sich tragen, nur von ferne spiegeln. Sie spiegeln es verweint und ungenau, als wollten sie es wiederum verlieren, und wie in alten blauen Briefpapieren ist Gelb in ihnen, Violett und Grau; Verwaschnes wie an einer Kinderschürze, Nichtmehrgetragnes, dem nichts mehr geschieht: wie fühlt man eines kleinen Lebens Kürze. Doch plötzlich scheint das Blau sich zu verneuen in einer von den Dolden, und man sieht ein rührend Blaues sich vor Grünem freuen. (Rilke 2003, 481)

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Blue Hydrangeas Just like the last green in the color crucible are these leaves, dry, lusterless, and rough, behind the umbels, which on themselves do not carry a blue, only reflect from afar. They mirror it, as if tear-stained and vaguely, as if they wanted once again to lose it and like the blue in old letter papers there is yellow in them, violet and gray; Washed pale like a child’s apron, no more worn, to which nothing happens anymore: how one feels the brevity of a little life. Yet suddenly the blue will seem to revive in one of the umbels and one sees a touching blue looking forward to green. Rilke’s speaker considers the blueness of the blue hydrangea, a color not straightforwardly given with the object but rather evoked through the object’s horizonal resonances. The blue is first refracted through its contrast with the green leaves behind it, and then intensified through the distance through which it may be perceived. The association of “from afar” (von ferne) with the color blue invokes the sky without directly naming it, just as the implication of tears (in “verweint”) draws upon the metaphoric identification of blue with sadness and longing. If for Husserl the essence of a given phenomenon must be sought through imaginative variation, Rilke’s speaker suggests that the blue of these flowers appears only from a distance and through mirroring its reflection in other things. The color itself is nuanced through comparison to old stationery paper with inflections of violet, yellow, and gray, and to a washed-out child’s apron, the brevity of its use carrying existential implications. The function of reflection within the poem recalls what the literary scholar Jephcott once called a “verbal mirror,” affording an indirect rendering of the essence of the thing reflected (1972, 123). The eidetic intuition may be invoked in the last three lines of the sonnet, where a turn is indicated. After the process of perceptual contrast, indirect registration of the color, and the metaphorical identification of the blue flower with the blues of other things, “suddenly” (plötzlich) the blue appears in itself in one of the clusters of blossoms. It is as if the blue in the given phenomenon has come to life and in full givenness for the speaker, even if, once again, with reference to something (another color) both related to and apart from itself. Like that of Rilke, Wallace Stevens’ poetry has invited phenomenological study, in this case for explicit attention to the problem of reality and its appearances. His poems often describe a state of uncertainty or ambiguity between the subjectivity and objectivity of what is given, while the ordinary look of the world seems to be held in abeyance. Stevens explicitly addresses this problem in “The Bouquet,” for example, where the speaker refers to “a

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way of being seen” on the part of things. In that poem, perception of the titular object is rendered as “a drop of lightning in an inner world/suspended in temporary jauntiness” (Stevens 1997, 386). The bouquet in question is registered through the complex, contrary metaphor as an object for the “inner world” of imagination. Such language is engaged as a form of revealing—or in one scholar’s words, “as if it were a powerful microscope, causing us to feel the intimate presence” of the bouquet described, while it also reveals or brings to the fore the experience of reflection (Hertz 1993, 79). In his poem “A Plain Sense of Things,” Stevens considers the possibility of straightforward perception unadorned by imagination, here symbolized by trees which have lost their leaves for the winter. The speaker comments of the trees that “The great structure has become a minor house.” After the leaves have fallen, we return To a plain sense of things. It is as if We had come to an end of the imagination, Inanimate in an inert savoir. It would seem that the plainness of bare trees denies the imagination its playful provocation. Such knowledge is inert. Yet this revelation does not lay bare the immediate reality, as it were, untouched by the human mind. For even unadorned realism—a plain sense of things—is inflected with imagination. It turns out that bareness and lack of décor are also a product of the human mind: Yet the absence of the imagination had Itself to be imagined. The great pond, The plain sense of it, without reflections, leaves, Mud, water like dirty glass, expressing silence Of a sort, silence of a rat come out to see, The great pond and its waste of the lilies, all this Had to be imagined as an inevitable knowledge . . . . (Stevens 1997, 503) Stevens also treats perception in the context of its imaginative proliferation, conceiving that “it is not only that the imagination adheres to reality, but, also, that reality adheres to the imagination and that the interdependence is essential” (Stevens 1951, 33). His “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” playfully intertwines evoked and invented perceptions with metaphoric play, so that the poem itself seems to construct a moving world which, though unfixed, seems more primary than any object (the blackbird) from which the speaker’s imagistic adventures take departure. Like other works by Stevens, the poem strains the ideal of phenomenological revealing and its association with truth. Yet Stevens supports the notion that poetic revealing is also a bringing into being of what it describes. Echoing Heidegger and Gadamer, Stevens

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claims that: “A poet’s words are of things that do not exist without the words . . . . Poetry is a revelation in words by means of the words” (Stevens 1997, 663). In “Effects of Analogy” Stevens goes further, recognizing that “words have made a world that transcends the world and a life lived in that transcendence” (Stevens 1951, 130). It has been noted “how obsessed Stevens was with relating his own imagination to the world around him—to the immutable facts of reality—in the poems” (Hertz 1993, 83). While recognizing the naming and thus manifesting power of the word in the tradition of German phenomenological hermeneutics, Stevens’ poetics resonates profoundly with French literary theories in which imagination plays an important role. Stevens clarifies that poetry is “the imagination manifesting itself in its domination of words,” and that poetic acts are a means through language of “subtilizing experience and varying experience” (Stevens 1951, viii). Under the force of imagination and its language, Stevens declares that “the real is constantly being engulfed in the unreal” (Stevens 1997, 639). While poetic language for Stevens both discloses and brings to realization of what it describes, it also imports the “unreal” into its realm (Stevens 1997, 735). Poetry plays with unreality as much as it discloses beings, and with this Stevens’ poetics veers as close to Blanchot’s void as it does to Heidegger’s poetic founding of truth. The exquisiteness of Stevens’ poetic thinking consists in the unyielding maintenance of this paradox, neither ceding poetry wholly to the fantastical nor denying its effect, for human experience in any case, on the shape and presence of the real. With this tension in mind, we can approach Stevens’ poem “The Snowman,” a poem which demands of the reader a radically imaginative negation: One must have a mind of winter To regard the frost and the boughs Of the pine-trees crusted with snow; And have been cold a long time To behold the junipers shagged with ice, The spruces rough in the distant glitter Of the January sun; and not to think Of any misery in the sound of the wind, In the sound of a few leaves, Which is the sound of the land Full of the same wind That is blowing in the same bare place For the listener, who listens in the snow, And, nothing himself, beholds Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is. (Stevens 1997, 8) The first challenge to the reader to have a “mind of winter” is not merely to have winter in mind, but to approach the limits of knowledge and

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imagination. One must behold the winter landscape without attribution of meaning, to think, that is, of a place without any human significance. One is instructed “not to think/Of any misery in the sound of the wind,” to consider desolation and emptiness without their associative emotion. Poetic revealing here is not to bring about or realize the being of things, but rather to bring them—like Williams’ extreme minimalism has been said to do—“to the brink of nothingness” (Perricone 1998, 57). Stevens’ final directive—to behold “the nothing that is not there and the nothing that is”—instructs the reader to behold not an imaginary landscape, but what for Blanchot would be the other to all worlds. This recognition of the “not” and of the “nothing” can be read as a confrontation with mortality, an interpretation which would bring Stevens less into dialogue with the late Heidegger of poetic founding than with the most original insights of Being and Time, where Dasein confronts “the ‘nothing’ of the possible impossibility of its existence” (Heidegger 1962, 322). Yet Stevens’ poem does not demand a stance of resoluteness, but rather creativity, as a response to finitude. The poem ‘brings with it the challenge that we make that sensation itself the impetus for lyrical expansiveness’ (Altieri 2004, 85). Above I suggested a further issue at stake for Stevens, and it pertains perhaps more generally for the phenomenologically resonant poetry of modernism, namely the relationship between perception and imagination, and between consciousness and reality. Stevens’ poetry can be read “in terms of an oscillation between two poles and two aesthetic temptations: on the one hand, the imagination seizing hold of reality, and on the other, reality resisting the imagination” (Critchley 2005, 85). Yet it seems to be the ambition of Stevens’ poetry to discover how reality and imagination may come together, and how reality, although resisting imagination, may be informed by it. The revealing and realizing power of the poetic word, its capacity for phenomenological disclosure, must engage the imaginative play with possibilities. This poetry suggests that the phenomenological approach to poetic language as the disclosure of being must recognize and even address creative invention and intervention—and, above all, human creativity. It remains to be explored how such creative invention and intervention can be approached through the coupling of poetry and truth so emphasized in the phenomenologies of poetry by Heidegger and Gadamer, as well as in the context of Blanchot’s emphasis on literature’s radical departure from the real. While Stevens in “Bouquet of Roses in Sunlight,” recognizes the intrinsic untruth of metaphor, its departure from any faithful disclosure, he sometimes conceives of this poetic effort as a “completing of the truth” (Stevens 1997, 370). 3 Conclusion Phenomenologically oriented philosophies of poetic language have credited poetry with endowing a unique, disclosive event, one that brings us closer to understanding the relation of the world to words and to ourselves as bearers

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of linguistic meaning. In this essay, we have seen that poetry has been phenomenologically recognized as effecting an illuminating defamiliarization not only of the everyday world itself, but of the very nearness of the world, whilst also exploring the essence of things as we perceive and know them. We have examined Heidegger’s accreditation of poetry with an ontological power, a view embraced by Gadamer’s recognition of poetry’s capacity to bring to realization—though with more tolerance in the latter case for reference to human consciousness. While Bachelard explores the communicative power of the poetic image, Blanchot emphasizes its negating or derealizing effect. We have found that the phenomenology of poetry in this sense parallels phenomenological moments within poems themselves. Having traced here divergences among these highly resonant theories, and studied, however briefly, some phenomenologically oriented poems of modernism, we have brought to light tensions between the late phenomenological poetics of revealing and the idea of the founding of being. The playful ambiguity of poetic language, its play with possibilities, its tarrying with nothingness, and the imaginary challenge any poetic founding that would be resolute or univocal. The destabilizations inherent to poetry are phenomenologically and potentially existentially significant. While there are merits to Heidegger’s prioritization of language over speaking subjects, a wider view of the phenomenology of poetry and a glance at the phenomenology within poetry may invite a reexamination, on phenomenological grounds, of the connections between poetic revealing and imaginative creation.19 Notes 1 Heidegger wrote to Hannah Arendt on August 3, 1925 that Hölderlin’s Hyperion was “among the few books” on his desk; see Arendt and Heidegger (2004, 46). It has been noted that Heidegger would have found Hyperion challenging to the German nationalist project of the 1930s; see Krell (2015, 121); see Gosetti-Ferencei (2004, 185). See also more generally Fóti’s critique (1991). 2 For a critique of Heidegger’s etymology of this term, see Marcel Detienne (1996, 27). 3 See Savage (2008, 38–49); see also Wolfson (2018, 47): For Heidegger, despite his efforts to extend beyond the more constricted nationalism of Nazi ideology, the political dimension of poetry was still tied to the intricate connection between land, language, and peoplehood, and, in that respect, the figure of poetry effaces plurality. 4 5 6 7 8

See Adorno (2019), Rieckmann (2005), Winkler (2005), and Travers (2010). See Adorno (1992), Derrida (2008), Gosetti-Ferencei (2004), and Fóti (1991). See Gadamer (1960, 450; 2007, 129). Lawn (2001). Of course, Gadamer would recognize that some poetry can be adequately read only in reference to events outside the poem, such as in the case of Celan as a poet who suffered and witnessed the Holocaust. See Gadamer (1973; 1997). 9 See Heidegger (1998). 10 I have discussed the resonance between the poetic theories of Blanchot and Heidegger in Gosetti-Ferencei (2012).

172  Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei 11 See Luks (2017), 285. 12 Fine treatments of this theme are also offered in Mildenberg (2017) and Natanson (1997). See Gosetti-Ferencei (2007), in which I have traced the parallel structures and themes of phenomenology and modern literature. See also Fischer (2015) for a discussion focused on the work of Rilke. 13 See Perricone (1998, 59). 14 See Cook (2016, 54). 15 Translations from Rilke are mine. 16 See Gosetti-Ferencei (2007b, 2010) and Tobias (2015). 17 See Hamburger (1971), Gosetti-Ferencei (2007), Fischer (2015), Tobias (2012; 2015). 18 See Gosetti-Ferencei (2007, 112–4). 19 I discuss this tension in Gosetti-Ferencei (2018), especially Chapter 4.

References Adorno, T. W. (1992), “Parataxis: On Hölderlin’s Late Poetry,” Notes to Literature, vol. 2, ed. R. Tiedemann and trans. S. Weber Nicholson, 109–49, New York: Columbia University Press. ———. (2019), “Stefan George,” Notes to Literature, Combined Edition, ed. R. Tiedemann and trans. S. Weber Nicholsen, 437–50, New York: Columbia University Press. Altieri, C. (2004), “Intentionality as Sensuality in Harmonium,” in Rebound: The American Poetry Book, M. Hinds and S. Matterson (eds.), 81–8, Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. Arendt, H. and Heidegger, M. (2004), Letters 1925–1975, trans. A. Shields, New York: Harcourt. Bachelard, G. (1994), The Poetics of Space, trans. M. Jolas, Boston, MA: Beacon Press. ———. (2002), The Poetics of Reverie: Childhood, Language, and the Cosmos, Boston, MA: Beacon. ———. (2004), (reprinted). La Poetique de l’espace. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Bishop, E. (2004), Complete Poems 1927–1979, London: Chatto & Windus. Blanchot, M. (1955), L’Espace littéraire, Paris: Gallimard. ———. (2004), The Space of Literature, trans. J. Webber, New York: Routledge. Bruns, G. L. (1989), Heidegger’s Estrangements: Language, Truth, and Poetry in the Later Writings, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Cook, E. (2016), Elizabeth Bishop at Work, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Critchley, S. (2005), Things Merely Are: Philosophy in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens, New York: Routledge. Dahlstrom, D. (2013), “Heidegger’s Ontological Analysis of Language,” in Heidegger and Language, J. Powell (ed.), 13–31, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Derrida, J. (2008), “Heidegger’s Hand (Geschlecht II),” in Psyche: Inventions of the Other Vol. II, P. Kamuf and E. Rottenberg (trans.), 27–62, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Detienne, M. (1996), The Masters of Truth in Archaic Greece, New York: Zone Books. Fischer, L. (2015), The Poet as Phenomenologist: Rilke and the New Poems, London: Bloomsbury Academic. Fóti, V. M. (1991), Heidegger and the Poets: Poésis, Sophia, Techné, Altantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press. Fynsk, C. (2013), “Heidegger with Blanchot: On the way to Fragmentation,” in Heidegger and Language, J. Powell (ed.), 265–80, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. ———. (1960), Wahrheit und Methode: Grundzüge einer philosophischen Hermeneutik, Tübingen: Mohr. ———. (1973), Wer bin ich und wer bist Du? Kommentar zu Celans Gedichtfolge Atemkristall Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.

The Phenomenology of Poetry  173 ———. (1986), The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. (1994), Literature and Philosophy in Dialogue: Essays in German Literary Theory, Albany, NY: SUNY Press. ———. (1997), Gadamer on Celan, New York: SUNY Press. Gadamer, H.-G. (2007a), “Aesthetics and Hermeneutics,” in The Gadamer Reader: A Bouquet of the Later Writings, R. E. Palmer (ed.), 123–31, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. ———. (2007b), “Autobiographical Reflections,” in The Gadamer Reader: A Bouquet of the Later Writings, R. E. Palmer (ed.), 3–40, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. George, S. (1968), “Das Wort,” in Robert Boehringer (ed.), Werke. Ausgabe in zwei Bänden, 466–7, Düsseldorf and Munich: Verlag Helmut Küpper. Gosetti-Ferencei, J. A. (2004), Heidegger, Hölderlin, and the Subject of Poetic Language, New York: Fordham University Press. ———. (2007a), The Ecstatic Quotidian: Phenomenological Sightings in Modern Art and Literature, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. ———. (2007b), “Interstitial Space in Rilke’s Short Prose Works,” The German Quarterly 80:3, 302–24. ———. (2010), “Immanent Transcendence in Rilke and Stevens,” German Quarterly 83:3, 275–96. ———. (2012), “World and Image in Poetic Language: Heidegger and Blanchot,” Continental Philosophy Review 45:2, 189–212. ———. (2018), The Life of Imagination: Revealing and Making the World, New York: Columbia University Press. Hamburger, K. (1971), “Die phänomenologische Struktur der Dichtung Rilkes,” in Rilke in neuer Sicht, K. Hamburger (ed.), Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer. Heidegger, M. (1962), Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson, New York: Harper-Collins. ———. (1971a), On the Way to Language, trans. P. D. Hertz, New York: Harper & Row. ———. (1971b), “Origin of the Work of Art,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, A. Hofstadter (trans.), 15–86, New York: Harper & Row. ———. (1979), Unterwegs zur Sprache, 6th ed., Pfullingen: Verlag Günther Neske. ———. (1980), Hölderlins Hymnen “Germanien” und “Der Rhein,” Gesamtausgabe, vol. 39, Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann. ———. (1982), The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. A. Hofstadter, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. (1996), Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister,” trans. W. McNeill and J. Davis, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. (1998), “Letter on Humanism,” in Pathmarks, W. McNeill (ed.) and F. A. Capuzzi (trans.), 239–76, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. (2000), Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry, trans. K. Hoeller, Amherst, NY: Humanity Books. ———. (2014), Hölderlin’s Hymns “Germania” and “The Rhine,” trans. W. McNeill and J. Ireland, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Hertz, D. M. (1993), Angels of Reality: Emersonian Unfoldings in Wright, Stevens, and Ives, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1993. Hill, L. (2005), “Distrust of Poetry: Levinas, Blanchot, Celan,” MLN 120:5, Comparative Literature Issue, 986–1008. Husserl, E. (1994), Briefwechsel, Band VII, Wissenschaftler korrespondenz, ed. E. Schuhman and K. Schuhman, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

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Jephcott E. F. N. (1972), Proust and Rilke: The Literature of Expanded Consciousness, New York: Barnes & Noble. Krell, D. F. (2015), Phantoms of the Other: Four Generations of Derrida’s Geschlecht, Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Lawn, C. (2001), “Gadamer on Poetic and Everyday Language,” Philosophy and Literature 25:1, 113–26. Levinas, E. (1975), Sur Maurice Blanchot, Montpellier: Fata morgana. Luks, L. (2017), “Art as the Silence of the World: An Attempt at a Phenomenological Interpretation,” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 48:4, 275–86. Merleau-Ponty, M. (2002), Phenomenology of Perception, trans. C. Smith, London and New York: Routledge Classics. Mildenberg, A. (2017), Modernism and Phenomenology, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Natanson, M. (1997), The Erotic Bird: Phenomenology in Literature, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Perricone, C. (1998), “Poetic Philosophy: The Heidegger-Williams Connection,” The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, New Series 12:1, 47–67. Pimentel, D. (2019), Heidegger with Derrida: Being Written, trans. N. Olshansky-Ashtar, Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Powell, J. (2013a), “Introduction,” in Heidegger and Language, J. Powell (ed.), 1–12, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. ———. (2013b), “The Way to Heidegger’s Way to Language,” in Heidegger and Language, J. Powell (ed.), 180–200, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Rieckmann, J. (2005), “Introduction,” in A Companion to the Works of Stefan George, J. Rieckmann (ed.), 1–24, Rochester, NY: Camden House. Rilke, R. M. (2003), Werke. Kommentierte Ausgabe in vier Bänden mit einem Supplementband Band 1: Gedichte 1895 bis 1910, ed. M. Engel et al., Frankfurt am Main: Insel. Sartre, J.-P. (1988), What is Literature? And Other Essays, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Savage, R. I. (2008), Hölderlin After the Catastrophe: Heidegger, Adorno, Brecht, Rochester, NY: Camden House. Stevens, W. (1997), Collected Poetry and Prose, New York: Library of America. ———. (1951), The Necessary Angel, New York: Random House. Tobias, R. (2012), “Ecology and Egology: Husserl and Rilke on the Natural World,” The Yearbook of Comparative Literature 58, 218–22. ———. (2015), “Rilke, Phenomenology, and the Sensuality of Thought,” Konturen 8, 40–61. Travers, M. (2010), “Gottfried Benn’s Statische Gedichte (1948) and the Final “Turn” Towards the Poetic in the Work of Martin Heidegger,” German Life and Letters 63:2, 179–93. Wilbur, R., (1980), “Elizabeth Bishop,” Ploughshares 6:2, 10–4. Wild, M. (2012), “Heidegger and Trakl: Language Speaks in the Poet’s Poem,” in Paths in Heidegger’s Later Thought, G. Figal et al. (eds.), Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Williams, W. C. (1970), Imaginations, ed. Webster Shott, New York: New Directions. ———. (1986), The Selected Poetry of William Carlos Williams, 2 vols., W. Litz and C. McGowan (eds.), New York: New Directions. Winkler, M. (2005), “Master and Disciples: the George Circle,” in A Companion to the Works of Stefan George, J. Rieckmann (ed.), 145–60, Rochester, NY: Camden House. Wittgenstein, L. (1997), Philosophical Investigations, second edition, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, Malden, MA: Blackwell. Wolfson, E. R. (2018), The Duplicity of Philosophy’s Shadow: Heidegger, Nazism, and the Jewish Other, New York: Columbia University Press.

Part II

Language and Joint Experience

9

Complex Community Toward a Phenomenology of Language Sharing Andrew Inkpin

Language is indisputably in some sense a social phenomenon. But in what sense? What is it to share language or to be in linguistic community with others? Philosophers often take for granted that this can be understood straightforwardly in terms of the relation between an individual and a language community, with one of these poles being treated as more basic and used to explain the other. This article considers what a phenomenological view of language implies for the form of linguistic community—understood in the dual sense of how each of us is connected (“in community”) with others and what kind of collectives (“communities”) are formed by shared language use. By focusing on our lived experience of the ways in which language mediates or scaffolds our connections with others, it argues that linguistic community has a complex structure that requires both the idiolectal and social poles of language, hence also the relations between these, to be reconceived. The article begins by identifying some of the problems faced by two common, opposing approaches—social holism and individualism—that attempt to conceive language sharing simply, on the basis of the individual–social relation. It then develops an alternative phenomenological view by focusing on two principal ways in which language is shared. Thus the second section draws on the late Wittgenstein to characterize how shared practices ground linguistic communities. Based on the link between language-games and corresponding subcommunities of language users, I argue that our pragmatic sharing of language is both more fragmented than social holism suggests and more cohesively structured than individualism intimates. The third section considers the way linguistic community is grounded in shared sign systems. Merleau-Ponty’s appropriation of Husserl’s notion of “institution” is used to highlight how individuals and groups adopt existing linguistic structures as part of an open process that allows for varying degrees of differentiation. The final section looks briefly at how the two factors previously identified interact, before summarizing the resultant view of language sharing at the social and individual levels. I conclude that, as language users, who we are in community with and how closely we converge with others varies over different parts of language—we belong, that is, to communities that are complex in the sense of being fragmented, differentiated and non-uniform.

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1 Simple Community: Social Holism versus Individualism Our lived experience of language has contrasting features that can appear paradoxical. On the one hand, language is a social phenomenon: We use the same words as many others, in much the same ways and contexts; we expect to be understood by them, and much of our selfunderstanding relies on these shared linguistic means. On the other hand, as language users we appear to be autonomous: We usually find the words to express our thoughts spontaneously, without reflection and without consulting others; we have the power to use words in new (hence unshared) ways; and usually take ourselves to be authoritative in determining the meaning of our own utterances (just as we are competent in understanding those of others). These two aspects of the phenomenology of language—its “irreducible sociality” and the “competence autonomy” of language users—lend some plausibility to two common—but polarized and opposing—approaches in attempting to understand the way we share language with others. In view of its irreducible sociality, philosophers often conceive language as something shared by a “language community,” understood as a set of speakers of the “same” language, and as something that “we” speak. For this approach—that of social holism—the community has primacy over the individual: it is the “community” that fixes the meaning of words or establishes standards for correct or competent language use, whereas the individual is conceived as derivative and undifferentiated—as one of the crowd—and has the task of learning and remaining accountable to the community-wide standards. Some philosophers see this priority as having surprising consequences, such as the idea that community-wide standards are determined by “experts,” or that the meaning of a speaker’s utterance might change by situating them in a different language community (so that each of us cannot ultimately determine, and may not know, the meaning of our own utterances).1 Despite its prima facie appeal, the idea of a “language community” as a social whole is problematic in several ways. First, it is uninformative at best. Beyond a vague intimation (e.g., “English speakers”) that being raised in a certain country or the use of shared syntax suffices, it is not specified how such communities are defined or delimited, which criteria determine one’s membership of a community, what it means to speak the “same” language, or how communities acquire the authority to determine each individual’s language use. Once such questions are asked, however, the notion of a language community and its supposed role are far from obviously intelligible: If it is not clear what a language community is, the idea that it fixes word meanings or that we are accountable to such a community makes no sense. Rather, the term “language community” seems to be a placeholder, or an idealized projection, gesturing toward a focus imaginarius. Finally, even if the notion of a language community is assumed to make sense, its supposed role is at odds with our experience of competence autonomy. For we seldom pause

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to check that our language use converges with that of others, and when we do—say by consulting dictionaries—it is no clearer how this constitutes agreement with the community as a whole. The second common approach to understanding our sharing of language— that of individualism—focuses on individuals as the bearer of linguistic abilities. This approach respects language-users’ competence autonomy by assuming that whatever cognitive abilities language use involves cannot depend constitutively on the presence of others. That is, although others have an important role in their acquisition, we do not need others to exercise our linguistic skills.2 This approach encourages the thought that individuals have primacy over the community, so that word meanings are determined at the level of the idiolect, with socially shared patterns of language use conceived as the overlap or convergence of idiolects.3 One advantage of this approach is its reassuring implication that we are entitled to claim we understand and determine the meaning of the words we speak—rather than making their intelligibility dependent on the community’s actual or potential assent.4 This second approach also faces obvious problems. First, one might worry that its individualism is a Cartesian residue that is undermined by the external or public character of language: Given that we don’t relate to words in the same way as to internal mental states, why should we expect a first-personal privilege in understanding them? Second, the individualist approach makes the social sharing of language look like an empirical and contingent matter, a felicitous causal fact, which would be surprising at least, given our experience of language as irreducibly social. The underlying reason for this, third, is that an idiolect-centered conception of language fails to provide an account of its social cohesion, the way that language use grounds relations between speakers. This inadequacy is nicely illustrated by Davidson’s treatment of communication between two speakers (about something) as a model for the social aspect of language, which he takes to be explained by a convergence of the short-lived “passing theory” each uses to interpret the other’s utterances at any given time.5 This view—which underlies Davidson’s (2005a, 107) famous claim that “there is no such thing as a language”—clearly neglects the structural factors underlying the social fabric of language. The two approaches just surveyed are polar opposites and as such incompatible: one is community-based, holistic, and top-down, the other is individualist, atomistic, and bottom-up. Although each has some genuine phenomenological motivation, both are ultimately phenomenologically inadequate, as each captures only one of the aspects of our lived experience of language highlighted above—its irreducible sociality or competence autonomy—and is contested by the other. Hence, neither approach can be preferred on the basis of a cursory appeal to the phenomenology of language. They are also inadequate in that neither sheds much light on how language is shared: while individualism dissolves the social cohesion of language, social holism simply takes it for granted.

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To progress beyond these two approaches, it is instructive to notice three features they have in common, each of which is symptomatic of attempting to conceive linguistic community as simple in form. First, both are speakeror agent-centered, with the focus of attention being on who speaks. Yet this focus has the effect of abstracting from the question of what language sharing involves—which is why both social holism and individualism remain uninformative for this question. Accordingly, second, both seek to conceive language sharing in terms of the individual–social relation, tacitly presupposing that this relation applies in the same way—and between the same two relata—over all parts of a language. Finally, third, both approaches treat their preferred pole as something conceptually simple, i.e., as something intelligible without further explanation or articulation of its structure, and in terms of which its opposing pole can therefore be conceived. Thus for social holism the idea of a language community with homogeneous standards is assumed to be intelligible as a starting point, while individualism makes the same assumption of idiolects—apparently intimating that the latter could exist independently of the social contexts of language use. The following sections take a different approach to the topic of language sharing by focusing on where and how language is shared—specifically, through shared practices and sign systems—rather than who speaks. Doing this will show that linguistic community is a more complex phenomenon than the preceding positions suggest, such that the form of both the social and individual poles and the relation between these needs to be reconceived. My approach will be a phenomenological one in the sense that its main methodological commitment is to describe accurately the lived experience of language users.6 It will differ from, and improve on, the above positions by drawing on broader phenomenological evidence that is better suited to the question at hand. Thus the next two sections each start with an antecedently familiar— indeed obvious—feature of our experience of language sharing and follow through the implications of correctly describing this feature for understanding how language use binds us together into more complex forms of community. 2 Communities of Practice One of the main ways language connects us with others is through its use in the context of shared practices. This section considers how such practices ground linguistic community by drawing on the late Wittgenstein’s languagegames-based conception of language. In doing this, my aim is not primarily exegetical and I assume here, rather than argue, that this conception can both be attributed to Wittgenstein and form part of a phenomenological view of language that accurately characterizes its intertwinement with practice.7 The main thought I want to draw from Wittgenstein is that the structure and inherent logic of language is inseparable from the practices in which it is used—so that language is conceived as having a constitution that is “praxeological,” i.e., based primarily on the structure of practices rather than

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relations between agents. This thought is anchored in Wittgenstein’s notion of “language-games,” as simplified and clearly delimited, rule-governed activities that involve the use of language. Indeed, the central motivation underlying this notion is that language cannot be analyzed in terms of syntactic or semantic features alone, but must be conceived as structured in a way that respects its irreducible embedding in human activities. As Wittgenstein puts it in his Philosophical Investigations: the expression “language-game” is intended to convey that “the speaking of language is part of an activity, or of a form of life” (§23) and so refers to “the whole process of using words,” “the whole: of language and of the activities with which it is interwoven” (§7). Wittgenstein himself foregrounds the methodological importance of language-games as “primitive forms of language” (§5) that can be used as “objects of comparison” to eliminate philosophical misunderstandings by shedding light on how language functions (§130). However, for my purposes here, the most important aspect of his position is that language-games function as component practices—something like building blocks—that combine to make up what we might think of as a complete language.9 This thought is most clearly expressed in The Blue Book, which describes language-games as the “primitive” or “simple forms of language” from which “we can build up the complicated forms […] by gradually adding new forms” (Wittgenstein 1960, 17). This description implies that a complete language, and the abilities comprising linguistic competence, are to be thought of as a composite or compound form made up from the “simple forms” of language-games, i.e., as a set of functionally interlocking, rule-governed component practices. Because they are functionally related, rather than simply juxtaposed, language-games may depend on each other in various ways: some will presuppose others (as a foundation); others will depend on each other reciprocally; some will be deeply embedded in or linked with many other practices, and so on. Finally, given the inseparable link between language use and practice, these interconnections imply that imagining a (complete) language is to imagine a correspondingly composite “form of life” led by its speakers (§19). My concern here is with what this praxeological conception of language implies for the constitution of linguistic community. Wittgenstein himself often talks of how “we” speak or “our” use of language, without explicating who this unmarked “we”—to adopt Schemen’s (1995, 395) term—encompasses.10 For this reason, he is often read as postulating a more or less homogeneous “language community” that fixes the standards to which individual speakers belong and are accountable.11 However, I want to suggest that this social holist reading is not merely an oversimplification but is inconsistent with the thought that language is made up of language-games. To see this, consider what the praxeological approach implies for the composition of a language community by following a bottom-up movement from simple to compound forms. First, each (simple) component practice, or language-game, will have a corresponding set of participating speakers or agents, which I will call

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its “subcommunity.” If two such practices are considered, the corresponding “language community” would consist of those who participate—or are competent—in both practices, i.e., those speakers who belong to both the corresponding subcommunities. And so on. That is, as further component practices are taken into consideration, the community of speakers that master the increasingly composite language will consist of the intersection or overlap of their respective subcommunities, i.e., those speakers who are competent in all the language-games that together make up the complete language. What this mode of composition implies for the form of practically constituted linguistic community can be traced at two levels. First, at the social level, it entails that there is no such thing as a single “language community” for anything resembling a natural language. For the size of the intersecting set of subcommunities will diminish as the number of language-games increases, tending to zero with the many component practices making up a natural language. (To put it another way, no single speaker will master all the language-games that make up such a language.) Conversely, the cost of stipulating that there is a single community for a language comprising a multitude of language-games would be to concede that this community is an idealization, a focus imaginarius rather than an actual community of speakers. Faced with this claim, one might be tempted to think there is a set of core practices common to all competent speakers that defines a single community—indeed, Wittgenstein himself might be thought to hint at this possibility in talking of the “shared human way of acting” (§206). However, in addition to the difficulty of identifying such core practices, this would leave unexplained why the remaining non-core practices should be correlated with the same unified language community. On the praxeological approach, the image of a single, unified community speaking the same language is therefore replaced by that of a patchwork of subcommunities, with multiple intersections and overlaps, but no shared core set (of either component practices or speakers).12 Language users are, so to speak, members of many special interest societies rather than one big society that meets all their needs. If we still choose, on this approach, to talk of a “language community” for something approximating a natural language, it would be one that is constitutively fragmented and heterogeneous, an unsurveyable configuration of multiple subcommunities and their interrelations grounded in its constituent component practices. A corresponding picture results at the level of individuals. As at the social level, an individual’s language—i.e., idiolect—will be defined by a set of component practices. However, an individual is never alone in using language: in each practice they are part of a corresponding subcommunity, so that in speaking an idiolect the individual belongs to a multitude of such subcommunities. This makes it more difficult to describe the sense in which individual speakers belong to something like a “language community.” For the praxeological approach implies that when engaging in any component practice (language-game), the “we” we belong to—and are

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perhaps accountable to—is the relevant subcommunity. Further, when we move from one language-game to another, our group affiliation, or the subcommunity we belong to, changes accordingly.13 However, as noted above, there is no single set of speakers we belong to over all the component practices in which we use language. In this sense, the individual does not belong to a “language community.” That is, although language use constantly binds each of us to a (sub)community of others, it does not bind us to the same set of others over all its component practices. Insofar as the individual can still be said to belong to a community, this must be in the unorthodox sense that each speaker’s idiolect picks out a set of subcommunities, each of which are relevant to some—but not all—of their language-use practices. This means, somewhat paradoxically, that each of us constitutes a language community of our own—through our respective idiolectal configuration of language-game skills (our “form of life”). We belong not to a simple community, i.e., a single set of speakers united by the same language, but to a complex community, i.e., multiple sets of speakers bound together in a piecemeal and partial manner by convergences in practice. Although language-games are irreducibly social, each of us is therefore on our own in the sense that developing an idiolect commits us to a particular mix of affiliations that are partial rather than global (i.e., they apply to part, but not all, of our language use). Each of us is central to our own community— the point of intersection for a set of practical subcommunities—just as we stand at the center of our “circle” of friends as the common link that unites them. The praxeological approach I have drawn from Wittgenstein differs from the positions outlined in Section 1 in taking neither the individual nor the community as its point of departure, instead conceiving both shared language and idiolects as composite forms built up from the simpler forms of component practices. This has the consequence, from both the social and the individual perspective, that the constitution of language communities must be conceived as correspondingly complex. On the one hand, it dismantles the fiction of a single, holistic, philosophically prior language community to which each of us stands in the same relation. On the other hand, it highlights that each person’s idiolect is made up of irreducibly social practices and is therefore inconceivable in isolation from the subcommunities of others we interact with in practice. Neither shared nor individual language can be understood as something simple—as something basic or intelligible independently of its substructure and which makes its opposing pole intelligible. Rather, both must be conceived as complex or compound, and as spoken by various subcommunities that cannot be unified into a whole. 3 Instituted Community Perhaps the most salient way language connects us with others lies in the use of a shared sign system, a system not merely of syntactic forms but of

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such forms as paired with semantic properties. Whereas communities of practice are formed primarily between contemporaries, the sharing of sign systems extends into both the past and future, and binds us into a longer historical movement or tradition. This section draws on the phenomenological concept of “institution” to capture the way community is formed by inheriting sign systems. More precisely, by reviewing Merleau-Ponty’s appropriation of this Husserlian concept, it shows how the transmission of sign systems introduces an additional aspect of complexity to the form of linguistic community. Whenever Merleau-Ponty discusses “institution” he invariably attributes this notion to Husserl. Although it is often not clear which textual sources he has in mind, Merleau-Ponty’s explanation of institution (Stiftung) as always involving both original institution (Urstiftung) and institution of an end (Endstiftung) suggests he is relying on the material that became §§15–6 of Husserl’s The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology.14 Husserl uses these terms there to explain the method underlying his narration of the history of philosophy, particularly since Descartes, with the aim of characterizing it as a unified history in which differences between individual thinkers contribute to the same overarching project. Further, Husserl sees this project as a teleological one aiming at and culminating in “a final form of transcendental philosophy—as phenomenology” (Husserl 1954a, 71). It is in this context that he talks of an “original institution” of philosophy in ancient Greece and claims that this act essentially involves the “institution of an end” to be realized by the “historical process” (Husserl 1954a, 73). The intermediate steps in this historical process are to involve both “re-institution” (Nachstiftung) and variation (Abwandlung) of the original project (Husserl 1954a, 72). While this process allows for disagreement and apparently differing goals between philosophical positions, Husserl implies that once the final state has been attained, these differences will prove to be part of a unified, longer-term movement towards this state. As he puts it: “Only in the institution of an end does . . . the unified directedness of all philosophies and philosophers reveal itself”; once viewed retrospectively from the “evidence of a critical view of the whole,” the historical facts will appear as “a harmony of final meaning” (Husserl 1954a, 74). Thus, on Husserl’s view, Urstiftung and Endstiftung function as two fixed end points between which a unified project, e.g., that of philosophy, is suspended and unfolds. Merleau-Ponty takes up Husserl’s notion of institution, while modifying it in subtle but important ways. As his 1954–55 lectures on “Institution” explain, he sees this notion as important because it allows “fields” of shared meaning, including knowledge, to be understood without recourse to either a constituting subject or essences (Merleau-Ponty 2015, 45, 117 f.). Merleau-Ponty follows Husserl’s “Origin of Geometry” in construing institution as basic to many “products of the cultural world” (Husserl 1954b, 368) and in allowing our “knowledge tools [appareils de connaissance]” to be understood as belonging to a shared culture (Merleau-Ponty 2015, 129 f., 136).

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However, rather than taking geometry to be “exemplary” of such products, as Husserl (1954b, 365) had, Merleau-Ponty (2015, 136) “assimilates the history of knowledge to that of painting,” because he sees the latter as a model for the production of general meanings through individual acts. In addition to adopting Husserl’s terms (often untranslated), Merleau-Ponty retains the thought that institution accounts for the unity of historically developed projects.15 He also retains the idea that retrospectively a series of historical events will often appear to be a rationally developed sequence. However, as he highlights against Panofsky’s view of the development of central perspective, with the “logic of painting, the construction is retrospective (and provisional)” and the result of a process that is in fact a “mix of chance and reason” (Merleau-Ponty 2015, 109). Merleau-Ponty’s most important modification to Husserl’s view, however, is to conceive institution as an open or ongoing process rather than attaining closure in some kind of end state. Accordingly, he defines institution as the initiation of an open-ended series of meaningful acts that constantly generate new possibilities for understanding: Here “institution” [is] understood to mean these events of an experience that provide it with lasting dimensions, in relation to which a whole series of other experiences will make sense, form a thinkable sequence or a history— . . . not as a relic and a residue, but as inviting a continuation, demanding a future. (Merleau-Ponty 2015, 162) This definition requires two features of Husserl’s view to be relativized. First, the retrospective impression of unity is not limited to the privileged final perspective of transcendental phenomenology, but is assumed to be possible at any time—as a “provisional” construction—when interpreting the past.16 Second, Merleau-Ponty’s talk of Endstiftung must also be relativized: although ends may be constantly instituted by expressive acts and ongoing projects, the assumption cannot be that these ends remain constant or converge on a discourse that realizes their underlying shared telos. For the latter would render the openness of institution processes merely apparent, not genuine, negating the potential creativity of situated intentional acts, and subordinating these to a supposedly non-negotiable final goal. The openness of institution processes thus requires that ends are constantly (re)projected and may be modified in particular acts rather than being permanently oriented toward a fixed or absolute end.17 Modified in this way, institution is for Merleau-Ponty not so much about preservation of meaning and purpose, but becomes a creative act, a reconfiguration of inherited meaning or sense (sens): its “internal sense . . . is separation [écart] in relation to a norm of sense, difference. It is this sense by separation, deformation, that is proper to institution” (Merleau-Ponty 2015, 53).18 Accordingly, Merleau-Ponty repeatedly claims that institution

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involves the “forgetting of origins”—a trait he again attributes to Husserl.19 Indeed, for Merleau-Ponty, this creative impulse is what Husserl meant by institution: Husserl used the fine word Stiftung,—foundation or establishment—to designate first the unlimited fecundity of each present . . . —but above all that of cultural products that continue to be valued after their appearance and open a field of research where they are perpetually revived. (Merleau-Ponty 1959, 73 f.; cf. Merleau-Ponty 1969, 96) What does all this imply for the constitution of linguistic community? In this respect, there is again a significant difference between Husserl and Merleau-Ponty. Husserl’s emphasis on the unity, integrity, and continuity of instituted projects suggests a correspondingly uniform image of linguistic community. His central example of geometry illustrates the simple preservation of valid results: forms of representation and methods are passed on and taken up without change, so that each individual or group learns to do the same things in the same, already established way. Where this happens, the result is a homogeneous or identity-based community in which individuals relate to one another as undifferentiated and interchangeable participants in the relevant practice. Merleau-Ponty’s basic claim, by contrast, is that whenever an individual or a collective inherits a sign system, they are situated in an open process and have the possibility of producing meaning in new ways. Further, he often suggests that doing this is part of properly realizing our expressive powers, while failing to forge new ways of speaking amounts to a collapse into mere anonymity and sociality.20 On this view, we enjoy what I shall call “peripheral freedom,” a freedom to reconfigure or further develop sign systems in ways that are made possible by the inherited system (cf. Merleau-Ponty 1959, 113) and which—for this reason—depend on it and in principle remain intelligible to others. If we were to exercise this freedom continually, we would constantly separate and distinguish ourselves from others, even those who inherit and use the same sign system. Each of us would differ from all others, be a particular, while sharing sufficient background to ensure a high degree of mutual intelligibility. This view suggests a form of community that I will call analogical community, in which relations between members are based not on identity, by being the same, but on proximity or resemblance.21 Rather than being conceived of as simply undifferentiated or identical, the members of such communities would be separated by a greater or lesser analogical distance, depending on the extent to which they exploit their peripheral freedom. Similar considerations apply at the collective level. That is, groups of language users at any point in time would again have a peripheral freedom in taking up inherited language; they would again establish both differences and similarities with past use; and again the analogical distance between communities of speakers would vary, depending on factors such as the passage of time.

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One way Merleau-Ponty’s view of institution clearly improves on Husserl’s lies in its rejection of any final terminus. There is no reason to think inherited language could ever exhaust its expressive possibilities to parallel the way that Husserl believes transcendental phenomenology fulfills philosophy’s underlying telos.22 In this respect, Merleau-Ponty provides a more plausible general conception of institution processes than Husserl. Nevertheless, in another respect, Merleau-Ponty’s position remains one-sided. While it is no doubt true that we—both individually and collectively—can modify inherited sign systems, this possibility needs to be offset against the fact that often we don’t and that in many cases it would be inappropriate to do so (as Husserl’s example of geometry highlights). In other words, Merleau-Ponty’s emphasis on creativity needs to be offset by a recognition that we often share language with others in routine, uncreative, but practically important ways. It is in fact the contrast between the two positions that is particularly helpful in identifying how the transmission of sign systems contributes to the complexity of linguistic community. To be sure, this contrast highlights first that both authors overgeneralize their claims: Whereas Husserl overstates the integrity and unity of historical projects over time, MerleauPonty’s emphasis on creative feats exaggerates the fluidity and fragmentation of language.23 The contrast is nonetheless instructive because together these two views—each of which plausibly characterizes some component practices—show that language can be shared and inherited with varying degrees of preservation and differentiation. To reflect the phenomenology of language accurately, it is therefore necessary to recognize that institution encompasses a spectrum of possibilities, from simple preservation and identity-based community at one extreme through to creative differentiation and analogical community at the other. The next section will indicate how Wittgenstein’s praxeological approach allows this to be done by mediating between, and thus partly reconciling, Husserl’s and Merleau-Ponty’s views. 4 Linguistic Community as Complex So far I have distinguished two ways in which we share language with others and considered what each implies for the constitution of linguistic community. First, I drew on Wittgenstein’s praxeological conception of language to outline how the communities resulting from shared practices should be conceived. Second, by reviewing Merleau-Ponty’s critical appropriation of Husserl’s notion of institution, I highlighted that the transmission or inheritance of sign systems introduces varying degrees of differentiation between language users. A further complication in the constitution of linguistic community lies in that these two factors interact rather than operating in isolation. Thus, the openness of institution highlighted by Merleau-Ponty affects not only sign systems but also inherited practices, so that the praxeological structures inherent in language-games and forms of life are likewise subject to the imperfect transmission and deliberate variations Merleau-Ponty

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emphasizes. Conversely, rather than affecting language uniformly or holistically, the openness and variation that characterize institution processes are subject to the constraints implied by Wittgenstein’s praxeological approach, in particular those defining different practice types and their role in practitioners’ lives. This latter fact allows Husserl’s and Merleau-Ponty’s models of institution to be partly reconciled. Put simply, which of these models is appropriate depends on the language-game in question. In some practices, such as mathematics, it is of central importance that language is used in uniform and constant ways—this fact underlies the validity and practical role of mathematical methods and results, and the efforts made to ensure these are accurately preserved in transmission (i.e., teaching/learning). Conversely, in other practices, such as literary writing, uniformity and constancy of language use are perhaps less important than creative differentiation. It is therefore no coincidence that the practices Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, respectively, treat as paradigmatic of institution define opposing ends of a spectrum, as the contrasting modes of transmission they identify are constitutive of the practices in question. Further, it is the broader function of the specific practices— their role in human life—that determines how much freedom is available and relevant in appropriating existing language. Whereas for some practices (e.g., geometry) it is important to sustain a practice unchanged over many contexts and long periods, others (e.g., literary writing) will be amenable to change more rapidly and easily. At the end of Section 1, I suggested that focusing on where and how language is shared, rather than who speaks, would yield a more complex view of the phenomenon of linguistic community. I now want to conclude by summarizing what the intervening discussion implies for the form of this complexity, in particular how it leads the social and individual poles to be reconceived. The first thing to note is that we share language in different ways, each of which constitutes one kind of relation to others, but which need not coincide. Thus, the two factors considered here—shared practices and sign systems—highlight distinct ways in which language is shared; but these can plausibly come apart, resulting in either shared patterns of action using different words or a superficial sharing of syntax and grammar but different practices. However, I will assume here that being able to speak to someone and be understood by them requires both, so that each of these factors can be considered necessary but insufficient on phenomenological grounds for the constitution of linguistic community.24 On this assumption, I will now summarize the view of language sharing that results from the preceding discussions at both the social and individual levels. The way language is shared through practices and signs systems sustains the view that it is irreducibly social, but—in contrast to social holism— undermines the idea that we are undifferentiated members of a unified, social, and holistic “language community.” The most plausible basis for this idea is the fact that we share a sign system with many others. However,

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Merleau-Ponty’s view of institution highlights that this fact is insufficient to ground uniformity in language use, while Wittgenstein’s praxeological view implies that the multiple subcommunities we belong to in shared practices never coalesce into a single, holistic community. What kind of communities do these views yield instead? First, if we choose to talk of a “community” at the social level, this would refer to a fragmented or internally structured social whole. This is because—as described in Section 2 above—the starting point for description are the subcommunities corresponding to the multiple component practices that make up a language, with higher degrees of commonality being conceived in terms of the intersection or overlap between these subcommunities. Thus, the image of a single unified social whole is replaced by that of a patchwork of many partially overlapping subcommunities of practice. A second consideration is that groups of speakers and even individuals—especially over longer periods of time—will be differentiated from each other to a greater or lesser degree due to the openness of the institution processes that Merleau-Ponty highlights. Finally, third, the degree of uniformity or cohesiveness between speakers will also vary from practice to practice. As highlighted above, while some practices (e.g., mathematics) bind their practitioners closely, others (e.g., literary writing) allow for or even foster individual variations in language use. In sum, who we are in community with and how closely we converge with other members of each subcommunity varies over different parts of language. That is, the communities we belong to are complex in the sense of being fragmented, differentiated, and nonuniform.25 The resultant image of single speakers is correspondingly complex. To begin with, in contrast to individualism, an idiolect cannot be thought of as radically individual, i.e., as something that can be conceived in isolation from others. Rather, because they are structured by shared practices and an instituted sign system, idiolects are irreducibly social, so that single speakers are always in community with others. Yet single speakers are also not reduced to being undifferentiated members of a social whole, because two dimensions of freedom remain in constructing an idiolect: As well as realizing a personal configuration of component practices (a particular form of life), each speaker has the peripheral freedom to appropriate creatively at least some parts of the language they inherit along with others. As Rorty (1989, 24–8) has highlighted, this freedom can be important in allowing each of us to express our contingent and unique selfhood in language. However, this freedom remains peripheral insofar as it is scaffolded on structures and practices that are available to others, so that feats of creative differentiation remain intelligible to others who share a similar linguistic heritage. The complex—i.e., fragmentary, differentiated, and nonuniform— constitution of linguistic community is also reflected in the single speaker’s relations with others. Rather than being an undifferentiated member of an overarching community, the single speaker is simultaneously the member of a multitude of subcommunities with whose members they share

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a corresponding part of their language. Accordingly, the extent to which any two given speakers share language will be governed by the extent to which the component practices they engage in overlap. Further, as just highlighted, single speakers retain some scope to differentiate themselves from other speakers and groups, a residual and peripheral capacity to assert their particularity in using language. However, finally, the degree of similarity and difference between speakers and their idiolects will vary from practice to practice: in some language-games, all speakers are indistinguishable (e.g., mathematics), in others it may make little sense to suggest they use language in the same way (e.g., literary writing). Finally, we are now in a position to see why language sharing, or the form of linguistic community, cannot be understood in terms of a simple or single relation between the individual and a social whole. One reason for this is that neither of the relata—language at the community and the individual level—can be treated as something simple or conceptually basic that allows the opposing pole to be understood. Rather, the idea of a language community as a whole makes no sense, while the idiolect is always already social in its constitution. A second reason is that such relata are not constant over all language. Rather, as the praxeological model implies, individuals are related to practice-relative subcommunities, so that the relata of individual–social relations vary for different parts of a language. As language users, we are thus neither simply one of the crowd nor radically individual. Rather, we find ourselves in a complex community with others, related in ways that are irreducibly social while retaining possibilities for idiolectal variation. In the light of this phenomenologically more balanced view, the apparently paradoxical features of our linguistic experience referred to in Section 1 are to be expected and can be reconciled: While the irreducible sociality of language use is grounded in shared practices and sign systems, our ability to both participate in and—at least in principle— modify a distinctive, particular set of linguistic practices attests to the competence autonomy of single speakers. And although this overall image of linguistic community as complex may lack the philosophical charms of unity and simplicity, it has the decisive virtue of remaining true to lived experience of language and tracing the contours of actual patterns of language sharing rather than being an idealized projection. Notes 1 These consequences are suggested by Putnam (1975) and Burge (1979) in particular. Other prominent advocates of the primacy of the language community include Dummett (1980) and—with more subtlety—Taylor (2016, cf. 60–7). Hatab (2017, 44–6, 123)—whose phenomenological approach, like Taylor’s, is otherwise close to my own— also hints at such primacy. 2 For a philosophical study of the role of others in language acquisition, see Engelland (2014).—Note that this autonomy is largely independent of how individual linguistic competence is conceived—e.g., as rule-following or as involving certain mental states.

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Indeed, any conception of this competence that fails to accommodate individual speakers’ autonomy would be inconsistent with our experience of language. In Davidson’s (2005b, 111) words: “I take defining language as the philosophically rather unimportant task of grouping idiolects.” Influenced by Davidson, Rorty (1989, cf. 25–9) also assumes idiolectal primacy for at least part of our language—the “private” vocabulary we develop for the purposes of self-creation. See Smith (1998) for a staunch defense of such entitlement. In his view, “we have immediate authoritative knowledge of what words mean” (Smith 1998, 426). Davidson (2005a, 106, cf. 102): “Knowing a passing theory is only knowing how to interpret a particular utterance on a particular occasion.”—Davidson’s (2001a, 202–3; 2001b, 212–3) focus on such “triangulation”—two speakers talking about something— is echoed, along with an emphasis on the role of joint attention, by Hatab (2017, 45, 124). However, it seems to me Davidson is right to doubt that these features of communication can explain the wider and deeper social cohesion of language that Hatab also discerns (cf. note 1). It is what I describe in Disclosing the World as minimally phenomenological (Inkpin 2016, 6–11). Although my argument here is independent, this article complements that work in two ways: (i) The focus below on shared practices and sign systems corresponds to its distinction between “pragmatic” and “presentational” sense; (ii) It addresses the social aspect of language, a topic that work deliberately brackets (cf. Inkpin 2016, 228, 204–6). I have argued for these claims in detail elsewhere (Inkpin 2016, 162–8). For a more detailed development of this reading of Wittgenstein, see Inkpin 2016, 161–220, especially 168–77. Although Wittgenstein sometimes encourages us to think of individual language-games as “complete” languages (§§6, 2, 18), I mean above something at least approximating to the complexity of real human languages. He comes closest to defining this “we” in suggesting the formulas that sharing language involves agreement in a “form of life,” “definitions,” and “judgments” (§§241, 242). See, for example, Winch (1990, 32), Malcolm (1986, 156; 1995, 165), Kripke (1982, 79), or Wright (1980, 220). The structure and cohesion of linguistic community would be similar to that of family resemblance concepts as Wittgenstein describes them using the metaphor of a rope in which no single thread (here: set of speakers) runs through its whole length (§67). Insofar as we are thought to be normatively accountable to other speakers, this authority is local in the sense of being relative to the language-game in question.—It remains possible that some practices are parasitic on others that are taken to be conceptually authoritative, as in the everyday use of terms defined by specialist discourse (the kind of case that impresses Putnam and Burge). But there is no reason to assume that language is generally structured in this centralized and authoritarian way. “Toute institution comporte ce double aspect, fin et commencement, Endstiftung en même temps qu’Urstiftung” (Merleau-Ponty 2015, 131; similarly 121). Although Merleau-Ponty (1945, 148) describes “Stiftung” as Husserl’s favorite word, Husserl uses this term relatively rarely. It doesn’t occur at all in the Logical Investigations or Ideas I. He occasionally uses the expression “Urstiftung” in later works such as Ideas II, Cartesian Meditations, Formal and Transcendental Logic, and the “Origin of Geometry” (1954b, 368, 372, 386). However, to my knowledge, the connection between Urstiftung and Endstiftung is made explicitly only in the above passages of the Crisis. Particularly in his discussion of the history of painting as a unified cultural field (Merleau-Ponty 1969, 106–16, especially 112 f.). Just as in writing a biography: “retrospectively we can always find in our past the announcement of that which we’ve become”—“every life dreams of enigmas whose final sense is not inscribed anywhere in advance” (Merleau-Ponty 1966, 37, 43). The history of Western painting illustrates Merleau-Ponty’s view nicely. Although arguably guided by the telos of maximally realistic depiction from the fifteenth century

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onwards, once this goal was achieved in the nineteenth century, it continued to find new directions to explore while remaining retrospectively unified with (and motivated by) its previous history. “Primordial expression […] founds an institution or a tradition” (Merleau-Ponty 1959, 84)—Institution thus corresponds to his earlier notions of “speaking speech” (Merleau-Ponty 1945, 229) and “speaking language” (Merleau-Ponty 1969, 20). Merleau-Ponty (1959, 74; 1969, 96; 2015, 119, 130). This attribution is difficult to reconcile with the role Husserl assigns to Urstiftung (e.g., of philosophy). Perhaps Merleau-Ponty has in mind passages where Husserl acknowledges that “living evidence” can be lost and stands in need of remembering (Wiedererinnerung) and recovery (Wiederholung), and hints that the passive transmission of such truths is required to develop knowledge (Husserl 1954b, 370, 373–4). Husserl doesn’t use the term “Vergessenheit,” but otherwise his discussion and terminology echo—in order to critique—Heidegger’s (1993) claims that the question of being has been forgotten and needs recovering, as well as his descriptions of “idle talk” (cf. §1 and §35). Merleau-Ponty (1945, 207n, 446; 1969, 20). The cohesion between the members of such communities would be captured by Merleau-Ponty’s corresponding conception of style (Inkpin 2019) rather than the notion of rules, which everyone follows in the same way. Husserl’s own suggestion also has little going for it—being a variant of the “quest for the historical sublime” that Rorty (1989, 106) gently mocks as fancying oneself “in the role of the ‘last philosopher.’” Although Merleau-Ponty (2015, 136) concedes that language and knowledge involve a greater degree of “integration” than painting, he says little about what this involves and usually prefers to focus on creative feats. This is why the conclusions of the previous two sections—about communities in practice and instituted community—also apply to the overall form of our linguistic community. Hence the idea of a language community in the social holist sense cannot be understood as an approximation. Rather, this idea systematically misrepresents the form of linguistic community as there is no reason to think communities are being formed in a way tending toward holistic unity.

References Burge, T. (1979), “Individualism and the Mental,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy 4: 73–121. Davidson, D. (2001a), “Epistemology Externalized,” in Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective, Oxford: Clarendon, 193–204. ———. (2001b), “Three Varieties of Knowledge,” in Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective, Oxford: Clarendon, 205–20. ———. (2005a), “A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs,” in Truth, Language, and History, Oxford: Clarendon, 89–107. ———. (2005b), “The Social Aspect of Language,” in Truth, Language, and History, Oxford: Clarendon, 109–35. Dummett, M. (1980), “The Social Character of Meaning,” in Truth and Other Enigmas, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 420–30. Engelland, C. (2014), Ostension. Word Learning and the Embodied Mind, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hatab, L. (2017), Proto-Phenomenology and the Nature of Language, London and New York: Rowman & Littlefield. Heidegger, M. (1993), Sein und Zeit, Tübingen: Niemeyer.

A Phenomenology of Language Sharing 193 Husserl, E. (1954a), Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie, Husserliana VI, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1–276. ———. (1954b), “Beilage III [“Der Ursprung der Geometrie”],” in Husserliana VI, Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 364–86. Inkpin, A. (2016), Disclosing the World: On the Phenomenology of Language, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ———. (2019), “Merleau-Ponty and the Significance of Style,” European Journal of Philosophy 27 (2): 468–83. Kripke, S. (1982), Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Malcolm, N. (1986), Nothing is Hidden. Wittgenstein’s Criticism of his Early Thought, Oxford: Blackwell. ———. (1995), “Wittgenstein on Language and Rules,” in G. H. von Wright (ed.), Wittgensteinian Themes. Essays 1978–1989, Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 145–71. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1945), La phénoménologie de la perception, Paris: Gallimard. ———. (1959), “Le langage indirect et les voix du silence,” in Signes, Paris: Gallimard, 49–105. ———. (1966), Sens et non-sens, Paris: Gallimard. ———. (1969), La prose du monde, Paris: Gallimard. ———. (2015), L’institution, la passivité. Notes de cours au Collège de France (1954–1955), Paris: Belin. Putnam, H. (1975), The Meaning of “Meaning,” in Mind, Language and Reality, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 215–71. Rorty, R. (1989), Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Scheman, N. (1996), “Forms of Life: Mapping the Rough Ground,” in H. Sluga and D. Stern (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Wittgenstein, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 383–410. Smith, B. C. (1998), “On Knowing One’s Own Language,” in C. Wright, B. C. Smith, and C. MacDonald (eds.), Knowing Our Own Minds, Oxford: Clarendon, 391–428. Taylor, C. (2016), The Language Animal. The Full Shape of the Human Linguistic Capacity, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Winch, P. (1990), The Idea of a Social Science and its Relation to Philosophy, London: Routledge. Wittgenstein, L. (1960), The Blue and Brown Books, New York: Harper & Row. ———. (1989), Philosophische Untersuchungen, Werkausgabe 1, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Wright, C. (1980), Wittgenstein on the Foundations of Mathematics, London: Duckworth.

10 The Scaffolding Role of a Natural Language in the Formation of Thought Edmund Husserl’s Contribution Pol Vandevelde Among the many models that have been offered to approach the interaction between language and thought, the “scaffolding” model is the one I consider the most fruitful. This model shows how language provides information to the mind by building up the thought process, leading to the formation of more sophisticated thoughts. This model does not aim at granting priority either to language or to thought but rather at explaining how their interaction works. With regard to continental philosophy, this model has the added advantage of offering a framework within which many views defended in that tradition on the issue of language receive recognition and validity. In the first section, I briefly present what the scaffolding model is by discussing some of the views of the psychologist Lev Vygostky, who is at the origin of this model. In the second section, I show how the views Husserl offers on language in the revisions of the Logical Investigations, mostly conducted between 1914 and 1915 and published in 2003 and 2005 (Hua XX/1 and 2), can be seen as an original version of this model. 1 What Is the Scaffolding Model of Language? Although the term “scaffolding” was not used by Vygotsky himself, except in some of his notes,1 it was introduced by the American psychologist Jerome Bruner under the influence of Vygotsky.2 Bruner introduces the term “scaffolding” to describe Vygotsky’s notion of “zone of proximal development.” By this expression, Vygotsky names the fact that children’s learning is not only determined by their current cognitive developmental stage but also by the potential development that tutors or older, more advanced children can elicit by prompting them or showing them how to solve problems or understand situations that they cannot solve or understand at their current stage. These tutors or more advanced peers thus provide a “scaffolding” for the child’s learning. In Vygotsky’s words, the “zone of proximal development”— what Bruner interprets as “scaffolding”—is “the distance between the actual developmental level as determined by independent problem-solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers” (Vygotsky 1978, 86). Bruner uses the notion of “scaffolding” when discussing the zone

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of proximal development: “How can the competent adult ‘lend’ consciousness to a child who does not ‘have’ it on his own? . . . It is as if there were a kind of scaffolding erected for the learner by the tutor. But how?” (Bruner 1986, 74).3 Bruner understands this notion in terms of learning and methodologies of learning, making the term “scaffolding” a widely adopted concept in psychology and pedagogy.4 However, because of his specific interests, Bruner makes a selective use of Vygotsky’s model and understands the notion of “scaffolding” only from a synchronic perspective: given the stage of development at which a child is, what is the appropriate scaffolding needed? He thereby dismisses Vygotsky’s genuinely historical approach, which envisages the historical and cultural development of the child by combining a synchronic and diachronic perspective. This Bruner dismisses as a Marxist “hidden agenda” in the sense that Vygotsky “believed that the transmission of mind across history is effected by successive mental sharings that assure a passing on of ideas from the more able or advanced to the less so” (Bruner 1986, 74). Bruner rejects Vygotsky’s view that language serves as a vector for the transmission of ideas and can both “reflect . . . our lives in history” and “at the same time, . . . propel us beyond history” (Bruner 1986, 75). Putting aside this “agenda,” Bruner endeavors to “reconstruct [Vygotsky’s] intentions” in order to “better . . . grasp what this intriguing concept [of scaffolding] might mean” (Bruner 1986, 74). Contrary to Bruner, the historical aspect of learning is precisely what I find fascinating in Vygotsky’s approach. Language is not merely considered as a communicative tool in the development of the child but also as what contributes to the cultural development of the child.5 In his book Thought and Language (2012), written in the first part of the twentieth century and first published in English in 1962, Vygotsky shows on the basis of his studies of child development that the functions of speech and thought begin developing concurrently but independently. Yet, while “thought and speech have different genetic roots” (Vygotsky 2012, 85), at some point they converge. A child begins by babbling and progressively repeating words or short sentences, but, Vygotsky shows, this is just a lingual play that does not have a conceptual content. Concomitantly, the child’s cognitive development takes place in the form of play and manipulation of objects. In their phylogeny, there is thus “a prelinguistic phase in the development of thought and a preintellectual phase in the development of speech” (Vygotsky 2012, 85). These two functions “develop along different lines and independently of each other” (Vygotsky 2012, 85).6 Vygotsky argues that this dual development also happens in great apes: “Anthropoids display an intellect somewhat like man’s in certain respects (the embryonic use of tools) and a language somewhat like man’s in totally different respects” (Vygotsky 2012, 85). What is specific to humans, however, is that thought and speech converge in their phylogenetic development: “At a certain point these lines meet, whereupon thought becomes verbal, and

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speech rational” (Vygotsky 2012, 89).7 From this moment onward, language becomes a “scaffolding” for thought, which means that, as Carruthers describes this model, without, however, endorsing it,8 “language is necessary for the acquisition of many beliefs and concepts” and, in this sense, “may serve as a cognitive tool, enhancing the range and complexity of our reasoning processes” (Carruthers 2002, 660). Vygotsky calls this convergence between speech and thought “an authentic drama of development, as a living process of development of socio-historical forms of behavior” (Vygotsky 1997, 222). He speaks of a “history of the cultural development of the child” (Vygotsky 1997, 97) and calls it a “sociogenesis of higher forms of behavior” (Vygotsky 1997, 106). Vygotsky’s distinction of two lines of development for speech and thought clearly shows that not all thoughts are verbal, such as “the thinking manifest in the use of tools” or “practical intellect in general” (Vygotsky 2012, 94). In fact, “practical intellect is genetically older than the verbal; action precedes the word, and even mental action precedes the mental word” (Vygotsky 1999, 65). Rather, the interaction between speech and thought takes the form of “two intersecting circles,” and in “the overlapping parts,” verbal thought is produced. Vygotsky describes meticulously the different stages of a child’s conceptual development—what he calls “the ascent to concept formation.”9 What Vygotsky’s scaffolding model includes—fundamental for phenomenology’s claim to account for experience—is the recognition that “there is an essential difference between natural biologically grounded intelligence and historically developed human intelligence” (Vygotsky 2012, 148). He thus takes issue with those who claim that the child’s ability to use concepts is a matter of development of what was already present. This view, he believes, comes from the fact that, at a very early stage, children use the same words as their parents and apparently in the same sense. This fact gives the impression to parents that their children also use the same “concepts.” As he explains, The coincidence, in practice, of many word meanings for the adult and the three-year-old child, the possibility of mutual understanding, and the apparent similarity of their thought processes have led to the false assumption that all the forms of adult intellectual activity are already present in embryo in the child’s thinking and that no drastic change occurs at the age of puberty. (Vygotsky 2012, 129)10 While children have what Vygotsky calls the word’s “sense,” which is the use of the word in different contexts, they do not necessarily have the word’s “meaning,” which is close to conceptual meaning and is constant across contexts.11 Through its sense, which is linked to experiences, “the word is a direct expression of the historical nature of human consciousness” (Vygotsky

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2012, 271). Only in adolescence, after puberty, does the child come to master the meaning as conceptual and use concepts in the proper sense. After the lines of thought and speech converge, they reinforce each other and serve as a scaffold. Vygotsky explains: From our point of view, the processes of leading to concept formation develop along two main lines. The first is complex formation: The child unites diverse objects in groups under a common “family name”; this process passes through various stages. The second line of development is the formation of “potential concepts,” based on singling out certain common attributes. In both, the use of the word is an integral part of the developing processes, and the word maintains its guiding function in the formation of genuine concepts, to which these processes lead. (Vygotsky 2012, 154) This relation between thought and word is a “process” in the sense of “a continual movement back and forth from thought to word and from word to thought” (Vygotsky 2012, 231). The significant consequence of this process of development is that “thought is not merely expressed in words; it comes into existence through them” (Vygotsky 2012, 231).12 It is important to note that Vygotsky speaks of “speech” and not so much of language. What he shows is that, in the child’s development, speech functions as a way of processing information that leads to problem-solving. At the early stage, the child speaks to him- or herself when performing tasks. The speech does not describe what the child is doing. Rather, “the child’s speech is an inseparable and internally necessary part of the process, just as important as the action, for achieving the goal” (Vygotsky 1999, 15) so that “the discussion and action in this case are a single, complex mental function directed toward solving the problem” (Vygotsky 1999, 15). At a later stage, when the action is more complex and requires more steps to be performed, the importance of the role of speech increases: “Sometimes speech becomes so important that without it, the child is definitely not capable of concluding the task” (Vygotsky 1999, 15). This is how language is instrumental in the child having access to higher mental functions.13 Vygotsky certainly shows convincingly that there is an interaction between speech and thought14 and how this interaction ushers the child’s development into a historical dimension. This historical dimension is of a cultural nature and thus not merely the result of biological evolution. However, Vygotsky does not consider the specificity of the language in which the speech is done. He omits consideration of the specific ways in which different natural languages may scaffold thought in their syntactic and semantic specificities. This has led some people, such as Carruthers (2002, 657–74), to understand the scaffolding model as unidirectional in the sense of only consisting in language’s “developmental work of loading the mind with information.”15 Such an interpretation would mean that, as any scaffolding, it

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can be removed, just as the scaffolding for a building can be removed once the building can stand on its own. Thus, even if thought is informed with speech in its genesis, at some point thought would become autonomous. The fact that language is needed to convey information would not entail that language is required or even involved at the moment when I think. In this interpretation, the mind can very well function on the basis of the scaffolding provided by language—language would be “required” for loading those thoughts to the mind—but this does not necessarily mean that language is “involved” afterward when thoughts are entertained.16 To omit consideration of the role a specific natural language may play in the formation of thought amounts to a dismissal of the social and historical specificity of that which forms our thoughts. But such an account goes directly against Vygotsky’s avowed goal of showing how language contributes to the cultural and historical development of the child. I argue that Husserl’s views on language resolve this problem successfully and offer a better explanation of the scaffolding model of language, which in turn fulfils Vygotsky’s intent of providing an account of the historical and cultural contribution that language makes to cognition. 2 Husserl Compared to Vygotsky’s, Husserl’s views on the interaction between language and thought have at least two advantages. First, Husserl explains not only how language exercises a cognitive function in synchrony, at the moment of thought, but also in diachrony—a claim Vygotsky seems to accept but fails to investigate. Second, instead of treating language simply as a general faculty of speech, as Vygotsky does, Husserl considers and accounts for the specificity of language as a natural language. As a general remark, Husserl’s revisions of the Logical Investigations offer a significant development of his treatment of language.17 While the Logical Investigations present language as merely an expression for an apparently autonomous meaning-intention, and while Ideas I claims that language is “non-productive” (Hua III/1, 287), with the addition of Husserl’s revisions, we obtain a sustained and detailed treatment of how language works and how it fuses with thinking. Words themselves are shown to carry a meaning-intention that speakers awaken when they use them. Husserl is not just dealing with language in general, as a faculty, but with a natural language, complete with historical baggage. Compared to the “Origin of Geometry,” in which Husserl shows how language as a faculty contributes to the formation of an ideality, the revisions of the Logical Investigations probe more deeply into language and give us nothing less than an account of how a natural language, as opposed to a generic faculty, contributes to the activity of thinking and inscribes thinking in history. In what follows, I will examine three striking features of Husserl’s views elaborated especially in the second volume, Hua XX/2. First, Husserl considers words as belonging to a specific natural language and not just to

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a linguistic capacity. Second, words carry a meaning-intention (Bedeutungsintention) before they are used; the “use” of a word consists in reawakening the inherited meaning-intention of this word and “fusing” it with the meaning-intention of the speaker. Third, words of a natural language, operating as vectors of meaning-intentions, precede a speaker’s actual act of meaning something and mediate it through what Husserl calls the “indicating tendency” (Hinweistendenz) of words. The words of a natural language give a speaker’s meaning-intentions a historical character. 2.1 Words as Specific to a Natural Language Words are not meaningful by themselves. Husserl distinguishes two apperceptions at play in the use of words. The first apperception consists in taking noises as linguistic sounds (Wortlaut). I hear the noise /c-ae-t/ and I apperceive the linguistic sound /cat/. This is what Husserl calls a “consciousness of the linguistic sound” (a Wortlautbewusstsein) or a phonetic consciousness, which gives a “phonetic representation” (Lautvorstellung). In this case, I hear the English word “cat,” but the same process takes place when I hear a word I do not understand. For example, if I hear the noise “sesquicentennial” I apperceive this noise as an English word, even if I do not know what it means. Thus, at the same time I apperceive it as an English word, I also apperceive it as a meaningful word or well-formed word, the meaning of which may elude me. As Husserl says about such a case, “I do not know what it means, and still I grasp it as meaning something” (Hua XX/2, 187). Similarly, when visiting a foreign country and hearing people speak a language foreign to me I do not hear noises, but unintelligible “linguistic” sounds. This is why we call it a “foreign” language. Based on this “phonetic consciousness” (Wortlautbewusstsein)—apperceiving noises as linguistic sounds—I understand what they mean through a second apperception: I apperceive the meaningful English linguistic sound “cat” as carrying the meaning-intention “cat, the furry animal so-called.” This is what Husserl calls a verbal consciousness (Wortbewusstsein or verbales Bewusstsein): “The sensuous phonetic consciousness [Wortlautbewusstsein] is not the verbal consciousness [Wortbewusstsein]. In grasping the word the former is included, the sensuous linguistic sounds may well appear, but only as a founding stratum” (Hua XXVI, 142).18 Without the verbal consciousness, words would remain foreign or unknown. As indicated in the quotation above, the connection between the phonetic consciousness and the verbal consciousness is presented by Husserl according to the habitual schema founded–founding: “The verbal consciousness [Wortbewusstsein] is a complex consciousness: it is an intending act of meaning [intendierenden Bedeuten], founded in a phonetic consciousness [Wortlautbewusstsein]” (Hua XX/2, 150).19 Husserl also says about the “founding–founded” connection that the verbal consciousness is “higher”20 or that it is “grafted” on the phonetic consciousness.21 Once these two apperceptions come together—perceiving the physical noise as a phonetic sound and perceiving the meaningful word as the living

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body of an intention, we have the unity of a single expression: “the linguistic sound not only appears, but is the underlying layer of a founded unity, the unity precisely of the expression” (XX/2, 133–4). These two layers of apperception give the word “a peculiar ideal unity” (Hua XXVI, 142). Words like “cat” or “king” (Hua XVII, 24–5, 359; 1969, 20–1, 2001a, 12) can be repeated innumerable times and yet only exist once.22 It would be tempting but reductive to say that words have two layers: a phonetic and a semantic one. It would be reductive because these characterizations treat the word in terms of content, whereas Husserl treats the word in terms of consciousness. It is not so much that there are two layers in a word as that there are two moments of consciousnesses involved in a word. The fact that a word comes with a consciousness has at least two consequences. First, the meaning that I understand the noise /cat/to have is not the so-called “referent, “/cat/ the animal.” Rather, I understand “a consciousness of meaning ‘cat.’” When this phonetic consciousness (Wortlautbewubsstsein) of hearing a phonetic sound becomes a “verbal consciousness” (Wortbewusstsein) of recognizing the meaning of a word, it means that I intend the meaning-intention the words already have. I reawaken this intention carried by the word. Hence, Husserl writes, “Phenomenologically the word ‘cat’ is ensouled [Beseelung] by a certain act of meaning [Bedeuten]. It means ‘cat’ and it is not the meaning ‘table’” (XX/2, 265). 2.2 Words as Vectors of Meaning-Intentions The second consequence of considering a word as coming with a consciousness is that the word has a meaning-intention before I even use it. Besides the layer belonging to the word itself, my intention when using the word will in fact be another layer of “meaning-intention.” Husserl uses the expression “linguistic lived body” (sprachlichen Leib) to name the linguistic nature of a noise and “linguistic soul” (sprachliche Seele) to name what is meant (Hua XX/2, 134). As he writes, in an expression the sign is “the lived body for ‘something that is meant’ [Leib fur ein ‘Gemeintes’], something with which something else is designated and, through the sign, expressed, embodied [verkörpert]” (XX/2, 134–5). This is how a “verbal consciousness” lies in the word before I use the word. There is thus a temporal delay between my “subjective” intention and the “intersubjective” intention carried by words. The sign, the word as an objectivity constituted intersubjectively, as a word of the German language, as a cultural object, as the object of a common cultural world. There belongs to such a (univocal) word the identity of an intersubjective function, the function to communicate this or that, in this or that generally prescribed manner . . . . It is difficult to make this clear to philosophical children. (Hua XX/2, 75)

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The recognition of a phonetic consciousness, distinct from a verbal consciousness, and the recognition that there is a meaning-intention in language, help to differentiate language as a general faculty from language as a natural language that has its history—something neither Vygotsky nor Carruthers does.23 While Vygotsky considers speech as contributing to an individual’s cultural development, his generic notion of speech does not allow him to consider the specific mechanisms through which history is inscribed in the cognitive process. Carruthers, for his part, only focuses on the logical analysis of the formation of thought, whose conditions are the same under possible historical variations. Husserl succeeds in showing that this history permeates my meaning-intention, and so too your ability to grasp it. This history is the consciousness present in the “phonetic consciousness” and the “verbal consciousness” (Wortbewusstsein or verbales Bewusstsein) inherited from my sociolinguistic community; it is not my consciousness, the consciousness of the one who is now speaking. The phonetic consciousness that identifies the language I use as a specific language, such as English, and founds the verbal consciousness that endows these linguistic sounds with an intention, gives a natural language its specificity and autonomy in producing meaning-intentions. Meaning-intentions are not, in the first place, mine. Rather, they mediate my own meaning-intentions, as Husserl said in a quotation above. If it were the case that the language in question were a general capacity, it would not represent a real mediation with its potential opacity, but a mere means of expressing what I want to say. Now, because I have to go through the first apperception of noises as meaningful linguistic sounds of English, my meaning-intention is enacted intersubjectively, as it were. I am dependent on a natural language not just to express what I mean, but, first of all, to articulate it. Husserl uses the opposition between “latent” meaning-intention in words as available in my language and “patent” meaning-intention when I use them.24 When I use words, I animate them or reawaken their meaning-intention. When I “mean” something, such as “cat, the furry animal,” my meaning-intention (my Bedeutungsintention) re-effectuates the meaning-intention that is sedimented in the word’s meaning (Bedeutung): “cat.” Because words come with their own meaning-intentions before anyone uses them, when speakers utter them for expressing their own meaningintentions, their meaning-intentions become “patent” through the mediation of the latent meaning-intentions of words. This process occurs by way of what Husserl calls the “indicating tendencies” carried by words. 2.3 The Mediation of My Intention: The Indicating Tendencies (Hinweistendenz) of Words When Husserl grants words an “indicating tendency” (Hinweistendenz),25 the word “tendency” is supposed to demarcate the intention that inhabits words from the intention that a subject has when using the word, for example.

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The latter is actual and explicit. The former is latent and implicit. The intention that words have is not the intention by a specific subject and it is not accomplished through the word alone. Someone must use the word. Now, if I use a word, as we saw, it is because it is already carrying a meaning-intention. The word has, then, “tendencies” and these tendencies become a full-fledged “intention” when I use those words (Hua XX/2, 154).26 As Husserl explains, “we have here . . . a double intention. The one that originates from the pure subject of the cogito and the other that originates from the appearing linguistic sounds are in no way the same” (Hua XX/2, 154). The “indicative tendency” of words is “the phenomena of pointing away-from-itself and into-the-intention [Meinung], the phenomena of pointing-toward what is intended [das Gemeinte]” (Hua XVII, 361, 2001a, 15). Indicating tendencies manifest the dual aspect of words—subjective and intersubjective—as well as their belonging together. They describe the passage from a speaker’s intention to the words’ meaning-intention, thus from the subjective to the intersubjective. Husserl uses different formulations for characterizing the “indicating tendency” of words, which I would like to review. Two are paramount. First, words have a transient intention (Durchgangsintention) or transitive intention (Übergangsintention),27 and, second, a prescriptive tendency (Sollentendenz). By these expressions of “transient intention” (Durchgangsintention), “transitive tendency” (Übergangstendenz) or “transitive intention” (Übergangsintention), Husserl describes the fact that a speaker’s act of meaning goes beyond what the word itself means. At the moment I speak, my intention can only be such by “going through” the meaning-intentions that the words I use carry and they carry this meaning-intention by being words of my language in my community. A speaker’s act of meaning (Meinung) has to be embodied or go through the meaning of words (Bedeutung), which is itself a “transient” or “transitive” meaning-intention as a moment in the process of the speaker’s meaning-intention. The same goes when I hear someone speak. It is a “passage through the word into the intention carried by the word” (Durchgang durch das Wort ins Wortmeinen hinein) (Hua XX/2, 106). Husserl also characterizes the transient intention—the fact that I have to go through the meaning-intentions of words—as a “fusion”: my intention “fuses” with the meaning of those words. He sometimes describes this fusion as letting oneself be guided by the words. When the linguistic sound is animated by a cogito, “the gaze of the cogito lets itself be ‘guided’ [‘leiten’] by this tendency; the gaze of the subject follows this tendency from the word to the thing” (Hua XX/2, 154). Because words are a depository of meaning-intentions or “carry meaning intentions” (Hua XVII, 26, 1969, 22), that is to say, because they mean something in themselves before being endowed with an intention by a speaker, words also have a “prescriptive tendency” (Sollentendenz). This is the second characteristic of the “indicating” tendency of words. I cannot mean “moon” by using the word “sun.” I must use words in their customary meaning, at

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least most of the time in normal circumstances. Of course, I can be ironic, misspeak, and so on. Barring these anomalous uses, though, there is a normative aspect in the words against arbitrary use. If we understand a word (its Bedeutung), we understand what someone would mean by it (the Meinung). This is the basis on which we can say on occasion that people “misuse” a word or, sometimes, that they “don’t know” what they are saying. While I am the one who means and intends, I can only do so by enacting, as it were, intentions—meaning-intentions—that do not originate from me, but, broadly, from others. Although, in some way, I constitute words by choosing them and utilizing them, I do not control the meaning these words have. In speaking there are thus two intentions fused together. “There is an intention lying in the word itself toward the thing named [dem Wort haftet eine intention an gegen die Sache hin]” (Hua XX/2, 154) and there is an intention in the subject who means something. The former is a “going through the word toward the thing” (Das ‘Durch-das-Wort-auf-die-Sache’-Gehen)—this is the transient tendency (Durchgangstendenz)—that “has nothing to do with the character of the cogito and the subject of such a cogito” (Hua XX/2, 154). These two intentions—of the word and of my act of meaning—“both fuse into the unity of one consciousness” (Hua XX/2, 192). The fusion between the meaning-intention or indicative tendency of words, on the one hand, and the meaning-intention of an act of consciousness, on the other, takes place in the following way, as Husserl explains: [my ego] seizes the word in regarding it; it grasps its indicative tendency; it willingly allows itself to be guided by it, to be initiated into the execution of thinking; it allows itself to be oriented to what is thought as what is intended [Gemeinte] by the words. (Hua XVII, 366–7, 2001a, 22–3) Because he considers the meaning of a word as a meaning-intention, the word in fact expresses an intentional state or an intentional act of meaning, for example, a cat. It is thus not merely a semantic unity, but also a consciousness. A word expresses a Meinung as an intentional state. Words then give to intentional states or acts of consciousness a dual status analogous to the word’s dual status. Let us recall these two levels of “meaning” in words. When I say “a cat” while seeing a cat, I make the noises [c-ae-t] that I intend as an English sounding word /cat/. Any English speaker would understand these noises as a meaningful English word even if the speaker did not know what it means—this is the latent intention, the intentions at the level of words—as, first, a phonetic consciousness (Wortlautbewusstsein), and, second, a verbal consciousness (Wortbewusstsein, verbales Bewusstsein). I, at the moment of utterance, “animate” this string of, now, linguistic sounds so that the verbal consciousness (Wortbewubsstsein, verbales Bewusstsein) becomes the expression of my own intentional act—as my Meinen—“a cat”—in the sense that I name a cat in front of me. This is the patent intention.

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Husserl’s view on words is rather remarkable. They are not just signs with a meaning in the sense of a semantic content, but vectors of meaning in the sense of acts of intending.28 This means that my act of meaning or intending something (Meinen) is not first instantiated mentally and only later articulated, linguistically or otherwise. I articulate my intention (Meinung), not so much by expressing it (it does not exist yet), but by letting it gain visibility or hearability through words (with their meaning) and my intending “fuses” with the meaning of those words, a meaning that is itself the public act of intending. This takes place by letting myself be guided by the words. When fused with an actual intending (Meinen), signs “awaken . . . their familiar meanings [Bedeutungen]” (Husserl 1970, 361. Translation modified). This remarkable connection between word and thought—I think “a cat” by reawakening the meaning-intention carried by words—shows how thought is mediated by a natural language and this mediation allows history to enter the mind. 3 History at the Heart of Intentional States History irrupts in intentions at two levels. First, since words have indicating tendencies, as we have seen, the passage through words turns my act of meaning something (Meinen) into, in fact, a reawakening—or a taking as my own—of the meaning-intention carried by words, as in our example of “cat.” Second, my intentional act of meaning a cat is in fact the re-effectuating of an intentional act as a type (a Meinung), which, for example, I could read in a novel, as said by a fictional character, “a cat,” which anybody can instantiate or perform. In other words, the passage through words confers a public intersubjective character on intentional acts so that they exist independently of any singular actual effectuation or instantiation. Just as words have “meaning” before I can mean something with them, in the same way, intentional acts are available before I can instantiate my meaning. The fusion between thinking and words is thus not to be understood as a case of mere instantiation, in which case my use of words is only an instantiation of the meaning of the words. As carriers of a Bedeutung, which is a virtual Bedeutungsintention, instantiations can become part of—fused with—an act of intention as Meinung. Instantiation is thus a twofold act: (1) I, as a speaker, endow words with my intending (Meinen), as a mere moment of “wanting to say something” with them and (2) I can only do this (picking the words I use, choosing this one and leaving that other aside) by assenting to what the words, now as ideal entities, “mean.” What allows me to pick this word instead of that word is the phonetic consciousness (Wortlautbewusstsein), and once I have uttered it I assent to its verbal consciousness (Wortbewusstsein) or it becomes a verbal consciousness when I use it. It is not just an assent given to already-existing words. We “produce” words when we take them under our responsibility. There is a “practical intention” involved (Hua XX/2, 87). Like writers, speakers, too, can create something new by using words.

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By granting words an intention Husserl recognizes a level of intentionality that is different and separated from what subjects intend. A subject’s meaning-intention has to inscribe itself or embeds itself in a verbal consciousness. Most of the time or “habitually,” as Husserl says, we do not pay attention to the consciousness of the linguistic sounds.29 Yet, even if we do not notice it, there is a dual level of intentionality. We have, first, the public level of available intentional acts—meaning as type (Meinung)—such as seeing or desiring, and, second, the public level of words and sentences with their customary sense as recognized by the linguistic community. Anybody can perform the intentional act of seeing a cat or desiring warmer weather— as Meinung—and anybody can express these intentional acts in whatever language they use. There is in the act of intending (Meinen), as we saw, a “hidden intention, a latent intention, the ideal possibility of an intention” that is “unrealized but realizable” (Hua XX/2, 220). Similarly, anybody can understand and use the words, “There is a cat there.” Built upon this first public level of both intentional acts and word meaning, we have the second level of performing a particular intentional act, such as seeing a cat. When I perform this act of intending (Meinen) that there is a cat there, when my act of intention inhabits this intention (Meinung), we have a “patent, effectuating intending” (Hua XX/2, 220). Thus, there is in Husserl the possibility of speaking about the history of an “intentional state.” Let me illustrate how Husserl’s views on language can deal with an apparent tautology such as “boys will be boys,” which is not actually a tautology. About such expressions Pinker writes: In their literal forms, these sentences [“Boys will be boys,” “A deal is a deal”] look like empty tautologies, but of course they are not. Any speaker knows what they mean: a reminder that some entity has the essential qualities of its kind, despite one’s hopes or forgetfulness to the contrary. ‘Boys will be boys’ means that it’s in the nature of young men to do things that are pointless, reckless, or tasteless. (Pinker 2007, 163–4) Here is how Husserl could explain why these sentences are not tautologies: first, we have a phonetic consciousness (Wortlautbewusstsein) instead of simply hearing noises. We understand that the noise /boys/ – /will/ – /be/ – /boys/ is a string of sounds in a language and means something—first apperception. Second, we understand the words in their meaning (we have a verbal consciousness [Wortbewusstsein]), and not just that they are words of a possible language. We understand what the words mean—second apperception. Third, through the rules of grammar and syntax, we understand what these words mean together. Now, if we stayed at this level of words and operated with an expressibility principle, the intentional act of meaning “boys will be boys” and the linguistic expression “boys will be boys” would be the same and thus the

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sentence could only express a tautology. Once we borrow Husserl’s dynamic model, we do not need to assume that what the words mean—a possible latent intention (Meinung) of believing that boys will be boys—is identical with what someone—anybody speaking English—would mean when uttering those words—his or her Meinen. What a speaker means as an intentional act of consciousness by saying “boys will be boys” is not just what the sentence means, but what the speaker means by using it. In Husserl’s model, a speaker’s meaning is only minimally the act of meaning—wanting to say, and hence using, a sentence. A speaker’s meaning thus allows for ambiguity, which can be caused, consciously or not, by intonations, connotations, etc. This is the reason why we are often correcting, qualifying or otherwise amending what we say in conversation. In our present example, it can even be claimed that nobody actually knows “exactly”—in the sense of a unique propositional content—what the expression “boys will be boys” means. It is because we are familiar with the expression and with how it has been used that we understand it as meaning that boys will do whatever silly or outrageous things boys are known to do. The advantage of Husserl’s model is that the Meinung as a type of intentional act is in fact subsequent to and founded upon the verbal consciousness of understanding the string of noises as a latent intention “boys will be boys.” This is an example of how the speaker is led by words. Thus, in Husserl’s model, intentional acts do not always precede their expression. I can apperceive in a string of words—that may originate from me as a writer, for example—an intentional act and I can thus create new Meinungen out of words. This is how both poetry and religion, to some extent, work: “Love thy enemy,” as a Christian principle, does not so much express a clear intentional act or mental state as it presents an aspirational intentional state that nobody can clearly explain. It is a Meinung as a kind of intention that invites its effectuation and, in the striving to actually be in that state, people recognize themselves as Christian “followers.” Husserl’s views complement Vygotsky’s scaffolding model by showing that the historical and cultural contribution of speech consists in the meaning-intentions carried by a natural language. The following quotation, which does not sound like the canonic Husserl, taken from an appendix to Formale und transzendentale Logik, nevertheless describes the general fusion between language and thought: The one who expresses himself lives in the efficacious practical intention to articulate this or that view. That must not be understood as if he formed the intention [Meinung] explicite, and would only then seek suitable words to express it . . . . Thinking is carried out from the very outset as linguistic. What resides in our practical horizon as something to be shaped is the still indeterminate idea of a formation that is already a linguistic one [sprachliches Gebilde]. (Hua XVII, 359, 2001a, 12. Translation modified)30

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With this mediation of a natural language, an intention is not merely a matter of mind, but also a matter of history. This is how, Husserl tells us, “I am a ‘child of the times’ [Kind der Zeit].” As a subject living in a community with other subjects, which has “influenced” me, “I am what I am as an heir” (Hua XIV, 223).31 Notes 1 See Shvarts and Bakker (2019). 2 Bruner (1986) dedicates a chapter to Vygotsky, titled “The Inspiration of Vygotsky.” 3 See also Shvarts and Bakker (2019, 6). Carruthers also understands “scaffolding” as a reformulation of the zone of proximal development: One of Vygotsky’s ideas concerned the ways in which language deployed by adults can scaffold children’s development, yielding what he called a ‘zone of proximal development.’ He argues that what children can achieve alone and unaided is not a true reflection of their understanding. Rather, we also need to consider what they can do when scaffolded by the instructions and suggestions of a supportive adult. (2012, 387) 4 One of the reasons why this notion has been tremendously influential in child psychology and pedagogy is that, as Vygotsky explains, “the most essential feature of our hypothesis is the notion that developmental processes do not coincide with learning processes. Rather, the developmental process lags behind the learning process” (1978, 90). 5 Although Vygostky does not explicitly use the notion of “zone of proximal development”—Bruner’s “scaffolding”—in relation to language (though he mentions it briefly in Vygotsky 1978, 89), it is an apt term to name Vygotsky’s model of the relation between language and thought. This is precisely how Peter Carruthers understands Vygotsky, who, in Carruthers’s words, “argues that language and speech serve to scaffold the development of cognitive capacities in the growing child” (Carruthers 2002, 660). 6 See also Vygotsky (1997, 123). 7 While great apes may have “something approaching intellect” and even an “embryonic intellect” (Vygotsky 2012, 95), their limited intellect does not come to overlap with any form of speech, as in the case of human beings: “The close correspondence between thought and speech characteristic of man is absent in anthropoids” (Vygotsky 2012, 85). See also Vygotsky (1998, 119). 8 Carruthers puts Vygotsky’s views about the link between language and thought among “the more extreme” views (Carruthers 2012, 397). 9 Vygotsky distinguishes three basic phases, which he calls (1) “unorganized congeries or heaps,” (2) “complexes,” and (3) “genuine concepts” (Vygotsky 2012, 103ff). 10 As Vygotsky explains further, it is easy to understand the origin of this misconception. The child learns very early a large number of words that mean the same to him and to the adult. The mutual understanding of adult and child creates the illusion that the end point in the development of word meaning coincides with the starting point, that the concept is provided ready-made from the beginning, and that no development takes place. (Vygotsky 2012, 129–30) 11 Vygotsky borrows this distinction between “sense” and “meaning” from Frédéric Paulhan, which Vygotsky reformulates as follows: The sense of a word . . . is the sum of all the psychological events aroused in our consciousness by the word. It is a dynamic, fluid, complex whole, which has several

208 Pol Vandevelde zones of unequal stability. Meaning is only one of the zones of sense, the most stable and precise zone. A word acquires its sense from the context in which it appears; in different contexts, it changes its sense. Meaning remains stable throughout the changes of sense. (Vygotsky 2012, 259) 12 Not only does this scaffolding model explain the genetic complexification of thought through language, but it also explains how perception and language can reinforce each other and make perception more sophisticated, which is to say, richer by being infused with concepts. Vygotsky explains that speech, being involved in the processes of visual perception by the child, does not proceed in parallel to these processes as a peripheral series of reactions, as an accompaniment that goes along with a basic melody. On the contrary, speech is interwoven with processes of visual perception and forms new and complex syntheses, restructuring these processes on a new base. (Vygotsky 1998, 87)

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I cannot examine here the role of language in perception. On this topic, see Vandevelde (2013; 2017). “If at the beginning of the genetic path, the child carried out manipulations in a direct situation, aiming his activity directly at the objects that attracted him, now the situation has become significantly more complex. Between the object that attracts the child as a goal and his behavior, stimuli of a second order appear that are no longer aimed directly at the object, but toward organization and planning of his own behavior. Verbal stimuli directed toward the child himself, being transformed in the process of evolution from a means of stimulating another person to stimulating one’s own behavior, radically reconstruct his whole behavior” (Vygotsky 1999, 25). On the current debate on the role of speech in cognition, see Langland-Hassan and Vicente (2018). See Baumeister and Vohs (2002, 676). As Carruthers (1996) puts it, “we need to distinguish between the claim that natural language is required for—is a necessary condition of—thought, or some types of thought, and the claim that language is constitutively involved in those thoughts” (1996, 19). For Carruthers’s more recent views, see Carruthers (2018). There are many works on Husserl and language or phenomenology and language, but none, to my knowledge, on the question of a natural language in Husserl. Scholars have focused either on the question of meaning, which is linked to the question of expression (Don Welton’s (1983; 2000) and J. N Mohanty’s (1964) works are well-known), or on the connection between language and another topic (such as the reduction, as in Suzanne Cunningham (1976), or intentionality, as in David Woodruff Smith and Ronald McIntyre (1982), and Jocelyn Benoist (2001)). Others still have presented Husserl’s views by focusing on his critics, including, for example, Derrida (see Rudolf Bernet (1995), and Curtis Bowman (1999)). Regarding Husserl’s revisions of the Logical Investigations, there are very few studies taking account of their novelty. Rudolf Bernet presented these original views of Husserl before they were published (1988). Ullrich Melle (1999; 2002) has commented at length on these new texts, as the editor of the volumes, but does not address what I regard to be truly original in Husserl’s account, namely that it is about a natural language and not merely about a general faculty. Let us note that he sometimes calls both the consciousness of the sounds and the verbal consciousness by the same word. See also: the verbal consciousness “is founded in the phonetic consciousness [Wortlautbewusstsein]” (Hua XX/2, 138). As Husserl explains, the first level of consciousness, my consciousness of grasping noises as phonetic sounds (Wortlautbewusstsein), is very often “multilayered: optic, acoustic, motor” (Hua XX/2, 170) in the sense that I can see the word on the page, hear it, or pronounce it.

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References Baumeister, R. and K. Vohs (2003), “The Collective Invention of Language to Access the Universe of Possible Ideas,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 25: 675–6. Benoist, J. (2001), Intentionalité et langage dans les Recherches Logiques, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Bernet, R. (1988), “Husserl’s Theory of Signs Revisited,” in R. Sokolowski (ed.), Edmund Husserl and the Phenomenological Tradition, 1–23, Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press. ———. (1995), “Derrida and His Master’s Voice,” in W. R. McKenna and J. C. Evans (eds.), Derrida and Phenomenology, 1–21, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Bowman, C. (1999), “Speech and Phenomenon on Expression and Indication: Derrida’s Dual Critique of Husserl’s Demand for Apodictic Evidence and the Phenomenological Reduction,” International Studies on Philosophy 31 (4): 1–21. Bruner, J. (1986), Actual Minds, Possible Worlds, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Carruthers, P. (1996), Thought, and Consciousness: An Essay in Philosophical Psychology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. (2002), “The Cognitive Functions of Language,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 25: 657–74. ———. (2012). “Language and Cognition,” in E. Margolis, R. Samuel, and S. Stich (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Cognitive Science, 382–401, Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. (2018), “The Causes and Contents of Inner Speech,” in Langland-Hassan and Vicente (eds.), Inner Speech: New Voices, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 31–52. Cunningham, S. (1976), Language and the Phenomenological Reductions of Edmund Husserl, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Husserl, E. (1970), The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Philosophy, trans. D. Carr, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. ———. (1973), Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität. Texte aus dem Nachlass. Zweiter Teil: 1921–1928, ed. I. Kern, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff (Hua XIV). ———. (1974), Formale und transzendentale Logik. Versuch einer Kritik der logischen Vernunft, ed. P. Janssen, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff (Hua XVII). ———. (1976), Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, Band I: Allgemeine Einführung in die reine Phänomenologie, ed. K. Schuhmann, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff (Hua III). ———. (1987), Vorlesungen über Bedeutungslehre. Sommersemester 1908, ed. U. Panzer, Dordrecht: Springer (Hua XXVI). ———. (2002), Logische Untersuchungen, Ergänzungsband, Erster Teil, Entwürfe zur Umarbeitung der VI. Untersuchung und zur Vorrede für die Neuauflage der Logischen Untersuchungen (Sommer 1913), ed. U. Melle, Dordrecht: Springer (Hua XX/1). ———. (2005), Logische Untersuchungen, Ergänzungsband, Zweiter Teil, Texte für die Neufassung der VI. Untersuchung. Zur Phänomenologie des Ausdrucks und der Erkenntnis (1893/94–1921), ed. U. Melle, Dordrecht: Springer (Hua XX/2). Langland-Hassan, P. and A. Vicente (2018), Inner Speech: New Voices, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Melle, U. (1999), “Signitive und Signifikative Intentionen,” Husserl Studies 15: 167–81. ———. (2002). “Einleitung des Herausgebers,” in U. Melle (eds.), Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, Ergänzungsband, Erster Teil, Entwürfe zur Umarbeitung der VI. Untersuchung und zur

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Vorrede für die Neuauflage der Logischen Untersuchungen (Sommer 1913), xiii–liii. Dordrecht: Springer . Mohanty, J. N. (1964), Edmund Husserl’s Theory of Meaning, The Hague: M. Nijhoff. Pinker, S. (2007), The Stuff of Thought, New York: The Penguin Group. Shvarts, A. and A. Bakker (2019), “The Early History of the Scaffolding Metaphor: Bernstein, Luria, Vygotsky, and Before,” Mind, Culture, and Activity 26 (1): 4–23, DOI: 10.1080/10749039.2019.1574306. Vandevelde, P. (2013), “Husserl and Searle on the Completable Nature of the Object of Perception,” in I. Guenzler and K. Mertens (eds.), Wahrnehmen, Fühlen, Handeln. Phänomenologie im Wettstreit der Methoden, 347–63, Münster: Mentis Verlag. ———. (2017), “How Husserl’s and Searle’s Contextual Model Reformulates the Discussion about the Conceptual Content of Perception,” in R. Walton, S. Taguchi, and R. Rubio (eds.), Experiential Reason: Husserl on Perception, Affectivity, and Volition, 57–76, Dordrecht: Springer. Vygotsky, L. (1978), Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes, ed. and trans. E. Hanfmann, G. Vakar, and A. Kozulin, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. (1997), The Collected Works of L. S. Vygotsky, Vol. 4, The History of the Development of Higher Mental Functions, ed. R. Rieber and trans. M. Hall, New York: Plenum Press. ———. (1998), The Collected Works of L. S. Vygotsky, Vol. 5, Child Psychology, ed. R. Rieber and trans. M. Hall, New York: Plenum Press. ———. (1999), The Collected Works of L. S. Vygotsky, Vol. 6, Scientific Legacy, ed. R. Rieber and trans. M. Hall, New York: Kluwer Academic Publishers and Plenum Publishers. ———. (2012). Thought and Language, revised and expanded edition, ed. and trans. E. Hanfmann, G. Vakar, and A. Kozulin. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Welton, D. (1983), The Origins of Meaning: A Critical Study of the Thresholds of Husserlian Phenomenology, The Hague: M. Nijhoff. ———. (2000), The Other Husserl: The Horizons of Transcendental Phenomenology, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Woodruff Smith, D. and R. McIntyre (1982), Husserl and Intentionality: A Study of Mind, Meaning, and Language, Dordrecht: Reidel Publishing. Zahavi, D. (2003), Husserl’s Phenomenology, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

11 Widening the World through Speech Husserl on the Phenomenon of Linguistic Appropriation Michele Averchi What is the relationship between language and communication?1 The obvious answer is: we use language in order to communicate. In this chapter, however, I present Husserl’s account of a more specific and less obvious answer: we use language to communicate experiences. Husserl claims that all types of communication, including non-linguistic communication, can be used for transmitting information, but that only linguistic communication can be used for sharing experiences. In fact, it is only through language that we can appropriate someone else’s experience. Such a unique feature of language dramatically broadens our access to the world. Through language we can learn from the experience of others and exponentially increase our knowledge of the world. According to a widespread interpretation of Husserl’s phenomenology of language and communication, Husserl takes language to be crucial for knowledge only insofar as it can be severed from its ordinary communicative function.2 In this interpretation, Husserl thinks that there is an essential correlation between language and knowledge independent of the role of language in communication. Ordinary language is imperfect precisely because it arises out of the pragmatic context of communication. The ideal language is, by contrast, a purely logical one that allows for a Lebinizian mathesis universalis and makes the storage of stable knowledge possible. I agree that there might be, in places, a hyper-logical treatment of language in Husserl’s phenomenology. In this chapter, however, I argue that Husserl also develops a very different account of language and communication, one in which language serves knowledge precisely because of its unique role in communication. Husserl shows that it is only through language that we can share experiences and that we can only accumulate knowledge about the world by sharing experiences. The argument proceeds as follows. First, I present Husserl’s phenomenology of linguistic communication in the Logical Investigations and identify one important element of originality, namely, that linguistic communication is presented as world-oriented, rather than mind-oriented. For Husserl, when we talk, we are not given access to other people’s minds per se, but rather, we are given access to their experience of the world through access to their meaning-activity. Second, I detail the way Husserl discusses these two

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kinds of “access” in his account of the function of “intimation” (Kundgabe) of language, in which he distinguishes between a narrow and a broad sense of intimation; every case of communication involves not only a narrow intimation of a judgment’s content but also a broad intimation of the speaker’s experience of that content. Third, following Husserl’s analysis in a manuscript for the reworking of the Logical Investigations, I move then to establish a phenomenological definition of “understanding speech” as a species of empathic presentification. While one may object that Husserl’s account of language in communication fails to capture what distinguishes language from nonlinguistic communication, I argue that Husserl’s account of indications and expressions in the Logical Investigations answers that objection. According to the Logical Investigations, only communication based on expressions (linguistic communication) can be used to appropriate (übernehmen) someone else’s experience as her experience. In the final part of the chapter, I present Husserl’s account of the phenomenological structure of appropriation (Übernahme) developed in the course of his reworking of the Logical Investigations. There, Husserl argues that appropriation is only possible on the basis of empathic presentification taking place through language. Thus, we can share experiences only through language. 1 Husserl’s Phenomenology of Linguistic Communication in the Logical Investigations Husserl develops a brief but dense phenomenology of linguistic communication in the Logical Investigations. He focuses on the most primordial form of language use in communication, namely a conversation between two speakers. Husserl defines linguistic communication as a “mental commerce” (Husserl 1970, 189) between the two speakers. What is the meaning of this definition? According to Husserl, in a conversation we use linguistic signs in order to allow the hearer to share in our mental activity, or, more specifically, in our activity of intending something in the world. In our interaction with our surroundings and with ourselves, we are normally oriented intentionally to something such as an object or a state of affairs. In linguistic communication, specifically, we use signs in order to manifest to the hearer our intentional activity. The hearer “takes the speaker to be speaking to him” (Husserl 1970, 189) and interprets the vocal signs (in the example of a conversation) as a manifestation of the speaker’s intentional activity. Through the interpretation of signs, the hearer understands “what the speaker means,” that is, has an access to the speaker’s meaning-activity. Consider the following example: John tells Mary, “The white oak is down the road.” John is meaning the state of affairs that the white oak is down the road. Through the use of language, John manifests to Mary what he is doing, namely, meaning that state of affairs. Through her interpretation of the communication, Mary understands what John is doing and has access to his experience of the world.

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Husserl’s account is far from obvious: in his view, the mental activity is neither the content nor the object of the communication. The object or state of affairs is the object of the communication, not the mental activity. A more traditional account of speech would hold that vocal signs manifest the thoughts of the speaker, so that the thoughts of the speaker are the objects of the communication. The vocal signs would stand for mental contents, which are mental representations of objects and states of affairs in the world. It is important, thus, not to conflate Husserl’s account with this type of broad representational account. For such an account, a speaker uses words in order to manifest mental representations. For Husserl’s account, a speaker uses words in order to manifest an intentional activity. Thus, in general terms, the first type of account is mind-oriented and only derivatively world-oriented, while Husserl’s account is world-oriented through and through. In Husserl’s view, the hearer shares in the speaker’s experience, not in the sense that the hearer is peeping into the mind of the speaker (“experience” as an inner psychological event), but rather in the sense that the hearer is given access to the world through the mind of the speaker (“experience” as intentional activity). 2 Narrow and Wider Senses of “Intimation” Husserl calls “intimation” (Kundgabe) the function whereby the speaker’s meaning-activity is manifested through linguistic signs. In a conversation, intimation works for both interlocutors. In our example, when John and Mary are talking, both are using vocal signs as intimations of their meaning-activities. In this way, both share in the meaning-activity of their conversation partner. The notion of “mental commerce” implies the reciprocity of manifesting one’s own meaning-activity while sharing in the other’s meaning-activity. A remark is in order here. There are cases in which the content of communication seems actually to be a speaker’s mental content, rather than an object or state of affairs in the world. Such cases are possible, but they are exceptions rather than the rule. In other words, it is not the case that the content of communication is per se about mental content. Rather, such cases are particular instances of communication, in which the speaker’s meaning-activity is reoriented toward the speaker’s own mind. Consider Mary saying, “I wish to see the show tonight.” The thematic focus of Mary’s communication is, indeed, a mental content rather than an object or state of affairs in the world. Mary is only obliquely referring to the state of affairs that there will be a show tonight, because the primary object of her communication is her wish to see that show. In discussing such cases, Husserl remarks that intimation has a wider and a narrower sense. In the narrow sense, intimation is the manifestation of “acts which impart sense” (Husserl 1970, 189) or, in other words, acts of judgment. For Husserl, acts of judgments are intentional acts through which we take a state of affairs to be real. In our previous example, when John says,

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“The white oak is down the road,” he is manifesting an act of judgment, namely his taking such a state of affairs to be real; hence he is intimating in the narrow sense. In our current example, when Mary says, “I wish to see the show tonight,” Mary is intimating a judgment having a mental content as its theme. In the previous example, the judgment was about a state of affairs in the world, while in the current example, the judgment is about Mary’s wish to see the show. Thus, this is one of those particular cases in which the speaker’s meaning-activity is reoriented towards the speaker’s mind. In the wider sense of intimation, however, Mary is intimating her wish, not just her judgment about her wish. Mary is not just informing John that she takes that wish to be real in her mind. Rather, she is sharing that desire with John, maybe even with the goal of motivating John in helping her to fulfill the desire. Husserl’s distinction between a narrow and a wider sense of intimation suggests that, even when communication addresses mental content, it does so only in a narrow sense. Even in those cases, there is a wider sense of intimation, in which the content is related to the wider context of communication. In fact, in our daily interactions, we normally interpret intimations of mental content in the broad sense, rather than the narrow one. A failure to do so would generate puzzlement in the listener. Consider someone telling the bartender, “I would like another glass of wine,” and receiving as an answer, “Oh, good to know what’s going on in your mind.” We would find such an answer odd because it means that the bartender takes the customer’s order as if the customer were just manifesting a judgment about his or her mental content. The fact that such example strikes us as odd shows that this is not how communication usually works. Rather, we take intimations about mental content to be in the wider sense, that is, as a manifestation of that content insofar as it relates to the object or state of affairs. Husserl’s distinction between the narrow sense and the broad sense aims at avoiding the misinterpretation of intimation solely in terms of its narrow sense. Even though a full account of this distinction is beyond the scope of the chapter, a further aspect of it is worth mentioning, namely, Husserl’s commentary on “statements of perceptions” (Husserl 1970, 189). Suppose John were to say, “I see a white oak down the road.” In the narrow sense, John is intimating a judgment about his own perceptual experience of the state of affairs; he manifests the fact that he takes it to be the case that he is perceiving such a state of affairs. In the broad sense, however, John is intimating his experience of the state of affairs, not his judgment. As in the case of wishes, we normally take the broad sense of intimation to be the relevant one in everyday conversations. If John says, “I see a white oak down the road,” Mary will normally take John as reporting something about the world through an intimation of his own experience of it. Even if statements of perception have a mental content as their proper object, they are normally used to share the speaker’s experience of the world.

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3 Understanding Speech as a Non-inferential Process How precisely do intimations achieve “mental commerce,” which is to say, how do they effect understanding speech? Through intimations, the hearer grasps the meaning-activity of the speaker through a perception (or, more precisely, through an apperception), rather than through a judgment. In Husserl’s words: to understand an intimation is not to have conceptual knowledge of it, not to judge in the sense of asserting anything about it: it consists simply in the fact that the hearer intuitively takes the speaker to be a person who is expressing this or that. (Husserl 1970, 189) Understanding an intimation takes place through empathy rather than through inference, i.e., through putting oneself in the shoes of the other, rather than through decoding signals. Consider a different example. John hears Mary saying, “The red car is around the corner.” In order for John to understand Mary’s utterance, John does not need to formulate an inference such as, “Mary is using the words ‘the red car is around the corner,’ thus she must mean that the red car is around the corner.” Rather, in hearing and understanding Mary’s words as such, John has an intuitive grasp of Mary’s meaning-activity. In other words, Mary’s meaning-activity is presented to John’s mind as Mary’s meaning-activity. Going a little beyond the letter of Husserl’s text, we could say that John somehow simulates Mary’s meaning-activity through his own mind: he re-presents such meaningactivity as associated with such words and attributes it to Mary. Husserl explicitly compares this process of understanding to the process of empathy taking place with emotions. He thinks, for instance, that we “see” someone’s anger: “Common speech credits us with percepts even of other people’s inner experiences: we ‘see’ their anger, their pain etc.” (Husserl 1970, 190). Through the other person’s bodily expressions, we somehow apperceive anger as his or her anger. We have an intuitive grasp of how that persons feels. In normal cases, we do not have to formulate the inference, “This person is yelling, bouncing his fist on the table, etc., therefore this person is angry,” although we could do so if needed. When we apperceive others’ emotions, we understand what they feel because we are able to put ourselves in their shoes, at least at a rudimentary level. In the same way, Husserl argues, when people talk to us, we are able to understand them because we are able to put ourselves in their shoes and share in their meaning-activity. 4 Understanding Speech as an Act of Empathic Presentification In a later attempt at reworking the Logical Investigations, Husserl fine-tunes this claim about intimations as a case of empathy by employing more precise

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terminology. In light of his more advanced phenomenological analysis of empathy, he characterizes the specific type of intuition taking place in intimation as a form of “presentification” (Vergegenwärtigung). In his words: “Understanding is clearly an act of the class of presentifying ones: the act brought to communication does not migrate into the hearer, but rather is first re-presented [vertreten] in him through an act of presentification” (Hua 20.2, 38). What are presentifications, and how does this new terminology improve on Husserl’s phenomenology of communication? Presentifications are complex intentional acts in which an intentional content is presented as given in intuition to an intentional agent different than the one performing the presentification. The intentional agent performing the presentification takes the role (re-presents) of a different intentional agent, as if he or she were having a first-hand experience that the different intentional agent is having or might have. At the same time, the intentional agent makes no mistake about the ownership of such experience because such experience is presented precisely as someone else’s experience. In short, in presentification, a quite complex phenomenological structure takes place: something is presented as present to someone else and, therefore, as absent to the intentional agent performing the presentification. An example will help to illustrate this complex phenomenological structure. Let’s consider the case of an act of imagination. I imagine myself walking toward the red car around the corner, the one Mary was talking about with John. With the “eyes of my mind” I imagine the street slowly unwinding in front of me, until the car stands in front of me with its characteristic form and color. How is this a case of presentification? In my activity of imagination, the red car is presented as a perception of the imagined ego. Without my fully realizing it, my intentional activity is now split between the activity of my real ego and the activity of my imagined ego. My real ego is perceiving the things in its surroundings, such as my room, the desk, the window, etc. At the same time, my ego is imagining an imagined version of itself walking down the street to the red car. Thus, the red car is part of the imagined perceptual surroundings of the imagined ego. Note that the red car is therefore given as present to a different intentional agent than my real ego. On the one hand, the red car is given in intuition and not just in conceptual thinking. I “see” its place, its shape, its doors, etc. On the other hand, however, the red car is not given in perception to my real ego. If it were the case that the car really were given to my real ego, we would have either a real perception or a hallucination. In imagination, by contrast, I am aware that the red car is in fact not in my surroundings. In conclusion, this is a case of presentification because the intentional agent performing the act of imagination takes the role (re-presents) of a different intentional agent, as if he or she were having a first-hand experience that the different intentional agent is having or might have.3 Recollections are also cases of presentifications. In recollections, an intentional content is presented as experienced first-hand by a past ego rather

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than by an imagined ego. Let’s assume that I have actually seen the red car around the corner a while ago. Thinking back about the past experience, I now remember walking toward the red car around the corner. All the sensory qualities are now presented to my mind as present once to a different ego than my present one, namely my past ego. Husserl’s phenomenological analysis of presentifications clarifies the general phenomenological features of the intentional activity taking place when we understand someone’s speech. It suggests that understanding someone’s speech must be seen as a species of presentification. As seen above, Husserl claims that the understanding of intimations is an act of empathy, rather than an inference. When we grasp the meaning of someone’s communication, we are able to share in the meaning-activity performed by that speaker, as that speaker’s. The meaning-activity intimated by vocal signs is presented to the hearer’s consciousness as present to the speaker’s consciousness. The conclusion of the analysis is, therefore, that understanding someone’s speech is a species of empathy and that empathy is a kind of presentification. Let’s follow, then, the process of definition from the highest genus to the species. Presentifications are intentional acts in which a certain intentional content is presented as present to a different intentional agent. Acts of empathy are presentifications in which a certain intentional content is present to another intentional agent different in number from the one performing empathy: it must be a numerically other intentional agent, thus ruling out imagined ego and past ego. Finally, understanding someone’s speech is a species of empathy, in which the presented intentional content is specifically the speaker’s meaning-activity. As Husserl puts it in a later manuscript: In every understanding of an Other (Einverstehen) there lies, thus, a presentification of experiences along with the corresponding subject of experiences . . . insofar as the understanding subject puts himself in the shoes of the Other through analogy [sofern darin . . . ein analogisierendes Hineinversetzen des einverstehenden Subjekts . . . in den fremden . . . statthat]. (Hua 20.2, 38) Let’s draw a further crucial conclusion: Husserl’s analysis shows that the use of language in communication makes it possible to share experiences. “Experiences” does not mean here just “intentional activity” in general, but also specifically “experience of something,” namely, first-hand experience of an object or a state of affairs. This is the case because, as seen above, the meaning-activity in communication is mainly world-oriented, rather than mind oriented. The fact that our meaning-activity in communication is mainly worldoriented is particularly clear in the case of so-called “statements of perception,” such as “I see/have seen that the red car is around the corner.” The hearer of such a statement understands it, that is, re-presents the meaning-activity of the speaker. In taking the role of the speaker, the hearer has an intuitive

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grasp that the speaker is presenting himself or herself as having had a firsthand experience of a certain state of affairs. Thus, the hearer immediately interprets such utterance as entailing a truth-claim about the surrounding world: “I have seen that the red car is around the corner” entails “The red car is around the corner.” The speaker is using language in order to share his or her first-hand experience, and the hearer is re-presenting such first-hand experience as the speaker’s. Note that, in the context of first-hand reports, the same would hold true even with the simple statement, “The red car is around the corner.” Consider, for instance, a scenario in which John meets Mary and asks her, “Where is the red car?” Imagine Mary pointing her finger behind her and replying, “The red car is around the corner.” In such a context, John would most probably take Mary as reporting a first-hand experience of the car, and he will re-present such experience as belonging to Mary. If John is unsure whether such utterance is actually a first-hand report, he might ask Mary to clarify it. But even if she changes it to “I have seen the red car around the corner,” what is intimated is not just her intentional activity of judgment (narrow sense of intimation), but rather the experience expressed through it (broad sense of intimation). 5 A Possible Objection: What Is Specific to Language? A possible objection to Husserl’s account of language is that it doesn’t confer any specific role to language in communication. The widespread interpretation is that Husserl discusses language mostly with the goal in mind of isolating it from communication in order to preserve its purity as a logical and epistemological tool. In my interpretation, however, Husserl discusses language also in order to show its essential role in sharing experiences through communication. But isn’t communication per se—so goes the possible objection—a form of sharing? There are many forms of non-linguistic communication, and all of them bring about some “sharing”; think, for instance, of animal communication or even communication among machines. If this is the case, language seems not to add anything specific to communication; rather, it seems to be just a particular form in which the general goals of communications are achieved. My reply to this objection is that we must disambiguate the sense of “sharing” by distinguishing between the transmission of information and the sharing of experiences. All forms of communication, including linguistic communication, might transmit information, but we can only share experiences through language. Thus, non-linguistic communication transmits information but does not share experiences. Linguistic communication may or may not be used for transmitting information, but its unique use is to share experiences. Only through language, and not through other forms of communication, can an intentional agent re-present an experience as another intentional agent’s experience of a state of affairs.

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Consider the state of affairs that the cathedral is in the central square of the town. In the context of a first-hand report, John tells Mary, “The cathedral is in the central square of the town.” Mary understands John’s utterance and re-presents that state of affairs as a correlate of John’s experience. John’s experience of the state of affairs is shared with Mary and, if Mary believes him, she now takes that state of affairs to be real as well. Now compare this case with that of non-linguistic communication about the same state of affairs. Without uttering a word, John shows Mary a picture of the cathedral, and then he points to a location on the map of the town. As a result, Mary understands that the cathedral is in the central square of the town. What is the difference between the two cases of communication? In both cases, a transmission of information has taken place, and in both cases Mary comes to understand that the cathedral is in the central square of the town. Even in the case of non-linguistic communication, Mary might realize that John has experienced the cathedral in the central square of the town in person. For instance, the picture he shows her could be of himself near the cathedral. At the same time, however, only in linguistic communication does Mary re-present “The cathedral is in the central square of the town” as an expression of John’s experience. In the case of non-linguistic communication, John offers Mary the materials for formulating herself the judgment that the cathedral is in the central square of the town. In the case of linguistic communication, John offers Mary that judgment as an expression of his own experience. Thus, in non-linguistic communication, the judgment is present in Mary’s mind as Mary’s original creation, while in linguistic communication it is re-presented in Mary’s mind as an expression of John’s experience.4 In fact, John’s non-linguistic communication through the use of pictures and maps is essentially compatible with Mary’s forming a number of different judgments, such as “The cathedral is close to the town hall,” “The cathedral is five minutes away,” etc. All of these different judgments could be formed on the basis of John showing the picture and pointing to the map. Only linguistic communication makes it possible specifically to share John’s experience of the state of affairs that “the cathedral is in the central square of the town” as John’s experience. 6  Indications and Expressions in the Logical Investigations Why does only linguistic communication allow for sharing experiences? In the Logical Investigations, Husserl argues that linguistic signs function with a different “logic” than non-linguistic signs. According to him, the very notion of “sign” is ambiguous, because it can refer to two different types of phenomena, namely, indications or expressions. Husserl adds that “the two notions of signs do not . . . really stand in the relation of more extensive genus to narrower species” (Husserl 1970, 183). Expressions are linguistic signs in the proper sense. To complicate the picture, however, Husserl also argues that, in intimation, expressions are used as quasi-indications. Thus,

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linguistic communication operates by way of using the unique features of expressions within the context of intimation. In order to understand in more detail why only linguistic communication allows for sharing experiences, a closer phenomenological analysis of indications and expressions is needed. 6.1 Indications The first sort of signs described by Husserl in the Logical Investigations are indications. Examples of indications are artificial signs like sirens, flags, traffic lights, pointing with a finger, “a knot in a handkerchief” (Husserl 1970, 184), or natural signs, like smoke indicating fire or “fossil vertebrae” suggesting “the existence of prediluvian animals” (Husserl 1970, 184). Indications work as signs because their presence points to the reality of something else, such as an object or state of affairs. From the presence of an indication, an intentional agent can grasp the reality of a certain object or state of affairs. For instance, John sees or smells smoke and grasps that there must be a fire around. In this case, the presence of smoke indicates fire. Indications work through reliable association. Through repeated experiences, we learn to associate the presence of an indication with the existence of some object or state of affairs. For instance, John has learned to associate the presence of smoke (A) with fire (B) through repeatedly experiencing them together. Through repeated association, the presence of smoke (A) is taken to be a reliable indication of fire (B). Once a reliable association between smoke and fire is established in John’s mind, John will start to expect fire to be around every time he experiences smoke. Reliable association is all that is needed for an indication to work as such. This circumstance implies that indications work even without grasping the reasons underlying the association. Smoke is a reliable indication of fire. An intentional agent can interpret smoke as such, and react in appropriate ways—running away, fetching water, calling the firefighters—without having to know anything about combustion, particulates, etc. Taking an indication as an indication does not require one to understand why the indication is reliably associated with a certain object or state of affairs. The latter circumstance also implies that, if communication is based only on indications, it works even without grasping the sign user’s meaningactivity. As should be clear by now, this achievement marks a crucial difference between indications and linguistic communication. Consider such a possible case of communication by indications (call it indicative communication). A sender emits the signal. A receiver takes the signal to be a reliable indication for the presence of an object or state of affairs. This form of communication is possible if the receiver has learned through repeated experiences to associate the presence of the signal with the presence of a certain object or state of affairs. As a result of the learning process, the receiver can form appropriate beliefs and carry out adequate responses to the signal.

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A real-life example of indicative communication is the system of alarm cries used by vervet monkeys. Vervet monkeys can send two different kinds of alarm cry, according to the different kind of predator around: eagle-calls or snake-calls. As vervet monkeys grow, they learn to associate the presence of eagle-calls with the presence of eagles, and the presence of snake-calls with the presence of snakes. As a result, the monkeys learn to respond in two different ways to the two kinds of alarm call. If the alarm is the snake-call, the monkeys climb trees. If the alarm is the eagle-call, monkeys will hide in the grass. Here we have a case of effective transmission of information through indicative communication; it is an effective transmission of information, because monkeys can quickly inform one another about the kind of threat at hand. This example illustrates indicative communication insofar as it is based on the reliable association between an indication and the presence of an entity (snake or eagle).5 The key difference between this example and linguistic communication is that the communication system of vervet monkeys works even if the receiver has no grasp of the sender’s mind. Vervet monkeys do not have to take indications as intimations of the sender’s meaning-activity. When a monkey hears an eagle call, it does not have to take the role of the sender and grasp that it means “eagle.” All it needs to do is to associate between the presence of the indication and the presence of the eagle. In fact, vervet monkeys respond to the calls in the appropriate way even if the call comes from a loudspeaker and they do not perceive another monkey around them. The important conclusion to be drawn from Husserl’s discussion of indications is, thus, the following: unlike linguistic communication, non-linguistic communication does not require the receiver to share in the sender’s meaningactivity because it is based on pure association rather than on empathy. 6.2 Expressions As distinct from indications, Husserl also discusses another kind of sign in his Logical Investigations: expressions. Like indications, expressions are also signs insofar as they point to objects or states of affairs. What, then, distinguishes the two? While indications point to their objects by association, expressions point to their objects through their own meaning, and meaning derives from their being composed of words. Expressions are meaningful spoken and written words, or sequences of words, such as “house,” “the dog,” and “the red car is around the corner.” One could be tempted to think that expressions work, like indications, through association with the presence of the object or state of affairs they mean. If that were the case, expressions would just be a species of indication. For instance, I might learn the meaning of “car” by hearing the word “car” while someone points to a car. Through repeated experiences, I would learn to associate the presence of “car” with the presence of a car. Isn’t this how learning works, and isn’t it a case of indication?

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According to Husserl, the answer is in the negative. Although one may discern in this example a superficial resemblance to indication, one must also identify a more significant difference. As shown above, the presence of indications reliably points to the presence of an object or state of affairs. When I sense smoke, I expect fire to be around. When a vervet monkey hears an eagle-call, it expects an eagle to be nearby. Such is not the case with expressions. It is not the case that I expect a car to be around when I hear the word “car.” Once I understand it, “car” retains its meaning even if no car is around. “car” keeps pointing to cars even in the absence of cars. Unlike indications, expressions function both in presence and in absence. Husserl explains the difference between the ways in which indications and expressions work with the claim that indications work through association, while expressions work through their meaning. As Husserl puts it: “an expression only refers to an objective correlate because it means something” (Husserl 1970, 198). Expressions do not directly point to an object or state of affairs, but rather do so through their meaning. Let’s examine this phenomenological structure in greater detail. Expressions refer to objects or states of affairs as something. In other words, they draw attention to objects or states of affairs according to a certain meaning. For instance, I point to a red car and call it “car.” Then I point again at the same car and call it “red.” In both cases, I am referring to the same object (the car), but I am meaning something different about it (it is a car; it is red). Thus, in expressions there is a “distinction between what is meant or said, on the one hand, and what is spoken of, by means of the expression, on the other” (Husserl 1970, 197). Here, Husserl draws our attention to the difference between the content of an expression, which is the meaning, (“what is meant or said,”) and the object of an expression (“what is spoken of”). In fact, different expressions may present the same object or state of affairs according to a different meaning, that is, as something else. One of Husserl’s clearest examples is the expression “the equilateral triangle,” as compared with the expression “the equiangular triangle.” Both expressions refer to the same object, because the equiangular triangle is the equilateral triangle. However, the two expressions have a different meaning, because they highlight different features of the object. Here, what is meant (the meaning) does not immediately overlap with what is spoken of (the object). Expressions can mean objects or states of affairs because they are associated with sense-bestowing acts, a species of intentional acts. An intentional agent’s meaning-activity consists of sense-bestowing acts. As seen above, Husserl calls “intimation” the association between expressions and sense-bestowing acts. Expressions manifest the mental activity of the speaker to the hearer because the hearer has learned to associate the presence of certain expressions with the presence of certain sense-bestowing acts (how such learning works is beyond the scope of this chapter, so let’s just assume that it has already happened). Hence, as Husserl notices, in intimation, expressions function like quasi-indications because their

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presence furnishes reliable evidence for the presence of the sense-bestowing act associated with it. However, the quasi-indication function of expressions does not coincide with their meaning-function. Consider the expression, “The red car is around the corner.” This expression intimates that the speaker is meaning the state of affairs that the red car is around the corner. By means of its association with the sense-bestowing act, the expression means that the red car is around the corner. According to Husserl, it is not the case that expressions mean mental acts. Rather, expressions mean objects or state of affairs, through their association with mental acts. As already shown, when we interpret an expression, we are intending the world through the speaker’s mental activity rather than intending the speaker’s mental activity per se; with an empathic presentification, we access the world through another intentional agent’s point of view. In this way, Husserl’s phenomenological analysis of indications and expressions answers the possible objection about the role of language in communication. The objection was that Husserl’s account of language fails to attribute a specific role to language in communication; if language brings nothing more to communication that do non-linguistic modes, then like the latter, language is merely the transmission of information. This analysis of indications and expressions, however, precludes that consequence, showing how linguistic communication alone effects the sharing of experience and, too, the growth of knowledge. Its distinctive ability derives from its operative mechanics, which is to say, not mere association, but empathic presentification. We can share someone else’s experience of the world as their experience only through language. 7 A Phenomenology of Appropriation Sharing experiences through linguistic communication discloses the possibility of making someone else’s experience our own. Husserl calls this process “appropriation” (Übernahme) and its outcome “secondary experience” (sekundäre Erfahrung) (Hua 15, 222). Its importance can hardly be exaggerated: through appropriation, we can dramatically expand our access to the world to regions that would remain otherwise outside our grasp. With appropriation, the notion of “sharing” experiences takes on its strongest sense. When appropriation takes place, someone else’s experience of an object or state of affairs to an extent affects my own experience of the world, as if I had experienced that object or state of affairs myself. Nevertheless, there is no confusion concerning the ownership of the experience. Husserl carefully highlights this point by coining the expression “secondary experience,” which he describes as follows: “Through communication, he [the hearer] shares in an experience he has not originally had himself” (Hua 15, 222). In secondary experience, I appropriate someone else’s experience precisely as his or her own experience rather than conflating it with my own first-hand experience.

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Consider the initial example of John telling Mary, “The white oak is down the road.” In understanding John, Mary gains access to the world through John’s experience of it. If she believes him, her own experience of the world is affected: now she takes that state of affairs to be real, that is, she takes the white oak to be down the road, although she has not experienced it first-hand. Thus, through John’s experience, her experience of the world has changed. But it is not the case that Mary develops a delusional belief to have experienced that state of affairs first-hand herself. Rather, she takes John to have experienced it first-hand and, thereby, appropriates that experience as John’s. In a text written for the reworking of the Logical Investigations, and now published as text number two of Husserliana 20.2, Husserl examines, on the basis of his earlier analysis of communication and in further detail, some essential phenomenological features of the process of appropriation. Once again, Husserl argues that the act of understanding someone’s speech is an intentional act of empathic presentification. Here he focuses attention on the act of understanding a speaker’s assertions. Assertions are speech acts by which a speaker presents himself or herself as performing an act of judgment. In their turn, judgments are intentional acts that take a certain state of affairs to be real. Thus, in our example, John judges that the white oak is down the road and asserts, “The white oak is down the road.” Mary hears the assertion and grasps it as such; she understands that John (assuming sincerity) is taking the intended state of affairs as real. If appropriation takes place, not only does the hearer understand that the speaker is taking a certain state of affairs as real, but the hearer is at the same time motivated to take the same state of affairs as real too. In other words, in appropriation the hearer understands a judgment performed by the speaker, and he or she performs it along with the speaker. Husserl argues that the process of appropriation is essentially characterized by an intertwined, two-layered position performed by the hearer of an assertion. Note that “position” is Husserl’s technical term for “taking something as real.” Thus, Husserl is arguing that appropriation is characterized by a two-layered taking something as real. The first layer of position belongs per se to acts of understanding. In Husserl’s words, “the representation he has of the assertion (Aussagen) as assertion of the speaker, thus, is a positional (seinssetzende) one, it has the modus of certainty” (Hua 20.2, 38). Husserl here adds an interesting remark to his analysis of communication in the Logical Investigations: all acts of understanding essentially include a position because they take the speaker to be real and to be really talking to the hearer. Without taking the speaker for real, the hearer would not take his or her words seriously and use them to access the world through the speaker’s meaning-activity. Thus, as Husserl puts it, a position belongs “eo ipso” (Hua 20.2, 38) to acts of understanding. Note that acts of understanding are presentations, but not all presentations include eo ipso a position. As seen above, I can perform a presentation of the imagined experience of my imagined ego, while at the same time not taking that ego for real.

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Husserl’s remark here is not as obvious as it might appear. His claim is that understanding in the proper sense, namely as an act of empathic representation, essentially requires the hearer to take the speaker to be a real intentional agent. If such condition is not met, no understanding in the proper sense takes place. Husserl explicitly addresses such possibility with the case of a “mechanic doll” (Hua 20.2, 38); imagine that Mary hears John talking, only to realize later that John is a robot and that his “speaking was an appearance of speech” (Hua 20.2, 38). When the first-level position is removed, we do not believe anymore that someone is communicating something to us, so that the communication breaks down and no understanding can take place. One might object here that Husserl’s requirement for understanding is too strict: after all, if a robot talks to us, we do understand what it is saying. For instance, if robot John tells Mary, “The white oak is down the road,” she understands the content of the robot’s vocalization. Husserl, however, argues that what is going on in such cases is a different act than the act of understanding communication. In “understanding” the robot we infer the meaning on the basis of the typical association between signs and sense-bestowing acts, and we understand that someone has programmed the robot to work that way. We are not taking the robot as communicating to us. Once again, one could object that the difference is not so relevant. In order to grasp why it is, let us move to the second layer of position performed in appropriation. The second layer of position is where appropriation in the strict sense happens. It takes place when the hearer believes the speaker and thus takes the content of the speaker’s judgment to be real. In our example, Mary believes in John who tells her, “The white oak is down the road,” and thus she takes that state of affairs to be real. In taking that state of affairs as real, Mary performs, in the first person, the same judgment she has re-presented as John’s at the same time as she understands his assertion. Thus, the judgment, “The white oak is down the road,” is now present in two different forms to Mary’s mind. On one hand, it is re-presented as John’s judgment, and, on the other hand, it is present as Mary’s own judgment. As Husserl puts it, the content of judgment is not just “believed as believed by the interlocutor, but rather also believed as such” (Hua 20.2, 39). Mary both believes that John believes that a certain state of affairs is real, and believes herself that that same state of affairs is real. The crucial conclusion to Husserl’s analysis of appropriation is that the first belief essentially grounds the second belief, and, therefore, that the first level of position grounds the second level of position in appropriation. Mary believes that the white oak is down the road because she takes John to be reporting his first-hand experience of the state of affairs. Note that the order or reliance differs from a case in which, say, Mary takes John to assert a certain judgment, while holding the same judgment as true independently of John. If John tells Mary, “Today the sun shines,” she takes John to be holding that state of affairs as real, while also holding the same state of affairs as real, herself. Here Mary is performing the two positions independently of one another. In the case of appropriation, by contrast, Mary is performing

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the second position on the basis of the first position: she takes a certain state of affairs to be real because she understands John to take it as real and she believes him. Were John to change his mind about that state of affairs and inform Mary, she would change her mind too. In order to describe the relationship of foundation subsisting between the two layers of position in appropriation, Husserl uses the expression “shared belief” (Mitglaube). The hearer’s belief is essentially founded on appropriating the speaker’s experience as the speaker’s experience. This conclusion also explains why the case with the robot is essentially different than communication with a human. In the case with the robot, the hearer does not take the speaker to be sharing its experience of a state of affairs. Rather, the hearer takes the robot’s words as a reliable indication of the presence of a state of affairs. Consider, for instance, a home device saying, “It is raining outside,” so that its owner can wear the right clothes. Here the robot is transmitting information about the world to the owner so that the owner can form a belief about a state of affairs with no need of first-hand experience. For Husserl, this is a perfectly legitimate situation, but not a case of appropriation. Indeed, words are not even essential to it; the words, “It is raining outside,” could be replaced by a beep or another signal, if the owner of the device has learned to associate them with the presence of rain outside. Thus our conclusion is: Appropriation, and the consequent shared belief, is a unique type of intentional bond that can only take place between intentional agents sharing experiences through linguistic communication. Notes 1 Thanks to Mr. Robert Gervasini for his extremely helpful comments on an earlier version of this chapter. 2 A famous and still influential example of such interpretation is to be found in Derrida’s Speech and Phenomena. According to Derrida, Husserl excludes “everything that belongs to the communication of manifestation of mental experiences” (Derrida 1973, 37) so that “the reduction to the monologue is really a putting of empirical worldly existence between brackets” (Derrida 1973, 43). 3 For a recent and excellent treatment of the phenomenon of ego-splitting in imagination, see Cavallaro (2017). 4 This unique and crucial possibility of linguistic communication is apparently overlooked in the otherwise excellent discussion of linguistic and non-linguistic cognition in Lohmar (2016, Chapter 6.1, 187–90). 5 A discussion of vocal communication in vervet monkeys and correlated experiments, further mentioned in this chapter, can be found in Tomasello (2008, Chapter 2, 15–20). The original experiments are presented in Seyfarth, Cheney (2003).

References Cavallaro, M. (2017), “The Phenomenon of Ego-Splitting in Husserl’s Phenomenology of Pure Phantasy,” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 48 (2): 162–77. Derrida, J. (1973), Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

228 Michele Averchi Husserl, E. (1970), Logical Investigations, Vol. I, London and New York: Routledge. ———. (1973), Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität. Texte aus dem Nachlass. Dritter Teil: 1929–1935, Hua XV, The Hague: Nijhoff. ———. (2005), Logische Untersuchungen. Ergänzungsband. Zweiter Teil. Texte für die Neufassung der VI. Untersuchung: Zur Phänomenologie des Ausdrucks und der Erkenntnis (1893/94–1921), Hua XX.2, Dordrecht: Springer. Lohmar, D. (2016), Denken ohne Sprache: Phänomenologie des nicht-sprachlichen Denkens bei Mensch und Tier im Licht der Evolutionsforschung, Primatologie und Neurologie, Dordrecht: Springer. Seyfarth, R.M. and D.L. Cheney (2003), “Signalers and Receivers in Animal Communication,” Annual Review of Psychology 54: 145–73. Tomasello, M. (2008), Origins of Human Communication, Cambridge: MIT Press.

12 The Priority of Language in World-Disclosure Back to the Beginnings in Childhood Lawrence J. Hatab In this chapter I argue for the phenomenological priority of language, which means that the disclosure of the world is gathered in language, not objects, perception, thought, or consciousness. I draw on a two-volume work of mine, which aims to deploy Heidegger’s early phenomenology in a new way and connect it with the generative question of child development and the role that literacy has played in philosophical misconceptions about the full nature of language (Hatab 2017; 2019). It is important to stress that the priority of language here is not a matter of linguistic idealism. The key to my case is overcoming a “lexical” picture of language that concentrates on word tokens as such—which is a product of written graphics—in favor of what I call “dwelling in speech,” wherein language is originally a matter of face-to-face speech in the midst of social, embodied practices in an environing-world, an ecological nexus that cannot be reduced to mere words or individual utterances. 1 Proto-Phenomenology and the Lived World I use the term proto-phenomenology to focus on the “first” world of lived engagement with other persons and the everyday affairs of life in surrounding environments—that which precedes philosophical reflection and evinces its own modes of intelligibility. Unlike some versions of phenomenology, my approach does not begin with abstract notions of consciousness, intentionality, intuition, constitution, synthesis, qualia, or any preconceived project of cognitive grounding. Proto-phenomenology does not aim to provide sense for an otherwise inchoate world; rather, it articulates the already operative sense of factical life, the concrete embeddedness in meaningful activities that mark pre-reflective existence. What is shown in the factical lived world? We must begin with evident conditions that anyone would recognize as normally pertaining to human existence. Therein we are embodied beings surrounded by natural and cultural environments. We have desires, needs, concerns, and interests driven by the assignments of life. We possess habits, capacities, and practical skills (know-how) that enable dealings with things and other people. Aspects of the world are opened up by a host of feelings, moods, perceptions, and

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comprehensions. Normative guidance and a wide range of valuations pervade most dimensions of life. From the beginning, individual existence is shaped and furthered by social relations. Everyone is born into a world not of their choosing and shaped by inherited customs and traditions. And everything so far described is saturated with language usage. Finally, factical life is finite in being temporal, ever-changing, and subject to chance, and in pressing limits on knowledge, agency, achievement, and well-being—all consummated by the ultimate limit of death. In summation, the lived world is embodied, environed, meaning-laden, practical, capacious, felt, understood, social, inherited, temporal, and finite. I assume that the elements here described are evident to anyone and would cut across all human cultures, with obvious differences in how these common features are specified. Since the modern period, philosophy has primarily operated with subject–object constructions and representational theories of knowledge and language. Such mind–world dichotomies have been guided by the dictates of scientific reason, which takes a remedial approach to factical experience and its finite, temporal, and meaning-laden character. Proto-phenomenology is non-remedial and operates with a presumption of immanence, which means that human beings fully belong in the world and that factical life has ontological and veridical primacy on its own terms and cannot be set aside or thought to require rationalized explanation to be intelligible. In this analysis, the lived world is gathered around the term dwelling, which captures in its verb sense active living and in its noun sense the natural and cultural environments in which we live. Human dwelling inhabits the world in an irreducible and inextricable manner, a “field” concept that precedes the dichotomy of subject and object, of reflective consciousness and external things. Dwelling “in” the world is not like spatial location (“in the box”), but more like being “in love” or “in pain.” Writing “in my room” can certainly indicate location, but also dwelling in meaningful space, the place where I write. A phenomenological account of dwelling cannot begin with, or be limited to, the third-person standpoint. It begins with the first-person experience of what it is like to engage actively in the affairs of life—before such engagement is subjected to reflective analysis. I must stress that the first-person perspective here is not a matter of “introspection” or any grounding in an ego, subject, or consciousness. What “I” discover in a proto-phenomenological manner is my absorption in fields of experience “outside” of me, so to speak. I cannot give an extensive account of my phenomenological approach (Hatab 2017, 19–71), but I will focus on the gateway to understanding dwelling, namely the dynamic relation between immersion, contravention, and exposition—which is my redescription and extension of Heidegger’s analysis of Zuhandenheit and Vorhandenheit (Hatab 2018). The primary mode of dwelling is a matter of immersion, where one is absorbed in an activity such as riding a bike or having a conversation. In the normal flow of such experiences, I am not conscious of a “self” relating to an external circumstance

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measured by intentional structures or the reception of perceptual information; I simply am riding the bike or conversing—and in the latter case there is no explicit awareness of “words” communicating “mental states,” but rather an immediate disclosive process emanating from the conversation and its content. Immersion is “ecstatic” in the sense of dwelling in the circumstance “outside” my body. When immersed in something like bike riding, a “contravention” can interrupt or disturb the practice—a tire malfunction or a muscle cramp—in which case I become explicitly aware of bike properties, intentional states, purposes, and bodily capacities, which are implicit in the immersed practice but recessed from conscious attention. Such explication is an “exposition” of the practice, where aspects of psychological and external reality are “positioned” apart from each other and articulated. Here is where subject–object and representational relations have found salience, but their derivation from more original conditions of immersion limit their role in understanding world-disclosiveness.1 A proto-phenomenological analysis is itself a form of exposition but it aims to be faithful to the immediacy of ecstatic immersion, and whatever indicative concepts can be drawn therefrom—knowhow, tacit intimation of background elements, temporal spans, historical influences, affective attunement, purposefulness, inter-personal relations, embodiment—are intrinsic to immersed practices, not fashioned by an application of concepts or constituted in some transcendental manner. Immersion allows for things like values, purposes, and meanings to be ecstatically there in the world and not simply psychic occasions in a “subject.” Now we can ask how such a phenomenological orientation can address the question of language. 2 Dwelling in Speech I answer the phone and hear my sister tell me, “Dad died last night.” I ask my girlfriend a question and she answers, “Yes, I will marry you.” I receive an email that says, “Your manuscript has been approved for publication.” The effect of these words is an immediate disclosure of important meanings in my life, infused by a range of comprehensions and feelings. Right away my world is altered. How is it that sounds from the mouth or marks on a screen—which by themselves are nothing like things or events in the world—can be so world-disclosive in such an automatic manner? Philosophical reflection on language differs markedly from normal usage because now language itself becomes something to talk about. We step back from engaged linguistic milieus and by way of exposition turn elements of such scenarios into objects of investigation: sounds, words, meanings, things, thoughts, feelings, speech, speakers, and communication between speakers. To a large extent, philosophical treatments of language in the West have proceeded by way of these delineations that follow from the reflective objectification of language by way of a representational scheme, wherein language is thought to “represent” or “signify” things, meanings, or thoughts;

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and wherein communication is accomplished by a transfer of representations from one speaker to another by way of verbal conveyance—all anchored in the subject-object distinction. Factical dwelling gathers the pre-reflective character of the lived world, which is not perceived as a subject–object transaction, but an engaged field of experience that precedes delineations of mind and world, of internal and external spheres. All told, meaningful dwelling exhibits a three-fold intersection of individual, social, and ecological elements, which I designate as the personal-social-environing-world. Along these lines, factical language should be rendered as dwelling in speech, indicated in the examples above. In such cases, I am not experiencing transactions between words and things or transfers between linguistic agents and recipients. There is simply an immediate disclosure of meaning—and here it is not a matter of semantic meaning but existential meaningfulness, how such moments figure in the meaning of my life. And such experiences of meaning are not simply subjective states because they are absorbed in natural, social, and cultural environments. The concept of dwelling in speech is not meant to reject representational thinking but to situate it in a more original environment that precedes, and makes possible, representational distinctions—which emerge out of contraventions in pre-reflective occasions of immersed speech. The immediate disclosive effects of language in occasions of dwelling have a presentational character that precedes their being re-presented as subject–object and subject–subject relations. Language at a more original level presents a meaningful world, rather than a procedure of representing something in the world. In general terms, I characterize language as differential fitness, where fitness captures the presentational disclosive power of speech, and the differential element stems from the material distinction between words and the world, which allows the full range of disclosive power beyond immediate occasions, such as temporal extension, relational thinking, story-telling, and the recursive capacity for inter-lexical modifications (Hatab 2017, 136–41). A proto-phenomenological account of language must begin with natural language, which is the language into which we are born, the language we learn as children and come to speak normally, our “mother tongue.” Natural language cannot be grounded in signification theories, where words are signs for things in the world or ideas in the mind. Language should be understood first as a mode of dwelling, where we inhabit language as the opening up and articulation of meaning in the world. Examination should first attend to meaningful speech practices and exchanges in the midst of the personal-social-environing-world. As such, language is not primarily an individual faculty but public communicative practice, a shared environment that exhibits an ecstatic condition of engaged immersion, which only derivatively is exposited into objective conditions such as words, signs, semantic meanings, and grammatical structures. Originally we are absorbed in a communication network of talk, which means talking about the world and its meaning with

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other speakers. Just as we can be absorbed in using an instrument without conscious reflection, we are usually engaged in speech about the world without reflective attention to words, intentions, reference, and so forth. Factical language includes embodiment and the full range of ecological factors that go with speech practices: mouth, tongue, voice, sound, intonation, rhythm, gestures, body movements, listening, and responding. Such factors show that words per se are part of the larger phenomenon of incarnate communication, which can open up the wider natural setting of verbal language. 3 The Priority of Factical Language My position is that language is at the heart of human dwelling, that language is the opening up of the world and the precondition for “mentality” and “thought.” Language cannot be grasped simply as object-designation, or the representation of things and thoughts, or the conveyance of meaning, because any such theory draws from a host of notions already presented in language. To think that the world is a set of nonlinguistic things or events that are designated by words is to overlook the fact that “thing” is a word— as are “event,” “world,” “is,” “a,” and so on. The very idea of language as a set of words or signs is exposited from the speech-world in which we dwell before any explanatory or reflective project. It can be said that language presents the world before anything (including language) can be re-presented. What follows is the difficulty in accounting for human understanding by tracing it to consciousness or objects in the world, because “consciousness” and “object” are linguistic presentations (and the consequence of a complex history of usage and theorizing). Any explanatory reduction (to a cause, entity, or faculty) would postdate the operation of language. Since the attempt to explain language must circuitously employ language, from this standpoint there is “nothing” outside of language, at least in the following sense: What can one say about a nonlinguistic foundation of language, or something prior to language? Put positively, from a phenomenological standpoint, the world is disclosed through language. This is not to countenance something like linguistic idealism. With proto-phenomenology, we inhabit a world; it is not produced or even “constructed” by us as language speakers. If I am rummaging around and someone asks what I am doing, I would not answer that I am looking for the phrase “my keys.” We must presume an extralinguistic world because speech is first and foremost immersed in practices navigating an environing-world and not simply a set of linguistic signs. Moreover, there are a host of constraints (environmental, practical, and social) that limit and check what can be said. Yet even what is “other” than, or “limiting” language has been expressed as such and thus rendered comprehensible. Language does not produce the world but it has a certain priority in being the window to the world, without which the meaningfulness of the world would not open up. A dramatic example is the case of Helen Keller, who tells of how the meaning of things and her own sense of consciousness

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were hidden from her until she was finally able to access language and communication through the sense of touch (Keller 1998). One might object to the priority of language advanced here: Are there not experiences and activities in which language is not functioning? Think of witnessing a dancer silently performing expressive movements, where both the reception and the performance operate without any words. True, but from a philosophical standpoint, once we inquire into the question at hand and bring up this purported counterexample, we are caught up in linguistic operations; even an analysis of silence is impossible without language. But what if we are not practicing philosophy, and simply witnessing the dancer? My answer is that with the witnessing of the dance or something like the experience of a landscape, there persists a certain priority of verbal expression in the following sense: As language speakers we have already been oriented toward disclosive modes of comprehension that prepare the meaningful engagement of such nonverbal experiences, and that allow us to talk about them meaningfully at any time—even if it comes to saying: “Words can’t describe how beautiful the dance was” (which is still saying something meaningful). To have a human “experience” of something presupposes a wealth of prior understandings that go all the way back to childhood and the learning of language. Even an experience of something strange, unmeaningful, or incomprehensible is engaged as such because of a default orientation toward meaning disclosed in language. Again, this is not to say that language creates meaningful experience because speech unfolds in its natural, social, and cultural environments. With the ecological character of the lived world, we are unable to advance originary separations like subject and object or language and world, and that rules out any kind of idealism, linguistic or otherwise. Here we also can address the difficult question of how to characterize the lives of animals and infants that do not have speech. Even though mature human practices are informed by language, the immersed phenomenon of non-reflective capacious knowhow allows us to recognize the “intelligence” of animal and infant behavior. Yet language will exhibit a qualitatively different character that exponentially alters language-lacking behavior—in such a way that we should not attribute the capable behavior of animals and infants to their “concepts,” “theories,” or any such mentalistic notion, which amount to undue exports from the sphere of spoken (and written) language. Mature language speakers are able to comprehend their behavior as such, and this ability transforms able behavior and communication (which animals exhibit) into disclosure of the space of meanings that are otherwise concealed. That is why we can come to the assistance of animals in their circumstances with comprehensions that are not evident to them. But language emerges in the midst of an enacted, embodied milieu and retains in many ways its nonreflective modes of habituated life. I now turn to an examination of language acquisition in childhood, which will reinforce my argument about the phenomenological priority

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of language. In my work (Hatab 2019, 55–102), I have tried to show how proto-phenomenology is best suited to illuminate the world of child development and how that world exhibits human dwelling in the making. Before proceeding, however, a central question must be asked: Can there be a phenomenology of early childhood? Proto-phenomenology begins with first-person engagement in factical life—not introspective attention to “mental states,” but what it is like to dwell in world environments. Childhood, however, is a special problem because (1) we cannot access first-person experience of our early life as infants and toddlers, since memory does not extend that far back, and (2) children at the earliest stages cannot verbally relay their experiences to us. I assume that such early periods are exclusively a matter of immersed engagement without reflective self-awareness (which I aim to show fully takes shape only with the emergence of language). How then can we come to understand early childhood experience? The original immanence of infancy and pre-linguistic experience is hard to fathom from an adult perspective and is thus almost irresistibly interpreted through the lens of reflective exposition. Accordingly, early child development typically has been retrofitted with more familiar (mature) capacities, so that we imagine a child’s “mind” or “concepts” or “theories,” primitive though they may be. Such retrofitting, however, conceals the ways in which language itself shapes such an account of pre-linguistic experience. I argue for an alternative approach in the following manner: Despite the impossibility of our direct access to early childhood experience, protophenomenological concepts can be disclosive because they are not grounded in “mental states” but rather ways of being in the world: immersed, embodied activities in meaning-laden environments marked by factical conditions of weal and woe that are readily observable in child behavior without theoretical presuppositions or experimental controls. Just as the adult lived world is a field of tacit meanings and interactive behaviors that need not be grounded in mental states, we need not “read” an infant’s “mind” to know when significant dispositions or bearings are in play. A child’s joy or distress is disclosed fully there in her behavior, her world. So, if a protophenomenological sense of ecstatic dwelling and ecological embeddedness is cogent for immersed adult experience, that sense can be extended to a child’s circumstances, with the advantage of being more apt for that world than most assumptions in child development theories. Proto-phenomenological exposition is not a matter of causal explanation or theoretical confirmation, but simply an indicative pointing to what is shown in a child’s behavior, environment, and social relations.2 One last preparatory remark. A phenomenology of childhood is not simply attention to something past and apart from mature life. It is obvious that all human persons are the temporal/historical products of their early environments. Yet this process of development is not merely a temporal sequence of changes. Human development is not, strictly speaking, a passage from early stages to later stages in a linear process that supersedes initial periods

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or leaves them behind. Early stages make subsequent stages possible, and the former remain in dynamic interaction with later capacities throughout the lifespan (Stern 2000, xi–xii, 162–82). Development runs through early stages to maturity in a nested, assimilating manner that sustains beginnings in a looping temporal structure. 4 Language Acquisition The phenomenological priority of language is buttressed by attention to the ways in which language first emerges in childhood, wherein the early stages of language learning exhibit modes of dwelling in speech.3 Yet even before the advent of speech, the effects of language in the environment shape a child’s development, so that in absolute terms, there is no prelinguistic domain in human life. The setting of child-rearing reveals that language should not be understood simply as the meaning and use of words, but as the symbiotic development of a child’s capacities for understanding and behavior in the midst of a prompting linguistic environment. It is evident that language is a multi-faceted environmental influence on children from their first moments of life. If language were simply a matter of communicating with words, then all of the verbal behaviors in which we naturally engage with infants before they learn to speak could seem to be wasted activity. But research has shown that our instinct to engage in child-directed speech is appropriate and crucial for linguistic development later on, even for brain development (Barinaga 1997, 641; also Borge 2013, on which I rely for some parts of this discussion). Such findings suggest that infants are exposed to a preverbal “rehearsal” of a complex linguistic environing-world from the very start: in terms of facial expressions, touch, physical interactions, gestures, sounds, rhythms, intonations, emotional cues, and a host of behavioral contexts (Bruner 1983, 21–42). The social structure of such encounters is shown when parents and infants naturally respond to facial expressions in kind to share affective occasions; infants seem to have an intrinsic need for such communication insofar as withholding a facial response to a child’s initiative will cause distress (Bruner 1983, 27). From a sonic standpoint, the melodic, high-pitched, slower pattern of speech directed toward infants (sometimes called “motherese”) seems instinctive and universal across cultures, and such tonal patterns communicate basic affective meanings and prepare an incorporation of the sounds and gestures intrinsic to speech. The sing-song style of this kind of communication draws an infant’s attention more readily that normal patterns of speech (Laing 2016; Nelson 2007, 118–9). Even crying patterns mimic melodic shapes of the natural language spoken in their midst (Mampe 2009; see also Nelson 2007, 69–70). All told, the pre-lexical stage of a child’s life is still saturated with language because (1) the language-world of caregivers continually shapes how infants are treated, and (2) an infant is exposed to the

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somatic-sonic-affective forces of speech from the first moments of life—a formative environment that precedes the coming acquisition of language. The ecological concept of dwelling is a more original mode of existence that precedes and makes possible subject–object and mind–world distinctions, which have been unduly emphasized in philosophy and child psychology alike. Dwelling in speech specifies an ecstatic immersion in the world-disclosive power of language, which has been concealed by representational theories. Although adult immersion in speech regularly alternates with expositional reflection, the early periods of language acquisition in children are exclusively a matter of immersion, whereas more reflective modes emerge gradually in the course of a child’s psychological and linguistic development. Such original dwelling in speech serves to support a central proto-phenomenological finding: the world-disclosive priority of language over “thought” and even “experience.” I have claimed that nonverbalized meaningful experiences are made possible by the historical effects of language on possible engagements with the world. It is not only the articulability of non-verbalized experience that counts here because early language acquisition generates the meaningful shaping of experience in the first place—a formative reservoir that becomes a tacit background for future postures of “thought” and “experience.” The dawning of language in children is not simply word usage but the assimilation of language-inflected practices and bi-directional interpretation between children and caregivers. It is easier to grasp the recession of language effects into a tacit background once language is taken beyond a mere lexical dimension to include embodied practices and habituation. No one doubts that learning language in childhood is essential for human development. Theories of learning, however, are marred by the same suppositions governing most linguistic theories. Debates between nativist and environmental models, respectively, turn on whether (1) some universal, inborn linguistic framework is simply triggered by contingent occasions of language learning, or (2) language has no grounding in a priori structures but is fully inculcated externally by a learning environment. Both approaches, however, emphasize objective domains and lexical systems; they sustain a subject–object binary by way of internal or external causes of language usage—which in either case takes a child’s mental representations as the proving ground for language acquisition. Proto-phenomenology emphasizes what is missing or suppressed in this debate: that language learning is animated by (1) factical situations laden with existential meaning; (2) embodied practices; and (3) the reciprocal triangulation of children, caregivers, and physical environments. A child’s “mind” in strict terms is neither the spark nor the recipient of language learning, a process that is better rendered as ecstatic enactment in ecological contexts of meaning. Following Wittgenstein, linguistic meaning is not something expressed by, or planted in, a child’s mental states; rather, it is first and foremost learned by ecstatic usage.4

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5 The Social Origins of Language Development Standard theories of language acquisition operate with monological models of the individual child, and with exposited notions of semantics and grammar— all of which misses the pragmatic and interactive milieus occupying infants and parents, milieus that are essential background conditions for language acquisition.5 Longstanding debates between environmentalism and a priori nativism should be exchanged for a pragmatic-social-interactive model that interweaves a child’s pre-linguistic intimations of meaning with the affordances and scaffolding effects provided by caregivers. When language first emerges, parents will much less correct grammar than share speech acts serving a child’s needs, aims, and activities. It is capaciousness that counts more than linguistic form (Bruner 1983, 18, 31–9). Rather than a choice between external conditioning and an internal linguistic storehouse, speech development should be understood as a personal-social-world, as a language acquisition support system, where joint engagements build from pre-linguistic comprehension and behavioral routines to predictable scripting patterns that fine-tune and expand communicative possibilities in a shared environment (Bruner 1983, 18, 39–42). The lexical elements of speech are made possible and furthered by natural capacities of transactional behavior, joint attention, goal-directed activity, accepting assistance, and predicting outcomes—capacities that young children display with interest and excitement (Bruner 1983, 26–31). Supplementing most of these processes is a child’s innate aptitude for imitation, an ability involving ecstatic immersion in behavioral prompts in the midst of verbal stimulation. Mimetic speech is a natural ability exhibited by children in developing word usage. All told, language development is (1) a reciprocal correlation of social guidance and natural propensities, and (2) an intersecting field of bi-directional effects between verbal articulation and social-practical engagement with a surrounding environment. Joint attention is the triangular relationship between one person gesturing or pointing to something in the environment for the attention of another person—a relationship illustrating the reciprocal structure of the personal-social-environing-world, particularly in terms of a natural impulse for disclosive communication. Joint attention seems to be unique to humans and is exhibited early in life between infants and caregivers, a pre-linguistic phenomenon that precedes and makes possible communication in speech.6 Early joint attention is an embodied communicative nexus (a social-world), which is a precondition for language acquisition (and also a check against linguistic idealism, understood in lexical terms). Indeed, even before a child’s first words, the vocalizations and speech practices of caregivers are essential for attuning infant behavior to the shared nexus as conjoined in communication and blended with the infant’s affective dispositions and sensori-motor activity (Storey 1996, 74–80). When a child begins to speak, words take over (though not entirely) the indicative function of joint attention and embodied communication; in doing so, speech opens up and expands the

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meaning-laden purpose of communication. Words add a material focal point that gathers the communicative aim of joint attention by way of a perceptible convergence—which is sounded there in the world, not in a mental state. We should say that the disclosive power of language is grounded not originally in “words” alone, but in a natural shared impulse to communicate existential import (Tomasello 2003). Within three to four months, infants display predictable stages of joint attention: checking to see if an adult is regarding something in the world; following adult attention to something; actively directing adult attention to something. There is a strong correlation between infant capacities for joint, embodied engagement and the coming production of language, a development that will launch from, and begin to articulate, a child’s natural communicative impulses. It is important to stress that joint attention, for both children and caregivers, is understood as shareable and reciprocal, something illustrated by the capacity for mimetic role-switching displayed by infants, wherein they (1) understand themselves as receiving and duplicating a caregiver’s agency, and (2) intimate the caregiver as a recipient of their own behavior.7 Important elements of meaning-formation in the midst of social scaffolding can be highlighted in acts of requesting (Bruner 1983, 89–116). Displays of request imply a sense of meaningful interest, purpose, and assistance. Beginning around the end of the first year, indicative reference expands to requests directed at caregivers: for objects and support of action, or as invitations to share an activity. Here begins conversational exchange geared toward a child’s possibilities, whether attaining things desired or executing aims. Requesting begins as babbled vocalization and develops with verbal expression. Certain intimations of meaning are shown when, for example, children ask for a toy to be assembled or fixed; with a ready response, children can wait with some patience, which implies that they grasp the sense of a purposeful process that takes time. Early scenarios of language learning afford children a growing comprehension of things, activities, agency, spatial and temporal understanding, aims, means, receipt, achievement, and reliance on others (Bruner 1983, 114–22). The emergence of speech in such scenarios cannot be confined to semantic or grammatical development; it must include an embodied, practical, social-environing-world. Children are not simply applying innate or learned linguistic rules or formats; language first emerges by way of ecstatic immersion in meaning-laden circumstances. This is why young children cannot be deemed ego-centric in a strict sense; if they were truly sealed up in an interior bubble, none of the processes that figure in language acquisition could actually take shape. Children from the start are ecological beings. To be sure, young children are driven by many “self-regarding” needs and behaviors. But they are social beings even before they are socialized by cultural norms. In any case, such a social-world includes the personal-world of a child’s particular aspects and behaviors. A more focused sense of personality and conscious self-awareness is made possible by further stages of dwelling in speech.

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6 Self-Development and Language Language in my account is a precondition for mature conceptions of “thought” and “experience,” even for the contours of self-awareness. We need to ask if any such condition would be possible if someone were not exposed to language as a child. Some evidence for the constitutive of role of language in the emergence of selfhood was given in Helen Keller’s dramatic claim that before she had access to language, she existed in a nebulous “no-world” that lacked a sense of consciousness and self-awareness. Before my teacher came to me, I did not know that I am. I lived in a world that was no-world. I cannot hope to describe adequately that unconscious, yet conscious time of nothingness. I did not know that I knew aught, or that I lived or acted or desired. I had neither will nor intellect. I was carried along to objects and acts by a certain blind natural impetus . . . . When I learned the meaning of “I” and “me” and found that I was something, I began to think. Then consciousness first existed for me.8 The proposed absence of self-awareness is not an erasure of a child’s “selfhood” in a loose sense, namely immersed individual experiences, needs, and practical abilities. Keller’s “memory” of her pre-linguistic self can be called an exposited awareness of the originally concealed meaning of her experiences that language opened up. Indeed, the very development of memory in a child’s life—at least episodic and autobiographical memory—appears to be constituted early on by language.9 Phenomenologically speaking, it seems evident that conscious selfhood is a later occasion in childhood—at the very least because we lack memories of the first years of life. More pointedly, developmental research supports the idea that self-awareness occurs only after the advent of language—indeed by way of speech processes, where self-referencing follows the internalization of speech, which offers a plausible explanation for how mature selfhood first emerges, without relying on theories that reduce any discussion of conscious mentality to a nonphysical entity or physiological causes. In other words, it is a child’s experience with speech practices and their ecological contours that prepares self-awareness. Research influenced by the work of Lev Vygotsky supports a social/environmental account of how a child develops an individuated sense of self—an outside-in process whereby the social-world of speech becomes internalized (Vygotsky 1986; Winsler 1997; Fernyhough 2008). We have noted that fully immersed experience is not self-conscious. A kind of expositional “distance” between, say, observer and observed is required for self-awareness of observation and of the self as observer. In Vygotsky-inspired developmental psychology, a child’s route to the expositional distance of self-consciousness is accomplished through “inner speech,” which allows children to become the

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object of their own attention, of their own thoughts and behavior (Morin 2005). The movement from a child’s immersion in the speech-world to inner speech is mediated by what is called “private speech,” which simply means self-directed verbalization, audibly talking to oneself (Winsler 1997). Private speech is not an interior domain but the replication of socially endowed speech in the midst of activity when no one else is directly involved. It is important to stress that such a development is derived from the original social milieu of language, so that self-awareness arises from the reproduction of social formats by way of self-directed language. Vygotsky has argued that private speech is essential for cognitive and behavioral development because here the child takes over the regulative role of the social world. Language begins as collaborative tasking and conversation; private speech is a redirection of this milieu toward independent functioning. Cognitive and behavioral capacities begin in a social-linguistic network; private speech begins a process that over time leads to the internalization of these capacities that now can operate “silently,” as it were. In sum, mature development, individuation, and self-consciousness are the result of an internalization of the social-linguistic environment, which is mediated by private speech becoming inner speech (Jackendoff 1996a). After early periods of socialized speech practices, by the fifth year, children begin to fulfill the internalization process that enhances cognitive and practical skills by way of more self-initiated aims, planning, and regulation (Kirkham 2013). Such a process also broadens a child’s experience through imagination and perspective-taking. Here language (by way of differentiation) gathers its own set of possibilities, distinct from immediate occasions in the social-environing-world. Gradually the internalization of speech achieves a more automatic and tacit facility. Now the scaffolding effects of language coalesce in both social and individual performances. Private speech shifts social effects to solitary occasions; inner speech expands a child’s possibilities, which then interact with the guidance of caregivers in negotiated episodes of expression, problem solving, and practical tasks. It is important to note that the mediation of audible private speech is central to these developments, because performance at early stages succeeds more when a child verbalizes while acting than when not verbalizing.10 In any case, the circular movement of social and individual scaffolding effects in speech underscores the constitutive role of language in world-disclosure, as well as the joint structure of the personal-social-world. Now we can give specific attention to how a child’s personal-world unfolds in the midst of social environments. When mediating influences on children are going smoothly, we can picture a joint condition of co-immersion. Yet the contraventions exhibited in a child’s mistakes, misbehaviors, or rejections bring on an expositional orientation for both caregivers and children. In pre-linguistic stages, a child’s “exposition” is more behavioral than verbal. But as language skills develop, the expositional dialogue between parent and child is launched, which of course is a difficult and challenging orchestration of young desires and social

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constraints. Conversations often involve parental interrogation of the child’s interests, with answers affording a recursive effect that helps shape or expand a child’s self-understanding. Communicative articulation in language is the vehicle for a child’s self-understanding and self-expression, which otherwise would lack disclosive detail, comprehension by other persons, and whatever modulations shared disclosure might require or bring to light. In early stages of psychological development, an emotional irruption can be managed somewhat by the request “Use your words,” which can mollify the intensity of feeling with more focused attention on the problem and a possible resolution opened up by dialogue. Such articulation can help both the child and caregivers come to terms with the implicature of forceful experiences beyond their immediate ignition. Here begins the power of verbal narration to incorporate experiences into a “world,” a context of meaning that extends the child into responsive possibilities. What comes to be called “thought” making sense of “experience” is shown in these early episodes to be meaning gathered in speech. Linguistic and developmental theories that miss the reciprocal communicative background of language acquisition will be constrained by verbal, representational, and referential notions that conceal how speech unfolds out of unique instincts for transactional communication. Animals and preverbal infants can understand utterances of direct reference: a dog will understand what saying “outside” means; an infant can respond to “Where’s the doggy?” The comprehension of some verbal meanings precedes a child’s own production of words by several months (Nelson 2007, 102–3). It is an externalized communicative practice that is grasped here, not semantic meaning per se. Human language presupposes that the child intimates an utterance as drawing attention to something the speaker is already regarding or thinking—so that speech is a matter of shared attention, understood as such, and functioning by way of reciprocal effects. Parent–child conversations are interlaced with cross-somatic behaviors and dealings with things in the immediate vicinity, all shaped by the expression of conventional meanings that begin to articulate shared moments of disclosure (Clark 2003, 45–50). This triangular structure opens a child to the rich history of usage in a caregiver’s language, a history that is super-added to immediate occasions of joint attention and primed for further applications. When various factical perspectives accumulate, actual perception can now be modified because immediate experiences become layered with social, cultural, and symbolic meaning (Spelke 2003). Here begins the shaping of experience by language, which in time will allow for unverbalized experiences that nevertheless are not utterly separable from language. Early language “usage” is not simply verbal expression or naming objects; rather, it is using words in co-present circumstances of involvement, whether it be perceptual regard, affective stimulation, or practical handling (Clark 2014; Nelson 2007, 122–5). Child–parent conversations are much more than verbal expressions and descriptions; they are carried on by the active bodies

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of children and caregivers casting out to their surroundings in the service of shared dealings and explorations. World disclosure is gathered by speech practices that multiply scaffolding effects in the environment, whereby children come to learn about things, actions, and relations by extending their bodies outward to investigate and manipulate, ever guided by caregiver speech. A child’s early understanding is a distribution of practices and possibilities that are focused and driven by verbal exchanges. Think of playing with a shape insertion toy: Which one? That one? Put it inside. Oh, too small! Take it out. Try another one. Yay, it fits! This and many other activities will teach nouns, verbs, adjectives, and prepositions—not as grammatical forms, but as distributed performances with things. A host of terms are learned in concrete circumstances and correlations: words like up, down, inside, outside, big, small, slow, fast, on, under, here, there, and so on—words that in time will be extended metaphorically in more “cognitive” ways, but which originally are not even verbal “forms,” given that they have a perceptible, tangible venue in material aspects and relationships.11 The “material engagement theory” is pertinent here because it shows how cognition is extended out to and amidst practical involvement with artifacts and the physical world. Adding a social-cultural-practical perspective offers rich possibilities for understanding the phenomenological notion of dwelling (Theiner and Drain 2017). My account can also engage the socalled 4E model of cognition—which takes intelligence to be embodied, enacted, embedded, and extended (Chemero 2009). Such engagement is fully consistent with an ecological phenomenology of immersion. From the standpoint of mature experience and common philosophical assumptions, the 4E approach might be taken to fall short in seeming to conceal internal mentality. But the 4E framework can be bolstered by attention to early child development and the absence of such mentality at that stage. Here the 4E approach seems vindicated. Such notions as aim, purpose, intention, emotion, desire, and so on can be manifested not in a child’s mind but in the body, in the animate body’s activity, behavior, gestures, facial expressions, and vocalizations.12 We do not have to “read” a child’s “mind” because delight, need, anger, frustration, and enjoyment are fully evident in somatic displays and speech. With the child’s factical living, we need not refer to internal mental states. We can understand a child’s intelligence phenomenologically as embodied and enacted behaviors that are public appearances, which are comprehended in their appearance. Such, in sum, is the dawning of human dwelling in speech. 7 Literacy and the Concealment of Speech After children acquire spoken language, they learn how to read and write. Schooling then introduces them to the intellectual tradition that has formed academic subjects. My work has attempted to show how the Western literate tradition came to conceal the contours of dwelling in speech that

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proto-phenomenology aims to uncover. Herein the personal histories of children and cultural history overlap. All of us have been taught how to read and write, and taught how to think about the world by way of written texts. Literacy is so much woven into our lives that we easily miss the way in which alphabetic script transforms speech and the disclosive power of language. That transformation is a mixed blessing because the original environment of factical speech has become distorted by a literate lens. In this essay I can provide only a brief outline of my treatment of this sweeping topic (Hatab 2019, 187–280). I argue that philosophy is made possible by literacy, originally in the Greek world and thereafter in the Western tradition. Written graphics allow the reflective and analytical powers that by nature eclipse the lived world of dwelling in speech—an oral world that necessarily precedes and makes possible learning how to read and write. Classical research has shown that the oral period preceding the inception of alphabetic script in the Greek world is intimated in Homeric epics and other forms of Greek poetry, which were almost exclusively presented in oral performance. I show how Homer’s poetry in many respects is indicative of the lived world exhibited in proto-phenomenology. Greek philosophers developed reflective skills made possible by literacy; and at the same time, they challenged the way human existence was portrayed in Homeric epics.13 Writing is a technology that affords language a fixed, objective presence in a material medium. That fixture makes possible a host of reflective and analytical effects that are not operative (or at best, not explicit) in oral cultures: representational models of “words” referring to thoughts and things; logical schematics; textual organization and compositional formats; the grammatical and lexical regulation of language; the disembodiment of language detached from face-to-face speech; and the reflective distance of reading written texts apart from factical contexts. Such effects are so habitual and pervasive in literate cultures that their transformative consequences easily escape notice. Oral practices were still operating significantly in the Greco-Roman intellectual world, but in time the Latin language retained only its written disciplinary form, since the evolution of vernacular languages in Europe displaced Latin as a mother tongue—an outcome that intensified a distance from natural language and dwelling in speech. The advent of print technology in the fifteenth century came to solidify the effects of literacy in intellectual work. All told, the Western philosophical tradition has been informed by the literate reformation of oral language. Proto-phenomenology does not aim to challenge literacy (since it too is a written discipline), but to limit its philosophical reach and indicate the cogency of pre-philosophical existence. Indeed, it is the reflective distance of written language from oral language that has concealed the world-disclosive priority of dwelling in speech.

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Notes 1 It is important to note that immersion and exposition can be bidirectional. Learning a new practice involves a host of expositional and reflective postures, but a background of immersed conditions remains operative in learning scenarios, and when a new practice is mastered, it evolves into immersed capacities of second-nature facility that no longer require expositional demarcations or governance. 2 An important work that aims to guide adults into the lived world of children is Simms (2008). 3 My discussion is drawn from Hatab (2019, 103–50). 4 For a thorough treatment, see Nelson (2007). 5 Much in this discussion relies on Bruner (1983). Although the book is saddled with expositional and representational biases, the experimental research and pragmatic orientation fit well with the aims of my investigation. See also Kramsch (2002) and Taylor (2013). 6 See Malinda Carpenter (1998), on which I rely in some of what follows. More generally, I draw from Tomasello (2008, 57–167). See also Seemann (2011) and Engelland (2014, particularly 3–37). Engelland discusses how Davidson and Searle recognize triangularity in language development, but they are unnecessarily wedded to internal intentional states as a baseline framework (4–11). 7 Tomasello (1999, 105). For Merleau-Ponty on triangularity, reciprocity, and reversibility in bodily perception and speech, see Merleau-Ponty (2010, 241–315). For helpful discussions of Merleau-Ponty on this and other matters, see Engelland (2014, 67–83), and Welsh (2013). 8 Keller (2004, 113, 117). See also Keller (1998, Chaps. 5–7), especially page 52. For a discussion of feral children in this regard, see Hatab (2017, 157–8). 9 For a discussion of research on this question, see Hatab (2019, 131–4). 10 See Winsler (1997, 65ff.) for examples from research. For the scaffolding power of language, see Clark (1998) and Jackendoff (1996b). 11 For the classic account of how metaphors function in human understanding, see Lakoff and Johnson (2003). 12 See Engelland (2014, 25). Engelland’s overall study is an important contribution, especially in concentrating on the “animate body,” drawing on both Aristotle and Merleau-Ponty. 13 In my work, I offer a critical engagement with Derrida and his deconstruction of Plato’s critique of writing in the Phaedrus. See Hatab (2019, 213–7).

References Barinaga, Marcia (1997), “New Insights into How Babies Learn Language,” Science 277 (5326) (August): 641. Borge, Steffen (2013), “Talking to Infants: A Gricean Perspective,” American Philosophical Quarterly 50 (4): 423–8. Bruner, Jerome (1983), Child’s Talk: Learning to Use Language, New York: Norton. Carpenter, Malinda, Katherine Nagell, and Michael Tomasello (1998), “Social Cognition, Joint Attention, and Communicative Competence from 9 to 15 Months of Age,” Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development 63 (4) (December): 1–133. Chemero, Anthony (2009), Radical Embodied Cognitive Science, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009. Clark, Andy (1998), “Magic Words: How Language Augments Human Computation,” in Peter Carruthers and Jill Boucher (eds.), Language and Thought, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 162–83.

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Clark, Eve V. (2003), First Language Acquisition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. (2014), “Pragmatics in Acquisition,” Journal of Child Language 41 (Supplement 1) (July): 105–16. Engelland, Chad (2014), Ostension: Word Learning and the Embodied Mind, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Fernyhough, Charles (2008), “Getting Vygotskian about Theory of Mind: Mediation, Dialogue, and the Development of Social Understanding,” Developmental Review 28 (2) (June): 225–62. Hatab, Lawrence J. (2017), Proto-phenomenology and the Nature of Language: Dwelling in Speech I, London: Rowman & Littlefield International. ———. (2018), “Re-describing the Zuhanden-Vorhanden Relation,” Gatherings 8: 21–35. ———. (2019), Proto-phenomenology, Language Acquisition, Orality, and Literacy: Dwelling in Speech II, London: Rowman & Littlefield International. Jackendoff, Ray (1996a), “How Language Helps Us Think,” Pragmatics and Cognition 4 (1): 1–34. ———. (1996b), The Architecture of the Language Faculty, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Keller, Helen (1998), The Story of My Life, New York: Bantam. ———. (2004), The World I Live In, New York: NYRB Classics. Kirkham, Julie, et al. (2013), “Concurrent and Longitudinal Relationships between Development in Graphic Language and Symbolic Play Domains from the Fourth to the Fifth Year,” Infant and Child Development 22 (3) (June): 297–319. Kramsch, Claire, ed. (2002), Language Acquisition and Language Socialization: Ecological Perspectives, New York: Continuum. Laing, Catherine E. (2016), “Here’s Why ‘Baby Talk’ is Good for Your Baby,” The Conversation, November 2016, https://theconversation.com/heres-why-baby-talk-is-goodfor-your-baby-68216. Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson (2003), Metaphors We Live By, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Mampe, Birgit, et al. (2009), “Newborns’ Cry Melody is Shaped by Their Native Language,” Current Biology 19 (23): 1994–7. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (2010), “The Child’s Relations with Others,” in Talia Welsh (trans.), Child Psychology and Pedagogy: The Sorbonne Lectures, 1949–1952, 241–315, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Morin, Alain (2005), “Possible Links between Self-Awareness and Inner Speech,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 12 (4–5): 115–34. Nelson, Katherine (2007), Young Minds in Social Worlds: Experience, Meaning, and Memory, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Seemann, Axel, ed. (2011), Joint Attention: New Developments in Psychology, Philosophy of Mind, and Social Neuroscience, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Simms, Eva M. (2008), The Child in the World: Embodiment, Time, and Language in Early Childhood, Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press. Spelke, Elizabeth S. (2003), “What Makes Us Smart? Core Knowledge and Natural Language,” in Dedre Gentner and Susan Goldin-Meadow (eds.), Language in Mind: Advances in the Study of Language and Thought, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 277–311. Stern, Daniel N. (2000), The Interpersonal World of the Infant, New York: Basic Books. Storey, Robert (1996), Mimesis and the Human Animal: On the Biogenetic Foundations of Literary Representation, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Taylor, Talbot J. (2013), “Calibrating the Child for Language: Meredith Williams on a Wittgensteinian Approach to Language Socialization,” Language Sciences 40: 308–20.

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Theiner, Georg and Chris Drain (2017), “What’s the Matter with Cognition? A ‘Vygotskian’ Perspective on Material Engagement Theory,” Phenomenology and Cognitive Sciences 16 (5) (December): 837–62. Tomasello, Michael (1999), The Cultural Origins of Human Communication, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. (2003), “The Key Is Social Cognition,” in Dedre Gentner and Susan Goldin-Meadow (eds.), Language in Mind: Advances in the Study of Language and Thought, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 47–57. ———. (2008), Origins of Human Communication, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Vygotsky, Lev (1986), Thought and Language, trans. Alex Kozulin, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Welsh, Talia (2013), The Child as Natural Phenomenologist: Primary and Primal Experience in Merleau-Ponty’s Psychology, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Winsler, Adam, et al. (1997), “The Role of Private Speech in the Transition from Collaborative to Independent Task Performance in Young Children,” Early Childhood Research Quarterly 12: 59–79.

13 Play in Conversation The Cognitive Import of Gadamer’s Theory of Play Carolyn Culbertson

When we reflect on the fundamental role that language plays in our lives, it is difficult to overstate the importance of conversation. Conversations, after all, have the power to transform our beliefs. This transformative effect can take place not only when we pass the hours in meaningful discussion with a friend but also when, in reading, we think along with the author about a subject matter or when, in listening to a lecture, we follow along with another’s path of inquiry. In each case, the conversation into which we enter is an opportunity to examine our present beliefs, to put them to the test, and potentially to rethink them. In emphasizing the importance of such interactions, however, one might think we weaken the argument that language is essential to how we develop understanding of the world. After all, we do not tend to think about understanding as something that emerges out of self-examination—let alone a continual series of self-examinations. This is apparent if we examine the theory and practice of education today. In schools today, one finds little emphasis on conversation and the social interactions and personal transformation that come along with it. Instead, education is understood as the transmission—from teachers to students—of socially valuable facts and skills. Paulo Freire famously calls this the “banking concept” of education. On the banking model of education, a teacher (or, in many cases, some impersonal educational technology) deposits content into the mind of the student. Teachers possess the facts, the possession of facts is understood to be knowledge, and their job is to transfer this knowledge to pupils. As Freire (2017) puts it, “Education thus becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor. Instead of communicating, the teacher issues communiqués and makes deposits which the students patiently receive, memorize, and repeat” (45). This model is widespread in schools today. While nowadays, one is likely to find more emphasis on the application of ideas and not just memorization and on the acquisition of skills and not just facts, assessment is still focused on the unilinear process of the banking model. Students still focus on mastering the content that their teachers have mastered, and teachers are still assessed on the basis of the extent to which they have successfully transmitted this content. In this scheme, conversation is at best regarded as a means of

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introducing new information, the absorption of which is still taken to be the essence of understanding. When genuine conversation does take place as part of educational experience, however, it unsettles both the assumption that learning transpires through this unilinear process of transmission and the theory of understanding implicit in this assumption. Engaged in class conversation or in reading a text, students are not simply absorbing new information to be inscribed upon an empty mind. They engage in conversation by putting forward what they already think they know about the subject matter but also by being open to changing their minds, to discovering the limits of their own beliefs. For those who engage in this way, genuine conversations have an intrinsic unpredictability that teaching and learning according to the banking model of education do not. In genuine conversation, no participant determines in advance where the conversation will go and what will have been learned from it. This unpredictability is part of what is exciting about conversation. Yet it is also what tends to make us suspicious of its cognitive significance. In what follows, I set out to explore the role of conversation in understanding. I begin, in the first section, by considering how phenomenologists have laid the groundwork for this investigation by shedding light on the role that social bonds and interactions have in disclosing the world to us in particular ways. In the second section, I turn to the role of one particular form of social interaction in this development, namely, play. Taking my lead from Gadamer’s analysis of the ontological valence of play in Truth and Method, I find that play not only prepares us to participate in conversations with others but allows us to take the conversations into which we enter as opportunities for ongoing critical self-reflection. Moreover, I argue that when we highlight the importance of play in this way, we gain clarity not just on the way understanding arises but into the nature of understanding itself. We see that the acquisition of prereflective social meanings is but a moment in the process of understanding and not the whole of that process. In the third and final section, I elaborate on what it means to see understanding as a process of ongoing critical self-reflection, returning to the topic of education and drawing from hermeneutic educational theory to clarify this point. 1 The Existential Phenomenological Conception of Understanding It is common to define knowledge as the condition of having true beliefs about the world, that is, of possessing an objective mental representation of how things out in the world actually are. This way of conceiving of knowledge has become especially common in recent centuries with the rise of the Scientific Revolution and its pursuit of what is “out there,” beyond our biases. We know from the Platonic dialogues, however, that this was already a dominant conception of knowledge in the ancient world. When Socrates investigates the nature of knowledge in Plato’s Theaetetus, for example, he

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asks Theaetetus to present what he considers the most plausible definition of knowledge. After realizing the inadequacy of his initial answer that knowledge is perception, Theaetetus states confidently that knowledge must be “right opinion” (187b), that, is an opinion or belief (doxa) that corresponds to how things actually are in the world. On such a definition, the development of knowledge needn’t involve any exchange between people. To achieve it, one need only capture the imprint of reality on the mind.1 Over the past century, phenomenologists have sought to problematize this notion in several ways. Philosophers in the existential phenomenological tradition, for example, have insisted that knowing must be thought of as a form of being-in-the-world and thus as something that we are always already engaged in insofar as we have being-in-the-world as our mode of being. In Section 13 of Being and Time, Martin Heidegger makes clear how this conception differs from the former: When Dasein directs itself towards something and grasps it, it does not somehow first get out of an inner sphere in which it has been proximally encapsulated, but its primary kind of Being is such that it is always ‘outside’ along entities which it encounters and which belong to a world already discovered. (1962, 89) Developing knowledge or understanding, then, is not a matter of receiving new information—of inscribing it onto a blank slate. Understanding is always already occurring insofar as we are always immersed in a world. Let us call this existential phenomenological conception of understanding “immersive understanding.” Needless to say, it is difficult to “get behind” immersive understanding in order to give an account of how it first emerges, and developmental accounts that do so run the risk of losing the ontological force of Heidegger’s argument. For Heidegger, it is misleading to speak about a world in which a knower at some point emerges and eventually comes to understand that world in some way. That said, there have been several authors coming out of the existential phenomenological tradition who have attempted to give some account of how immersive understanding emerges in the course of human development (Dreyfus 1992; Hatab 2017, 2019; Watsuji 1996). In these developmental accounts, social interactions turn out to be essential to the development of the immersive understanding that Heidegger describes. Particularly worth mentioning here is the work of Japanese phenomenologist, Watsuji Tetsuroˉ, who, in his major work, Rinrigaku, offers an account of the constitutive role that social relations play in worldhood and in the immersive understanding that accompanies it—an account that he finds underdeveloped in Being and Time (Watsuji 1996).2 For Watsuji, immersive understanding of the world is first configured through social relations, through what Watsuji calls relations of “betweenness” [aidagara]. The book that I

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hold in my hands, the street beneath my feet, even the heat of the summer air on my body—all of these are first set forth for me by others and retain tacit meanings incurred through these pragmatic, social interactions. Indeed, for Watsuji, it is not just in my language but already in my pre-verbal existential spatiality, in the way that things appear to me in space, where social relations play a constitutive role in setting forth that world with which my understanding is always already engaged. As it turns out, from a developmental standpoint, these pre-verbal social relations play a pivotal role in allowing children eventually to develop language. Hans-Georg Gadamer hits upon this point in his late essay, “The Boundaries of Language,” published in 1985. In the essay, Gadamer makes the developmental argument that the ability to speak with others requires that a child first be attuned to others. They must already have in common, for example, a pragmatic social context that acts as the hermeneutic background for interpreting any words or gestures exchanged. Here Gadamer reminds us of a passage from Aristotle’s On Interpretation (16a26) where Aristotle argues that language comes not from nature but from agreement (sunthˉekˉe ). Whereas it is typical for translators to render συνθήκη throughout the text as “convention” in the sense of artificial, agreed-upon custom, Gadamer points out the shortcomings of this translation. In this context, he argues, sunthˉe kˉe cannot mean an agreement in words, since the agreement at issue must occur prior to and serve as the basis for the development of semantic language (Gadamer 2000, 11–2). It must instead describe a way of being in agreement with one another [Übereinkommen] prior to any linguistic exchange. What Gadamer argues must exist as a condition for language-learning corresponds to what developmental psychologists today recognize as an important stage in the development of social cognition—what they refer to as “joint attention” (Mundy and Newell 2007; Seemann 2011; Tomasello and Farrar 1986). The development of joint attention marks an important step in social and cognitive maturation prior to and also crucial to the development of mature language skills. Children are said to have the capacity for joint attention when they are able to focus with another individual on the same object and where both individuals are aware that they are focused on the same thing. For example, a father points to a bird, exclaiming “wow, look at that bird!” and his daughter follows along with his gaze and his pointing hand, seeing the same bird and understanding that she is seeing the same object as her father. Another version of joint attention occurs when the child is the one who initiates the shared gaze, for example, by looking at and pointing to her toy and waiting for her father to recognize it and look with her. The appearance of such capacities are milestones in a child’s psychological development and typically start to take root in children beginning at about nine months. Their appearance signals that a child is developing the important capacity for joint attention—the capacity to have meaningful social interactions with others through establishing some mutual understanding with

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them. Phenomenologically speaking, they indicate that a child is learning how to dwell in a world that is opened up by others and to construct worlds of meaning themselves in which others can participate. Scenarios involving pointing, where an adult deliberately and intentionally tries to direct the child’s attention to an object by pointing to it, have become paradigmatic in the literature on joint attention. However, as Chad Engelland (2014) argues, it would be wrong to think that one learns social meanings as a child only from those who are intentionally trying to teach them or to show them something. According to Engelland, children are able, from a very early age, to pick up on the intentional action of others, to identify with them in their intentions, and thus to populate their worlds with social meanings acquired by identifying with others. Children do this, Engelland argues, by cluing into the intentional bodily actions of others. This form of social communication, which Engelland calls “ostension,” typically develops even earlier than the child’s ability to understand a deliberate gesture of indication such as pointing.4 2 The Role of Play in the Development of Understanding In this section, I would like to add to the developmental accounts just presented by exploring the role of play in the development of understanding. My aim is, on the one hand, to show how play is important to the development of immersive understanding as it has been understood by the existential phenomenological tradition. On the other hand, my analysis of play here brings to light the limits of this conception of understanding by explaining how in play we learn to put immersive understanding at risk and to attend to new disclosures of meaning. I take play, therefore, as what educational theorists call a “threshold concept” (Meyer and Land 2005)—a concept that can help pave the way for an inquiry that might otherwise be quite troublesome. In the context of this discussion, the analysis of play allows us to reconceptualize understanding in a way that would otherwise be quite difficult, and furthermore, it allows us to see that, while immersive understanding remains an important moment in the process of understanding, it cannot be taken as the entirety of this process. Play is another way in which infants begin to develop joint attention prior to any deliberate teaching by adults. We use the term “play” in a variety of contexts (e.g., playing tag, playing music, the play of the light, and so on), but in each case, what we mean is an interaction that someone or something has with someone or something else such that surprising, unpredictable discoveries take place in a way that produces pleasure. When one plays a game, for example, there is at least some part of the outcome that one cannot predict, and indeed, if one could predict it, what is played would no longer be a game. Similarly, when one plays a piece of music with other musicians, there are a number of elements of the experience that the audience (and sometimes even the players) cannot predict.5 It is the

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unpredictable element in both cases that is pleasurable; it is part of what makes the performance exciting. From a startlingly early age, infants display a desire to play in this sense. They delight in the game of peek-a-boo. They enjoy splashing water in their bath and experimenting with the sounds they can create with the shake of a rattle or the press of a button. They enjoy seeing what transpires as they stack blocks on top of one another or reach out to pull the tail of the cat. They are mesmerized by the playful movements of the mobile above their crib. Such natural fascination with play provides a basis for the development of immersive understanding early on. A child who plays peek-a-boo with her younger brother helps him learn to interpret the world along with her. The face that she suddenly discloses is the object of amusement. The hands she puts over her face is the build-up to this revelation. Similarly, he learns from watching her stack up the blocks until they fall. He quickly picks up on the game—on the parameters and rules of the game that allow the unpredictable disclosure—when and how the blocks will fall—to take place. Although there is no deliberate teaching taking place in such scenarios, children are nevertheless learning, as these games help them to develop immersive understanding. By learning to play different games, they are acquiring meaningful hermeneutic backgrounds that will allow them to engage in interpretation alongside others. They become immersed in a shared world. They become attuned to a set of rules governing the game: here is where the boundary of the game is, here is where you can throw the ball, these are the movements that you can make as the ball comes to you, this is the moment in the game where you react to catching or missing the ball. In this way, children can clue into many of the social, pragmatic “games” that operate in the background of human interactions. They can learn, for example, to take turns, to respond to someone when addressed, and to pay attention to those expressions and occurrences that are meaningful for their social group. Such forms of agreement must be put in place before language can emerge, for as Gadamer says, “language always presupposes a common world—even if it is only a play world” (Gadamer 2013, 424). But this is not the only way in which play relates to the development of understanding. Importantly, children also learn that those who engage in a game become transformed in it, just as the meaning of objects brought into the game become transformed.6 In this way, they learn that games are opportunities for novel disclosures of meaning. Now, to be certain, this development is not as readily observable as the development of immersive understanding. To appreciate this development fully, we need to rely not just on observation but on theory and, in particular, on an ontological theory that can allow us to conceptualize the features of that world opened up by play. Fortunately, such a theory can be found in Gadamer’s discussion of play in Truth and Method.7 What then are the essential features of the world that play opens up? First, Gadamer explains that play involves presentation (2013, 112–3). Play involves

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presenting things that, through immersive understanding, are already familiar to us but in a way that allows them to show up as if for the first time. In this sense, play is mimetic in the way that Gadamer says art is mimetic.8 Art takes something familiar to us but lets it shine forth in a new way.9 To say that play is mimetic, however, does not mean that it lacks autonomy. On the contrary, Gadamer insists that play has a kind of autonomy precisely in its ability to bring forth new meaning—meaning that was not evident to immersive understanding before. This is precisely why play, like art, fascinates us. The young boy that puts on a costume insists that he is Ironman, just as the painting of the peasant’s shoes makes the being of the shoes manifest right there and then in the viewing of the painting. The autonomy of play is also clear in the case of games. The parameters of a game are not determined by the particular interests or backgrounds of the players nor by the time of day, meteorological conditions, or geographic location where the game is played. Rather, the rules and internal regulations of the game alone prescribe how the field of the game is filled (Gadamer 2013, 111–7). The pleasure of the game then lies in seeing what actually takes place given these constraints. This, then, is another salient feature of play: the unpredictability of its outcome. To grant the game its autonomy, however, the players must set aside some of the immersive understanding that they would otherwise use to interpret what occurs and to determine how they’ll respond. In Truth and Method, Gadamer describes this willingness to put parts of one’s immersive understanding at risk as the attitude of “seriousness” that play requires. For Gadamer, play “contains its own, even sacred, seriousness,” fulfilling its purpose only if a player “loses himself in play” (107). The necessity of this step explains why, as Gadamer points out, one who fails to take the game seriously is considered a spoilsport.10 If one takes the game seriously, by contrast, one finds oneself pulled into the game in a way that requires one to set aside one’s usual intentions. One is not just passive in this process though. As Monica Vilhauer (2010) puts it, one loses oneself in the game “but with the seriousness of a fully engaged participant” (35). Through these distinctive characteristics of the play world, we learn, from a very young age, to inhabit that “temporary world within the ordinary world” (Huizinga 1949, 10). As it turns out, there are a number of social interactions in which a child will participate, later in life, which will require the kinds of seriousness and openness to transformation required of her by play. Play has an especially important role in preparing a child to engage in dialogue with others. Conversation, after all, shares some of the essential features of play. First, conversation is mimetic in the way that play is. Through conversation, we are able to take subjects already familiar to us and let them come to light in new ways. Next, genuine conversation requires the same attitude of seriousness expected of players in a game. It requires that we take seriously what our interlocutor says, meaning that we hear their words as “truth claims” that have the potential to change our understanding (Gadamer 2013, 403). Conversation is thus transformative in a way that play is. In conversation,

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we allow some of our immersive understanding to be put at risk. We open ourselves up to having our minds changed. What will result from doing so is, moreover, unpredictable to some extent. As Gadamer says, “No one knows in advance what will ‘come out’ of a conversation. Understanding or its failure is like an event that happens to us” (401). Finally, just as the unpredictable, disclosive, and transformative qualities of play make these experiences pleasurable for us when we are young children, these same qualities make conversation pleasurable for us as well. For this reason, we needn’t make a deliberate effort to engage in the activity of conversation. Rather, conversation is, like play, something into which we naturally fall. For the reasons just named, Gadamer describes play as having a pivotal role in how children develop not just that immersive understanding that is the precondition for language-learning, but also the capacity for dialogue that is characteristic of mature language users. Play, Gadamer says, is not only “the process that bridges the gap between a not-yet semantically articulated form of communication and word communication,” but “a type of pre-linguistic dialogue” that is visible “already in the play of the infant with its own fingers and movements, and especially in the play that includes others” (Gadamer 2000, 14). This is not to say that there is no difference between conversation and other forms of play. Despite the fact that a kind of seriousness is required in play, there are often practical and theoretical stakes to a serious conversation that make participation in it different from participation in a purely recreational game. Moreover, for Gadamer, it is ultimately only in language and, in particular, in the language of conversation, that we come to understanding in its fullest sense (Gadamer 2013, 462). In the next section, we will attempt to get a clearer picture of why it is conversation in particular that is so crucial to the development of understanding for Gadamer and, having obtained this clarification, to assemble a clearer articulation of how Gadamer conceives of understanding and knowledge. 3 Conversation as a Site of Understanding In our earliest social interactions, understanding another person typically requires no more than sharing a pragmatic social context with them that provides the necessary background information for interpreting their expression. If, as a five-year-old child, my mother announces at 8 p.m., “It is getting late; it’s time for bed,” I know immediately that this means that I must wash up, go into my bedroom, get into my bed, and stay there until I go to sleep. The primacy of such immersive understanding is rightly emphasized by phenomenologists like Heidegger, Watsuji, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. After all, when we are young children, outside of interactions that occur in the play world, this kind of understanding—understanding we can ascertain through pragmatic, social contexts—is all that is expected of us. Indeed, well into adulthood, these contexts remain an important part of how we interpret others’ expressions (Gallagher 2011, 29). If I am grappling with a

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partner at the gym and they give me two quick taps on the shoulder, I do not stop to think about what this might mean. I immediately interpret the taps to mean that I should stop and that my partner has submitted. If I walk by my colleague on campus and she gives me a quick “Hey, how’s it going?” as she breezes by me to the library, I know to interpret this as a greeting and not to bother her with a long description of everything happening in my life. In such cases, as Merleau-Ponty (1964) says, a person “does not hold before himself the words said, understood as objects of thought or ideates” (201). The pragmatic, social context is sufficient in such cases to interpret the expressions of others. But this is not always the case. In the play world, as we have seen, one must also be able to suspend one’s ordinary ways of interpreting experience and to attend to the novel disclosures of meaning that happen within this world-within-a-world. In this way, play prefigures a transformation that the child will undergo as she becomes attuned to the “ideality of the word.” What Gadamer refers to as the “ideality of the word” is that which allows the meaning of a word to be interpreted in different ways and, indeed, to say something different over time to different people. In the context of writing, it refers to the ability of a text to be interpreted by those who are not clued in to the original pragmatic, social contexts for and in which it was written. It is this ideality of language that makes written traditions feel contemporaneous to us and, as Gadamer puts it, “raises everything linguistic beyond the finitude and transience that characterizes other remnants of past existence” (Gadamer 2013, 408). It is not only writing that has this ideality, though. For Gadamer, speech shares in ideality as well (410). While live dialogue certainly requires that we attend to what our interlocutors mean to say and to the pragmatic, social contexts that give their words meaning, it also requires that one be attuned to the ideality of their language, for even in speech, what we mean is never exactly the same as what we say. This difference is what makes dialogue a source of unanticipated questions, responses, and discoveries. In dialogue, I may find myself compelled to articulate what I take to be the meaning or significance of what my interlocutor has said. I may, in fact, insist on some significance that an interlocutor did not recognize herself. Likewise, something that I say may prompt others to point me to some meaning or significance that I did not intend. In either case, I am allowing the verbal exchange to operate as a site of new disclosure for all those involved. This sophisticated form of social cognition is enabled by the ideality of language and, developmentally speaking, prepared for early on by the child’s early experiences with play. Similarly, play prefigures the development in the child that takes place as she starts to master the generative aspects of language, which allow her and others to construct new meanings from a set of rules governing syntax and derivation in sentences. With this, her understanding of the world now encompasses not only objects like the “bird” that she can name and gaze upon with others but novel sentences about the bird, creative uses of the subject

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“bird” or its qualities in a metaphor, claims about what the bird is not, and so on. In this, she becomes attuned to the speech of others in a different way. With this crucial development, she is now well-equipped to communicate and understand novel interpretations of given subject matters. She starts to grasp that linguistic understanding is the understanding not of singular, private phenomena, but of their meanings, and that these meanings are always being determined by the enterprise of collaborative interpretation. The speech of the other now has the potential to open up a particular subject matter in a way that challenges her current ideas about it—sometimes to the point of forcing her to reconceptualize the matter entirely. In turn, she begins to see that what she knows through her immersive understanding are not permanent, unchanging disclosures of the world but are the product of ongoing social, historical interpretation. This ongoing process of interpretation is, for Gadamer, essential to the process of knowing. For Gadamer, knowing is not reducible to possessing an unbiased mental representation of some reality outside of knowing consciousness. Such a conception of knowing is what, in Truth and Method, he famously calls “the prejudice against prejudice itself” (283). Rather than holding out for a form of knowing that is without any initial bias, Gadamer suggests we think about knowing—or, as he prefers to call it, understanding—as the process by which a finite, situated consciousness becomes exposed to others’ claims, transformed, and thereby educated. Let us now return to the topic of education in order to see how Gadamer’s conception of understanding applies to the educational process. As hermeneutic educational theorists (Fairfield 2011; Gallagher 1992; Hirsch 1988; Wiercinski 2011) point out, education requires that students begin with background knowledge of some kind. More specifically, it requires an initial sense of the social, pragmatic contexts that give meaning to the words that they share in common with others (e.g., with their teacher, the authors they read, and fellow students). Teachers know this point well. In a geometry class, for example, students must have some working familiarity with what a rectangle is before they can learn the sum total of the angles in a rectangle. Likewise, a feminist philosophy class presumes some background familiarity with the concept of gender as it functions in pragmatic, social contexts. Such background knowledge, which, following E. D. Hirsch (1988), we might call “cultural literacy,” is a necessary condition for any more abstract or critical investigation. Yet, as such examples make clear, this background familiarity is only the prerequisite for education to take place. It is clearly not the goal of education itself. In a geometry class, the students will at some point need to learn that different rules apply to three-dimensional objects than to two-dimensional objects. So, what they learned about rectangles as two-dimensional objects will need to be re-examined in the case of rectangular prisms. In the case of the feminist philosophy class, the aim may be to deepen the group’s understanding of what sustains the idea of gender as a natural type and which behaviors and institutions contribute to the problem of gender inequality. For such investigations

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to proceed, one needs to have background familiarity with social meanings related to gender, but one also needs to be able to put this immersive knowledge at risk for the sake of new understanding. According to hermeneutic theories of education, this is precisely what happens in genuine educational experience. Students come into a course with preconceptions and an assortment of fore-meanings relevant to the subject matter. The point of education is not simply to sweep away these things. They are, after all, necessary for any inquiry to begin. Their presence makes it so that when students read a text, they are not simply passively absorbing new information. Pre-conceptions and fore-meanings are inevitably in play. Likewise, when they listen to a lecture by the professor or to a remark on the text made by another student in the class, they do not do so as a blank slate. Interest, bias, and preconceptions are inevitably at work.11 What distinguishes educational experience, though, is not the presence of these things, which operate in interpretation even when education is not taking place, but the way that they are put at risk as one enters into conversation. In classroom conversation, one relies on the social meanings ready-to-hand for them in order to interpret what another is saying, but in doing so, one is often forced to articulate and justify these meanings as one’s own beliefs and, if one cannot do so, to abandon them. Paul Fairfield (2011) points out that, in this way, genuine conversations in the classroom can “remove our intellectual comfort by eliciting from us the semi-articulated judgments of which so much of our intellectual life consists” (83). This is a process that philosophers know well, as it is modeled throughout those dialogues of Plato where Socrates exemplifies the teacher who, in love with conversation, knows how to engage others in it in a way that delivers their preconceptions to them for reconsideration. The same process takes place, however, when a student reads a text in such a way whereby they are engaged by the truth claims the author puts forward. To be open to the author’s claims, it is not necessary to set aside entirely the immersive understanding that develops naturally in us during childhood. Such an accomplishment, even if one could pull it off, would make reading impossible. Reading discloses new understanding for us, but it requires that we rely, for example, on the operative understanding of words. This is the case even when reading philosophical arguments that ask us to question what we hear in certain terms. To read Simone de Beauvoir’s, The Second Sex, for example, I need to have some sense of that to which the term “woman” refers, even though one of the major philosophical questions that Beauvoir pursues in the book is the question of what woman is. I begin reading the text with an operative understanding of the subject under discussion but, as I read, that operative understanding falls short and I discover that I must refine it. In this sense, reading a text (or, for that matter, listening to a lecture) is not a passive experience at all. While one may acquire new information from what they read, what is most significant in this experience is not, to use Freire’s term, the “banking” of new information. It is, instead, the critical self-reflection that takes place.12

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On this model, good teachers are those that help students develop the comportment that they need to engage fully in this process. They help students to cultivate sensitivity to the claims of others, that is, to be attentive to the way that other voices and traditions may make a claim on their beliefs. They also help students learn how to take these claims seriously—to treat them not with mere tolerance and indifference but as opportunities to reflect on and to test out their own beliefs. The teacher thus has an important role in the process of education, although education [Bildung] is also self-cultivation. Despite the important role that immersive understanding plays in this process, it is common to imagine that education involves setting aside any social meanings acquired early on in life and simply “thinking for oneself” or observing the world free of all bias. We may even imagine that what is involved is a move away from the social interactions through which we develop immersive understanding early in life. But this is not the case. As Shaun Gallagher (1992) argues, “Learning is not the collecting of information in an isolated mind; it involves the dialectical interplay between ourselves and traditions which we find within ourselves because we are linguistic beings” (116).13 Social interactions remain just as essential to this new mode of understanding as they had been before, then. But what hermeneutic theories of education make clear is, as we have seen, how the role of others in understanding evolves. In mature social cognition, others are not just those from whom I receive the transmission of social meaning; they are those with whom I engage in critical self-reflection and thus with whom I develop new, shared worlds of meaning through conversation. Heidegger, in fact, makes this point in his early lecture on Aristotle, arguing that the way in which people communicate with one another is essential to how it is that they have a world in common. I communicate with others; I have the world there with the other and the other has the world there with me, insofar as we talk something through—koinoˉnia of the world. Speaking is, in itself, communicating; and, as communication, it is nothing other than koinoˉnia . . . logos is the mode of being of human beings in their world, such that this being is, in itself, being-with-one-another. (Heidegger 2009, 43) Now, as we have seen, from a developmental standpoint, it is certainly right to say that there must be something in common already that permits people to engage in conversation with one another. Yet this should not lead us to overlook the common world [koinoˉnia] that emerges through conversation. Like the play world, the world of a conversation emerges as a world-within-a-world. It is a place where things can come to presentation in a new way, where we have an opportunity to rethink them. Indeed, for Gadamer, it is what comes to presentation through the world of conversation and not some pre-linguistic entity that is the object of our understanding. To capture this point, Gadamer

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often speaks about the object of understanding as a subject matter [Sache] in the sense of a topic of conversation or debate rather than as a thing [Ding]. Reaching an understanding in language places a subject matter [Sache] before those communicating like a disputed object set between them. Thus the world is the common ground, trodden by none and recognized by all, uniting all who talk to one another. All kinds of human community are linguistic community: even more they form language. For language is by nature the language of conversation; it fully realizes itself only in the process of coming to an understanding. That is why it is not a mere means in that process. (Gadamer 2013, 462–3)14 For a linguistic community, the common world that members share is that which comes to presentation through the ongoing linguistic activity of different human beings as they engage in the process of interpretation with one another. It is what comes to presentation, in other words, through conversations with one another. As we have seen, the capacity to form linguistic communities of this kind is nurtured in us early on during childhood play. In play, the learning that takes place is not just a matter of receiving social meanings from others. It is not a matter of taking an object of understanding from others but constructing one with others. To play is thus to be open to new, unpredictable disclosures of meaning that emerge for the participants in the game. In these ways, play teaches one how to be a participant in conversation. Conversations require that participants allow the conversation a certain autonomy, namely, to determine the subject matter and what comes to light through the conversation itself. They also require serious engagement from participants. This means, as we have seen, that participants must take what others say in the conversation as truth claims that have the potential seriously to transform their beliefs and habits. Interlocutors cannot be indifferent to or dismissive of what unfolds in the conversation (Wiercinski 2011, 115). Rather, they must allow the subject matters discussed to come to full presentation in the conversation. To do this, they must accept that conversations have a life of their own and that they cannot determine in advance what will come to presentation as the conversation unfolds. For those who view education as a technical procedure for transmitting content in a predictable, efficient way from one generation to the next, what happens in conversation will seem alien to the educational process. The prospect of recognizing conversation as essential to education may even be troublesome. As I hope to have shown here, though, much can be gained from thinking about the nature of understanding on the basis of an analysis of play. To this end, I have offered a concept of play here, one informed by Gadamer, as a “threshold concept,” allowing us to reconsider the nature of understanding that might otherwise cause us trouble. By highlighting the role of play in cognitive development, we can better appreciate the unique

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qualities of the world that play sets up and the importance of play for our cognitive and social development. This play world, I have argued, has significant similarities to the world opened up by conversation. In conversation, one encounters others—other voices, other traditions—in a way that requires one to attend to new disclosures of meaning and to reflect critically on and refine one’s own beliefs. It requires that one be willing to reflect on and to put at risk some of the background theories upon which one normally relies, and to do so in communication and in community with others. In this essay, I have tried to articulate what it would mean to think about understanding, as Gadamer does, as what emerges from this linguistic process. As I hope I have conveyed, this account of understanding is not irreconcilable with the account of immersive understanding that existential phenomenologists have offered. Rather, it recognizes the existential phenomenological account of understanding to be one moment in a larger process. At the same time, it insists that others are not just those from whom I inherit understanding but those with whom I find understanding, and that the latter process requires a comportment of sensitivity and seriousness about the claims of others, which we do not automatically possess. We become educated in the fullest sense, then, through the unique form of linguistic play that is conversation. In this way, conversation is indeed essential to the process of understanding. Notes 1 To be clear, I am not attributing this conception of knowledge to Plato himself. I take Plato’s dialogues to be exemplary models of how conversation can be educative. 2 From a developmental standpoint, it is indeed curious that in Being and Time, it is 150 pages before Heidegger finally turns to address the role of others in the constitution of Dasein. Moreover, when in the fourth chapter of Division I, he finally does, his focus is almost exclusively on the role of an impersonal “one” [das Man] whose pronouncements we are constantly tempted to conform to (Heidegger 1962, 149–68), rather than on the constitutive role of significant personal relationships (e.g., friendships, parent/child relationships, and so on), which are much more reciprocal than Dasein’s relationship to das Man. Hubert Dreyfus (1992) identifies this as a missed opportunity, arguing that, had Heidegger distinguished between “constitutive conformity” and “the evils of conformism,” he might have penetrated more into the role that others play from the very beginning in the way that we dwell in the world (154). Lawrence Hatab offers a similar criticism of Heidegger on this point (2017, 65). It is worth mentioning here that, although Watsuji understood his criticism of Heidegger in Rinrigaku to be a criticism of Heidegger’s thought as a whole, it cannot be understood as such, since Watsuji was not familiar with other works where Heidegger dealt more extensively with the social dimensions of Dasein. For a more detailed discussion of this point, see Culbertson (2019). 3 It should be noted that autistic children do not develop joint attention at the typical age, and indeed the absence of a capacity to engage in joint attention is an important indicator of autism. In such cases, parents must take extra measures to assist the autistic child in developing joint attention. I do not have the space in this chapter to consider such cases, but suffice it to say that my description of typical child development here should not be taken to mean that all children develop joint attention on the same schedule or in the same way.

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References Culbertson, Carolyn (2019), “The Genuine Possibility of Being-With: Heidegger, Watsuji, and the Primacy of Betweenness,” Comparative and Continental Philosophy 11 (1): 7–18. Dreyfus, Hubert (1992), Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time, Division I, Cambridge: MIT Press. Engelland, Chad (2014), Ostension: Word Learning and the Embodied Mind, Cambridge: MIT Press. Fairfield, Paul (2011), “Dialogue in the Classroom,” in Paul Fairfield (ed.), Education, Dialogue, and Hermeneutics, 77–90, London: Continuum. Freire, Paulo (2017), Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. Myra Berman Ramos, London: Penguin Random House. Gadamer, Hans-Georg (1986), The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays, ed. Robert Bernasconi, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. (2000), “The Boundaries of Language,” in Lawrence K. Schmidt (ed.), Language and Linguisticality in Gadamer’s Hermeneutics, 9–17, Lanham: Lexington Books. ———. (2013), Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall, London: Bloomsbury. Gallagher, Shaun (1992), Hermeneutics and Education, Albany: State University of New York Press. ———. (2011), “Narrative Competence and the Massive Hermeneutical Background,” in Paul Fairfield (ed.), Education, Dialogue, and Hermeneutics, 21–38, London: Continuum. Hatab, Lawrence J. (2017), Proto-Phenomenology and the Nature of Language: Dwelling in Speech, Volume I, London: Rowman and Littlefield International. ———. (2019), Proto-Phenomenology, Language Acquisition, Orality, and Literacy: Dwelling in Speech, Volume II, London: Rowman and Littlefield International. Heidegger, Martin (1962), Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, New York: Harper and Row. ———. (2000), “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry,” in Keither Hoeller (trans.), Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry, 51–65, Amherst: Humanity Books. ———. (2009), Basic Concepts of Aristotelean Philosophy, trans. Robert D. Metcalf and Mark B. Tanzer, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Hirsch, Jr., E. D. (1988), Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know, New York: Random House. Huizinga, Johan (1949), Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1964), The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis, Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Meyer, Jan H.F. and Ray Land (2005), “Threshold Concepts and Troublesome Knowledge (2): Epistemological Considerations and a Conceptual Framework for Teaching and Learning,” Higher Education 49: 373–88. Nielsen, Cynthia (n.d.), “Gadamer on Play and the Play of Art,” in Theodore George and Gert-Jan van der Heiden (eds.), The Gadamerian Mind, London: Routledge, forthcoming. Seemann, Axel (ed.) (2011), Joint Attention: New Developments in Psychology, Philosophy of Mind, and Social Neuroscience, Cambridge: MIT Press. Vilhauer, Monica (2010), Gadamer’s Ethics of Play: Hermeneutics and the Other, Lanham: Lexington Books. Watsuji, Tetsuroˉ (1996), Rinrigaku: Ethics in Japan, trans. Yamamoto Seisaku and Robert E. Carter, Albany: State University of New York Press. Wiercinski, Andrzej (2011), “Hermeneutic Education to Understanding: Self-Understanding and the Willingness to Risk Failure,” in Paul Fairfield (ed.), Education, Dialogue, and Hermeneutics, 107–24, London: Continuum.

14 Translating Hospitality A Narrative Task Richard Kearney

Translation serves as a paradigm for linguistic hospitality insofar as it involves a mediation between host and guest languages. There is a double duty here: to remain faithful to one’s own language while remaining attentive to the novelty of the foreigner’s. One can fail in this duty by succumbing to either of the following temptations. First, the impulse to assimilate and absorb the Other into the Same, reducing the singularity of the guest to the totalizing norms of one’s native speech. This makes for bad translation, and at a political level it can lead to various forms of linguistic chauvinism. Second, there is the contrary temptation to evacuate one’s own linguistic dwelling altogether, surrendering one’s speech to the in-coming Other, even to the point where there is no longer a host at home to receive a guest at all. In this case, one may be so seduced or overwhelmed by the Other that one succumbs to supine servility. To avoid these extremes of linguistic hegemony or humiliation, one is best advised to take a middle road of “linguistic hospitality” where one honors both host and guest languages equally while resisting the take-over of one by the other. The good translator is neither master nor slave. 1 Linguistic Hospitality In On Translation, Paul Ricoeur spells out important implications of this paradigm of linguistic hospitality. Translation sets us not only intellectual work . . . but also an ethical problem. Bringing the reader to the author, bringing the author to the reader, at the risk of serving and of betraying two masters: this is to practice what I like to call linguistic hospitality. It is this which serves as a model for other forms of hospitality that I think resemble it: confessions, religions, are they not like languages that are foreign to one another, with their lexicon, their grammar, their rhetoric, their stylistics which we must learn in order to make our way into them? And is Eucharistic hospitality not to be taken up with the same risks of translation-betrayal, but also with the same renunciation of the perfect translation? (Ricoeur 2006, 23)

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A crucial step in resisting the lure of the Perfect Translation is to honor a dialectical balance between proximity (welcoming the stranger into our midst) and distance (acknowledging that something is always lost in translation: the other’s meanings can never be completely mine). A “hospitable” translator is one who aims at approximate correspondences between tongues without ever assuming these to be final or adequate; translation is always an endless task. It is work which is also a working through, in the psychoanalytic sense of Durcharbeitung—a difficult and demanding labor of mediation between one linguistic mind/culture/world and another. Such mediation involves a process of mourning and letting go—and in particular the renunciation of the egocentric drive to reduce the alterities of the guest to one’s own will for total adequation. As if, in translation, there were only one true language: my own. Our own. In politics we call this tribalism or imperialism. As Ricoeur insists, there is no such thing as language, only languages. But it is not simple. Traditore, tradutore: to translate is always in some sense to betray; for one can never do one’s guest true justice. And this means accepting that we all live East of Eden and after Babel—and this is a good thing. Our linguistic fallenness is also our linguistic finitude: a reminder of human limits which saves us from the delusion of sufficiency, the fantasy of restoring some prelapsarian logos (in which we “play God” speaking a single divine language with a perfect word for each perfect thing). We also need to abandon the illusion of a perfect logos of the future—such as the enlightenment dream of a caracteristica universalis or the more contemporary delusion of a pan-European Esperanto. Indeed the translation model of hospitality stands, politically, as an indictment of all historical attempts to impose a single language on diverse peoples—Greek, Latin, French, Spanish or today English (sometimes known as “Globish”). Imperial campaigns have always sought to impose a normative lingua franca on the multiplicity of vernaculars. But it is the right of every living tongue to speak itself and, moreover, to be translated into other tongues while retaining a certain reservoir of irreducible, untranslatable intimacy. Each dialect has its secrets, whence the legitimate double-injunction of every guest language cries to its host: “Translate me! Don’t translate me!” Take me but not all of me—Take me in, incorporate me, get me, but leave something of me to myself. Good translation is transfusion, not fusion. It signals a mutual transaction between worlds, never a subsuming of two into one. Hospitable translation thus renounces all claim to absolute sovereignty acknowledging that we share words as we share clothes. Or to paraphrase Ricoeur, we should let our language try on the garments of strangers at the same time as we invite them to step into the fabric of our own speech. Translation is transvestitude. And it begins from the word go. In the beginning was hermeneutics—meaning the interpretation of different meanings, tongues, intentions, lexicons. In principio fuit interpres. There is no pure pristine logos, unless it is God’s. And we are not God. To be human is to interpret and to interpret is to translate. Language is finitude, marked by gaps

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of time and space: scars of separation and otherness. There never was a self without an other, a host without a guest. From the start was hospitality— and, as we shall see, its twin shadow, hostility. As such, translation involves a certain humble recognition of our fragility and fallibility, keeping us always open to the never-ending task of more translation, better translation, alternative translation, again and again. The only criterion of a good translation is another translation, which is why the great classics are both untranslatable and infinitely translatable at once. There are never enough renditions of Homer, Shakespeare or the Bible. (Again, the truth of the Bible is Babel.) We are dealing thus with a drama of fragile hospitality. Ricoeur puts it well: Despite the conflictual character which renders the task of the translator dramatic, he or she will find satisfaction in what I would like to call linguistic hospitality. Its predicament is that of a correspondence without complete adhesion. This is a fragile condition, which admits of no verification other than a new translation . . . to translate afresh after the translator . . . . Just as in a narration it is always possible to tell the story in a different way, likewise in translation it is always possible to translate otherwise, without ever hoping to bridge the gap between equivalence and perfect adhesion. Linguistic hospitality is the act of inhabiting the word of the Other paralleled by the act of receiving the word of the Other into one’s own home, one’s own dwelling. (Ricoeur 2006, 10)1 But the host can never “capture” the guest in his/her own house, without some degree of violence and violation. And sometimes “the guest must leave the host in order to remain a guest,” as the poet Fanny Howe reminds us (Howe, 81). There is an “untranslatable kernel” in every linguistic transaction which reminds us that host and guest languages are never the same— and never should be. 2 A Wager between History and Hospitality While this acknowledgment of irreducible difference involves a therapeutic mourning of the dream of fusion, it also heralds the challenge of plurality and novelty. It is precisely when two distinct tongues cross that a third can be born. And this natality can be multiple, as mentioned, in the countless and in principle endless translations of the great classics—Greek, Sanskrit, Latin, Hebrew—rendered differently each time into numerous versions of vernacular speech. We do not lament the serial renditions of Homer, Virgil, Shakespeare, Proust. Au contraire! And the same goes for the Bible, from the Septuagint translation from Hebrew into Greek, St. Jerome’s translation into Latin, and the many subsequent vernacular versions in English (St. James), German (Luther, Buber, Rosenzweig), or French (Chouraqui), etc.

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With each rendition a new “semantic surplus” is triggered by the creative collision of separate tongues—something mutually enhancing for both cultures. Think for example of how, in the Septuagint translation of Exodus 3:14 (“I am who may be”), the Greek ontological notion of being (ontos on), understood as formal and material substance, is radically transformed by its encounter with the Hebrew notion of God’s becoming as historical and eschatological promise. And vice versa. By the time Maimonides is writing his Hebraic-Hellenic metaphysics in Guide for the Perplexed, both Greeks and Jews have reinterpreted their respective notions of what it means to be in the world—and that twin revision informs new ways of thinking the person, time, relation, and finitude. After the biblical translation into Greek we can agree with Joyce that “Greekjew is Jewgreek.” Athens and Jerusalem are never the same. But careful: translation is not always on the side of the angels. And each transition between linguistic host and guest involves the possibility of betrayal as well as rebirth. Hostility to the Other is as real as hospitality. As Emile Benveniste famously observed in Language and Indo-European Language and Society, hospitality and hostility share the same root, hostis, which can mean both host and guest, both friend and enemy (Benveniste 1969). Hence translation is a dramatic human action—a task, a labor, a wager between hostility (reducing host and guest to the same) and hospitality (rightly acknowledging a gap or separation between them). Which is why Antoine Berman speaks of translation as “l’épreuve de l’étranger”—an existential testing or trial of the stranger (Berman 1984). This notion of épreuve calls in turn for a kind of practical wisdom (phroneˉ sis), an ability to discern between varying calls and demands of the stranger, as foreigner or immigrant, as alien or refugee, as adversary or invader. Hence, there is constant dialectical wagering between hostility and hospitality, between vigilance and welcome, a wagering that invites a critical capacity to navigate between diverse perspectives which operates not just inter-linguistically (between a native and foreign tongue) but also intra-linguistically (between speaking beings within a single language—the mother tongue has many children!). And one might also add, with psychoanalysis in mind, there is need for a capacity to mediate between one’s own conscious and unconscious selves. We can find ourselves aliens within our own langue maternelle and within the depths of our own minds. We are, deep down, as Julia Kristeva reminds us, always strangers to ourselves. 3 Hermeneutic Mixture: Deconstructive “Hostipitality” It might be noted that Jacques Derrida makes a radical point here about the “impossibility” of any pure or absolute hospitality to the stranger. Every translation risks some degree of hostility toward the other insofar as it asks the Other to render itself in terms of the same (my language, life-world, culture, horizon). As soon as I, qua host, ask my guest, “Who are you?”

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I am asking a stranger to reply in terms which I can recognize and identify. All hermeneutics in practice involves some mixture of hospitality and hostility—what Derrida calls “hostipitality”—welcoming the other at the same time as one translates its alterity into something “like me.” Though Ricoeur interprets this “like” in term of someone similar (semblable) rather than the same (même), Derrida holds to the strict deconstructive line that any need for similarity is already a compromise on the strangeness of the Stranger (a radicalization of Husserl’s phenomenological analysis of knowing others in the Fifth Cartesian Meditation). So here is the difference. A hermeneutics of translation, à la Ricoeur, involves conditional hospitality (which in effect means some measure of interpretive judgment regarding mixed bags of “hostipitality”), whereas deconstruction invokes a notion of unconditional hospitality where one accepts the Other regardless of its origin or identity—human, animal or divine! Pure hospitality does not ask for IDs or passports; it is not concerned with border controls or contracts but demands pure exposure to alterity, welcoming the stranger without why. If there is a knock at the door, you open it without asking in advance if it is a messiah or a monster. Once you put hospitality into laws, rules, or norms you take the daring out of it, the radical risk of undecidability, the “yes” to all that comes. “Let us say yes to whom or what turns up,” writes Derrida in Of Hospitality, before any determination, or anticipation, whether or not it is to do with a foreigner, an immigrant, an uninvited guest, or an unexpected visitor, whether or not the new arrival is the citizen of another country, a human, animal, or divine creature, a living or dead thing, male or female. (Derrida 2000, 77)2 In short, absolute hospitality welcomes the stranger independently of all legal, political, or epistemological conventions; it calls for an impossible leap of faith toward the “absolutely Other”—or as Derrida puts it in his typically hyperbolic way: “Every other is absolutely other” (tout autre est tout autre). The stranger is always, at bottom, absolutely strange. And no stranger is too strange to be included. Such pure hospitality is, of course, not actually possible in terms of everyday practice—where the only feasible form of welcome is always contingent upon this or that condition (and thus never “pure”). Absolute hospitality is impossible, but if it did exist it could only do so, Derrida admits, as a blind, mad, mystical dream. All attempts—which occur daily—to make the impossible possible are already matters of betrayal, compromise, and contagion. Where hermeneutic hospitality speaks of conversion between host and guest, deconstructive hospitality speaks of contamination. Which perhaps goes some way to explaining Ricoeur’s claim that the difference between him and Derrida is that between the terms “difficult” and “impossible” (Ricoeur 2004, 469).

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4 Narrative Hospitality In an important and oft-neglected text, “Reflections on a new Ethos for Europe,” Ricoeur applies his model of linguistic hospitality to what he calls, more specifically, “narrative hospitality” (Ricoeur 1996, 3–14), which he describes as “taking responsibility in imagination and in sympathy for the story of the other, through the life narratives which concern the other” (Ricoeur 1996, 7). In the case of memorials and testimonials, narrative hospitality takes the form of exchanges between different peoples’ histories so that we may practice an art of transference allowing us to welcome the story of one’s neighbor, opponent, adversary, or forgotten one. For one nation’s narrative of glory is often another’s narrative of suffering and defeat. Victors and victims need to exchange places by exchanging stories. And exchanging stories is already an invitation to change history: to reanimate forgotten memories out of our debt to the dead. As I have already explored Ricoeur’s ethics of narrative hospitality elsewhere (Kearney 2008), I will confine myself here to four central features of a catharsis of exchanging memories. First, we have need of an ethic of narrative flexibility. Good memorials face the challenge of resisting the reification of an historical event into a fixed dogma by showing how each event may be told in different ways by different generations and by different narrators. That is not to say that everything becomes relative and arbitrary. On the contrary, acts of trauma and suffering call out for justice, and the best way of achieving this is often to invite empathy with strangers and adversaries by hosting a plurality of narrative perspectives. The resulting overlap may thus lead to what Hans-Georg Gadamer calls a “fusion of horizons” where diverse horizons of consciousness may not refute each other, but at last find some common ground (Gadamer 1975). Ricoeur describes this reciprocal transfer between opposite minds: “The identity of a group, culture, people, or nation is not that of an immutable substance, nor that of a fixed structure, but that, rather, of a recounted story.” A hermeneutic exchange of stories effectively resists an arrogant or rigid conception of cultural identity which prevents us from perceiving the radical implications of the principle of narrativity—namely, “the possibilities of revising every story which has been handed down and of carving out a place for several stories directed towards the same past” (Ricoeur 1996, 7). This entails, by implication, a second ethical principle—that of narrative plurality. Pluralism here does not mean any lack of respect for the singularity of the event narrated through the various acts of remembering. It might even be said to increase our sense of awareness of such an event, especially if it is foreign to us in time, space, or cultural provenance. “Recounting differently,” writes Ricoeur, is not inimical to a certain historical reverence to the extent that the inexhaustible richness of the event is honored by the diversity of stories which are made of it, and by the competition to which that diversity gives rise. (Ricoeur 1996, 8)

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And he adds this critical point: the ability to recount the founding events of our national history in different ways is reinforced by the exchange of cultural memories. This ability to exchange has as touchstone the will to share symbolically and respectfully in the commemoration of the founding events of minority ethnic and religious cultures within one’s own nation state, as well as the founding events of other cultures beyond our nation state (Ricoeur 1996, 9). This point applies as much to events of pain and trauma (as in war, famine, or genocide memorials) as to events of triumph and glory. One community’s memory of victory can be another’s memory of victimization—a question of power which calls for constant ethical discernment. A third aspect of Ricoeur’s hospitality of memories is the transfiguring of the past. This involves a creative retrieval of the betrayed promises of the past, so that we may respond to our “debt to the dead” and endeavor to give them a voice. The goal of memorials is, therefore, to try to give a future to the past by remembering it in the right way, ethically and poetically. A crucial aspect of reinterpreting transmitted traditions is the task of discerning past promises which have not been honored. For the past is not only what is bygone—that which has taken place and can no longer be changed—it also lives in the memory thanks to arrows of futurity which have not been fired or whose trajectory has been interrupted. (Ricoeur 1996, 8) In other words, the unfulfilled future of the past may well signal the richest part of a tradition; and the emancipation of “this unfulfilled future of the past” is the major benefit that we can expect from the crossing of memories and the exchange of narratives” (Ricoeur 1996, 8). Again, it is especially the founding events of a community—traumatic or dramatic—which require to be reread in this critical manner in order to unlock the potencies and expectancies which the subsequent unfolding of history may have forgotten or travestied. This is why any genuine memorial involves a certain return to some seminal moment of suffering or hope, to the original events and textual responses to those events, which are all too often occluded by “Official History.” As Ricoeur notes, “The past is a cemetery of promises which have not been kept.” Good memorials can, at best, be ways of “bringing them back to life like the dry bones in the valley described in the prophecy of Ezekiel” (Ricoeur 1996, 8). A fourth and final moment in the hospitality of memory is pardon. If empathy toward others is a crucial step in the ethics of remembrance, there is something more—something which entails moving beyond narrative imagination to forgiveness. In short, the exchange of memories of suffering demands more than sympathy and duty (though these are essential for any kind of justice). There must be pardon insofar as pardon means “shattering the debt.” Here the order of justice and reciprocity can be supplemented,

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but not replaced, by that of “charity and gift.” Such pardon demands huge patience, an enduring practice of “working-through,” mourning, and letting go. But it is not a forgetful forgiveness. Amnesty can never be based on amnesia. Amnesty remembers our debt to the dead through stories while at the same time introducing something other, a hospitality to the darkness of the past which resists language and is difficult almost to the point of impossibility—but something which is all the more important for that reason. One thinks of Brandt’s words at Warsaw, Havel’s apology to the Sudeten Germans, Hume’s preparedness to speak with the IRA, Sadat’s visit to Jerusalem, Hillesum’s refusal to hate her hateful persecutors: all miraculous moments where an ethics of reciprocity is touched by a poetics of pardon. But I repeat: poetics does not replace ethics—both pardon and justice are equally important in the hosting of past trauma. To the degree that charity exceeds justice we must guard against substituting it for justice. Charity remains a surplus; this surplus of compassion and tenderness is capable of giving the exchange of memories its profound motivation, its daring, and its momentum. (Ricoeur 1996, 11) We may say in conclusion that a poetics of narrative hospitality complements and supplements an ethics of historical judgment. In an increasingly hostile world where memory is questioned, truth challenged, and history too often forgotten, the task of linguistic hospitality could not be more urgent. Notes 1 See also Walter Benjamin’s notion of the “untranslatable kernel” (Benjamin 1996) and Marc Crépon’s work on the relation between linguistic singularity, translation and hospitality (Crépon 2001), as well as his work on the foreignness of even the mother tongue (Crépon 2005). I am grateful to Sarah Horton for the Crépon references. 2 See also Derrida’s discussion of language, translation and cultural identity (Derrida 1996). For a very illuminating analysis of Derrida’s complex reading of hospitality, see François Raffoul (2012).

References Benjamin, Walter (1996), “The Task of the Translator,” in Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jenning (eds.), Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 1, 253–63, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Benveniste, Emile (1969), Le Vocabulaire des Institutions Indo-Européenes, Paris: Minuit/(1973), Indo-European Language and Society, trans. Jean Lallot, London: Faber and Faber. Berman, Antoine (1984), L’épreuve de l’étranger: Culture et Traduction dans l’Allemagne Romantique, Paris: Gallimard. Crépon, Mark (2001), Les Promesses du langage: Benjamin, Rosenzweig, Heidegger, Paris: Vrin. ———. (2005), Langues sans demeure, Paris: Galilée.

272 Richard Kearney Derrida, Jacques (1996), Le Monolinguisme de l’autre ou la Prothèse d’origine, Paris: Galilée/ (1998), Monolingualism of the Other or The Prosthesis of Origin, trans. Patrick Mensah, Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. (2000), Of Hospitality, trans. Rachel Bowlby, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Gadamer, Hans-Georg (1975), Truth and Method, London: Sheed and Ward. Howe, Fanny (2007), The Lyrics, Minnesota: Graywolf Press. Kearney, Richard (2008), “The Ethics of Memory,” in Shannon Sullivan and Dennis Schmidt (eds.), Difficulties of Ethical Life, 181–94, New York: Fordham University Press. Raffoul, François (2012), “Chez Lui Chez L’autre,” in Joseph Cohen and Raphael Zagury-Orly (eds.), Les Temps Modernes (n. 669/70), Jacques Derrida: L’événement déconstruction, 133–56, Paris: Editions Gallimard. Ricoeur, Paul (1996), “Reflections on a New Ethos for Europe,” in Richard Kearney (ed.), Paul Ricoeur: The Hermeneutics of Action, 3–14, London: Sage/(1992), “Quel éthos pour l’Europe?” in Peter Koslowski (ed.), Imaginer l’Europe, Paris: Ed. du Cerf. ———. (2004), “Difficult Forgiveness,” in Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (trans.), Memory, History and Forgetting, 457–506, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. (2006), On Translation, trans. Eileen Brennan, New York: Routledge.

15 Inflecting “Presence” and “Absence” On Sharing the Phenomenological Conversation Chad Engelland Not comprehending, they hear like the deaf. The saying is their witness: absent while present.

—Heraclitus1

We learn our mother tongue by attending to our caregivers in the context of everyday routines. We eavesdrop on their conversations and make sense of their foreign word-sounds thanks to the familiar meanings inscribed in the movements of their animate bodies as they tend toward things of interest and away from things of disinterest or of evident aversion. In the milieu of everyday speech ordinarily acquired, we encounter philosophical terminology only as something strange or foreign. At first, we pick up these terms as jargon, as words we might employ but only clumsily and with great confusion. But in time we can go beyond mere use to actual understanding. Here these foreign words become familiar; instead of sounds said according to certain social routines or ways of speaking, they become words weighted with the truth of meaning. Now what is the relation between our mother tongue and our philosophical one? Quite obviously philosophizing requires everyday language as its background. How can the philosophical logos appear within everyday speech as other than it, so that it may be acquired as what it is? The problem of philosophical speech is an old one. Plato, for example, maintained that though language cannot express philosophical insight, it nonetheless helps occasion it; philosophy is not something that can be put into words like other sciences; but after long-continued intercourse between teacher and pupil, in joint pursuit of the subject, suddenly, like light flashing forth when a fire is kindled, it is born in the soul and straightway nourishes itself. (Plato, 1997, 341c) When it comes to phenomenology the question of philosophical logos becomes more vexed, for phenomenology trades on a shift in interest from things to the presence of those things, and the shift in experience requires

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a corresponding shift in language. Hence the question concerning the genesis of phenomenological language seems to be: how can a language fitted to things be repurposed to talk about the presence of those things? I think it necessary to challenge the framing of this question, for in fact ordinary language comprises both thing-directed and experience-directed terms, both ontic and transcendental terms. Therefore, the question is not how to bridge ordinary and phenomenological speech—both are possibilities of one’s mother tongue—but how to activate possibilities for phenomenological exploration, possibilities inscribed into the very texture of ordinary speech. In this paper, I argue that such activation occurs through a process I name “inflection.” This term of enactment recalls two senses of the root word, “flexion.” First, flexion names the native part–whole structure of experienced things that becomes expressed by the attributive or predicative function of the verb, “to be.” In the Sixth Investigation, Husserl argues that “the form-giving flexion being” (die formgebende Flexion, das Sein) does not arise through reflection even though it is not to be found in a straightforward perception of things: one sees paper and whiteness but not that the paper is white; one hears a creak but not that the door is creaking. The flexion expressed by being arises instead through a widened sense of perception called categorial intuition (Husserl 2001b, 277–81). Second, the root of inflection, flexion, also recalls the animate body—Merleau-Ponty’s “flesh” (chair)—that enables presence to oneself and joint presence with others, a theme with anticipations in Augustine and parallels in Wittgenstein (Engelland 2014). One flexes one’s joints in order to move toward and away from things or bring things close for inspection. In doing so, one advertises to others, whether with a communicative intention or not, which object is engaging one’s attention. The parent who walks over and picks up the ball makes her ball-directed interest manifest simply in virtue of picking it up. Infants start to learn speech only after figuring out the meaning latent in this sort of disclosive movement. Such movement has to become emphasized, has to be sorted or understood in a new way to enable prelinguistic joint presence. These two senses of flexion are entwined. Flexion suggests bending, especially limbs and joints. The natural jointure of the moving body mirrors the part–whole structure of perceived objects; just as we articulate our bodies, so we can, in speech, articulate things; speech in this way appears analogous to bodily grasping or gathering. Flexion also names the grammatical inflection of terms, and these terms function as they do so that the various words that comprise a sentence fit together with the unity of a single, articulated body. To speak about things is to articulate their experienced flexion or tissue of relations at work in them. Against this background, I argue that inflection names two processes of appropriation. (1) It names the way phenomenological terms arise through a process of appropriating the transcendental possibilities of our mother tongue. That is, initiates come to acquire phenomenological terms only once

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they have become clued in to the natural disclosive character of ordinary speech. (2) It also names the initiation of the means for appropriating our mother tongue in the first place. That is, infants come to learn their first words only once they have become clued in to the natural revelatory character of bodily movement. That primal, natural means of communication must itself be inflected just to get speech off the ground. The inflection that opens phenomenological word learning echoes the inflection that opens first word learning. Words such as “experience” and “presence,” as with the term “being,” are not acquired through reflection or straightforward perception of things but instead belong to the natural transcendental vocabulary of experience. To inflect is to make explicit the implicit work of the flexion of experience, which highlights the interconnected and dynamic structure of the domain of experience: inflection alters the syntax but not the semantics of its terms by bringing out the latent transcendental resources of speech. Instead of a syntax geared toward things and their properties, inflection delivers a syntax geared toward the experiential domain. Inflection thereby appropriates what we might regard as the natural transcendental vocabulary of the vernacular. To motivate my account of inflection, I introduce the difficulty of acquiring phenomenological terms by examining two high-profile criticisms of phenomenological speech in the figures of Carnap and Derrida, and I conclude that any account of how phenomenological speech is acquired must clarify its distinction from ordinary speech about things while not falling prey to an esoteric separation. Second, I review the way Husserl, Scheler, and Heidegger offer “indication” as the way to distinguish but not separate the one and the other. Third, I point out that indication on its own suffers from Quinean indeterminacy and therefore requires some other resources for its successful enactment; I argue that the usual candidates for aiding indication—analogy, metaphor, and metonymy—are insufficient for resolving this indeterminacy. Finally, I provide my own solution to the problem of philosophical speech, which approaches the question as one of genesis and acquisition: ordinary language embeds certain experiential terms that, when inflected, introduce the learner into the transcendental dimension of experience. I have in mind such terms as “presence,” “absence,” and even the word “interesting.”2 Inflection is the process of discovering that these terms express the experiential horizon of the speaker. My contribution, then, is to demonstrate the relevance of the question of language learning or acquisition for illuminating the nature of phenomenological language and its relation to ordinary speech. My goal is not only to handle the indeterminacy of indication but also to show that phenomenology’s reputation for obscurity is without foundation: phenomenological speech has its natural roots in our mother tongue (cf. Ricoeur 2014, 41), and its acquisition engenders no more vexing problems than the advent of our first language. In this way, I develop Ricoeur’s fecund suggestion:

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If phenomenological reduction is to be something other than the suspension of our links to the world, it must be the ‘beginning’ of a life of meaning, the simultaneous ‘birth’ of the spoken-being of the world and the speaking-being of man. (Ricoeur 1967, 30) We can speak phenomenologically about experience because we can already speak ordinarily about the presence and absence of things that show up in the world around us. 1 The Problem of Acquiring Phenomenological Speech How does one enter into phenomenology? The difficulty might seem akin to acquiring any technical vocabulary or perhaps akin to acquiring a second language. But I would like to suggest that the problem is equivalent to learning one’s native language, and I want to suggest further than the acquisition of phenomenological speech is a way of bringing to completion the language one first learns, of actuating certain possibilities resident in it. Phenomenology is not simply a technical vocabulary developed to conceptualize a region of investigation. Technical language occurs by means of a guided elucidation of examples offered for investigation. One acquires the language of mathematics, for example, by means of making sense of instances of number and counting. Here one can call upon the resources of the vernacular to disclose the region of things being investigated. But insofar as phenomenology deals with the domain of experience itself rather than types of things that show up in experience, it is not possible to handle its acquisition as another type of specialized discourse alongside the sciences and everyday technical vocabularies (talk of sports or of markets, for example). Acquiring phenomenology is not akin to learning a second or foreign language. While it is true that learning such a language challenges certain ways in which we carve up the world, it nonetheless proceeds through a process of translating. My own native language already shows me how to speak of things, and I learn a new language in light of the speaking I can already accomplish. Hence I am not learning to speak and understand in a radically different way; I am rather learning to speak and understand about the same things I would like to speak about and understand in my native language. Yes, I achieve a new distance to typical ways of articulating, becoming aware of the nuances at work in the way the languages differ in presenting things, but in doing so I do not accomplish a shift from things to their presentation. Hence, acquiring phenomenological speech is not like acquiring a second language, because phenomenological speech purports to talk about something other than what ordinary speech ordinarily is thought to talk about. I am suggesting instead that phenomenological speech poses a unique problem of acquisition. I think the best way to understand it is as a further move, an organic development of the acquisition of one’s first language. The reason

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it is so important for phenomenology to clarify the problem of its acquisition, and to naturalize it along the lines I will be developing in this paper, is the fact that otherwise its terms can all too easily appear to be nonsensical or esoteric. 1.1 Nonsensical Rudolf Carnap (1959) takes issue with the way in which Heidegger expresses himself in the notorious 1929 lecture, “What Is Metaphysics?” This is not surprising; even an astute phenomenologist such as Edith Stein recoils before the text’s “mythological tones” (Stein 2007, 92) evident in such strange assertions as the following: “The nothing itself nihilates” (Heidegger 1998, 90). Nonetheless, there is something revealing about Carnap’s criticism in terms of how phenomenological claims can routinely be misunderstood. He thinks all speech concerns things, because speech is bound by experience and experience concerns things. Heidegger, no less than Stein and Husserl, would accept the claim that speech is bound by experience while denying that experience exclusively concerns things. There is more to experience than the merely empirical; hence there is more to speech than what can be said by science. In this way, phenomenological experience involves not only new semantics but also a new syntax—“we lack not only most of the words but, above all, the ‘grammar’” (Heidegger 1962, 63). What is this new grammar? Kisiel (1995) astutely characterizes it as a temporal grammar of presencing rather than an ontic grammar of objects. Heidegger himself expresses the temporal grammar in 1928, “Timeliness brings itself forth” (Zeitlichkeit sich zeitigt) and in 1973, “. . . presencing itself presences” (Heidegger 1984, 212, trans. mod.; Heidegger 2003, 80). Carnap does not realize that phenomenological language is distinct not only semantically but also syntactically from everyday discourse about things. And yet the problem remains, how does phenomenology’s vocabulary relate to this everyday discourse? 1.2 Inaccessible Chief among the failings that Derrida sees in Husserl is the failure to give an account of language in general and phenomenological language in particular. Husserl insists on the otherness of philosophical investigation without recognizing that such otherness compromises the conditions for linguistic communication. He has no account of specifically phenomenological language but must implicitly assume the continuity of ordinary language or metaphysics with phenomenology in order to appeal to phenomenological terms as indications. Derrida writes, “The unity of ordinary language (or the language of traditional metaphysics) and the language of phenomenology is never broken in spite of the precautions, the ‘brackets,’ the renovations and innovations” (Derrida 1973, 8). But must the unity of language be broken? How can phenomenology be made accessible to initiates if it involves a rupture with ordinary language?

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Phenomenology all too easily appears to be nonsensical or inaccessible. How can it maintain the distinctness of its speech without having it devolve into a separation? How can phenomenological speech—and its novel logic of experience—be introduced in the terms of ordinary speech? 2 The Proposed Solution: Indication Max Scheler notes an early criticism of Husserl’s Logical Investigations by Wilhelm Wundt, who complains that Husserl never gets around to defining his terms; instead, he says what the terms are not and then concludes his discussion with a tautology. Scheler remarks: What Wundt did not consider is nothing less than the possible sense of a phenomenological discussion. This sense is only: to bring the reader (or listener) to see that which, by its essence, can only be “seen”; it is in view of this that all the propositions which occur in the book, all the conclusions, all the provisional definitions which are introduced as they are needed, all the provisional descriptions, all the chains of argument and proof, have simply the function of a “pointer,” pointing to what is to be brought to sight. (Scheler 1973a, 172–3) Scheler, following Husserl and followed by Heidegger, regards phenomenological terms as in the first place indications; they “can only be pointed to [aufgewiesen]” in order “to make them seen” (Scheler 1973b, 50). In a phenomenological text, the reader comes across words expressed in ordinary language whose function is to indicate phenomenological experiences that must then be enacted by the reader for the sense to be made plain. At the start of the First Investigation, Husserl introduces a crucial distinction between “indications” (Anzeigen) and “expressions” (Ausdrücke) (Husserl 2001, 183). Indications include marks and signals. Expressions include words, sentences, and language in general. Given his interest in logic, Husserl sets indications aside in order to focus on expressions, both simple and complex. It is thus curious that phenomenologists characterize phenomenological terms as indications rather than straightforward expressions. They do so because of the specific character of phenomenological speech, namely the fact that its terms are inseparable from phenomenological experience. Apart from such experience, the terms are meaningless; they merely indicate or point in the direction of that experience. Yet with that experience, they are meaningful expressions. In the Sixth Investigation, Husserl analyzes what he calls “essentially occasional expressions,” such as this or I. The indexed items might be absent to the auditor or reader. In such cases, the term indicates but does not express; there is no “definite reference” established apart from the requisite experience (Husserl 2001b, 199–200). Earlier Husserl distinguishes two kinds of

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meaning: “indicating” (anzeigende) and “indicated” (angezeigte); the former points out in an indeterminate way and the latter fixes the reference to something determinate. He says that all terms said in relation to oneself are essentially occasional (Husserl 2001a, 220). In this way, phenomenological terms follow the logic of the occasional. They have an implicit “this” placed before them that constitutes an invitation to the interlocutor to convert an indefinite to a definite expression by turning to see what it is that the speaker has seen and means. In Ideas I, Husserl calls these “intuitive pointers” (intuitiven Aufweisungen) in contrast to definitions (Husserl 2014, 164). Husserl becomes increasingly concerned with the question of language. In the Crisis, he notes a tension between the ordinary and the phenomenological; it is not only “unavoidable” for phenomenology to use ordinary language, it is “unavoidable” for the meanings of these ordinary terms to be “transformed” (Husserl 1970, 210). How shall we construe the relation between the two? In Ideas III, he provides two essential directives. First, phenomenological terms are not the same as ordinary words brought to fulfillment but have a different meaning determined by the intuited essences (Husserl 1980, 48). Second, ordinary words are connected to phenomenological terms as indications of the direction of phenomenological experience (Husserl 1980, 48). This raises the question of just how it is that an ordinary word can point to an experience other than its own proper fulfillment. How can it be bent to indicate something, strictly speaking, equivocal? Heidegger’s formal indication takes over the Husserl–Scheler thesis of indication, but it also draws upon Husserl’s resources of formalization to explain the problem of redirection (Engelland 2017, 45–54). Unlike the logic of the general that proceeds from species to genus to higher levels of abstraction, the phenomenological indication points to greater degrees of formalization as it drills down into the apriori structures of experience. Formal indication negates the thing-directedness of speech, and it implicates a textual web of interconnected meanings concerning the structure of human existence as the place of experience. Yet the tension remains: as expressions these terms mislead but as indications they can lead into the phenomenological domain: All statements about the being of human existence, all propositions about time, all propositions within the problematic of the essence of ur-temporality have, as expressed propositions, the character of indication [Anzeige]. But they indicate [indizieren] only human existence, even though, as expressed propositions, they nonetheless first refer to something merely-present. They indicate human existence and the structure of human existence and of time. They indicate the possible understanding of the structure of human existence, and, to the degree that it is available in such understanding, the possible conceptualizability of that structure. (Heidegger 2010, 339)

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How can a familiar expression be repurposed as a formal indication? While the phenomenological account of indication in Scheler, Husserl, and Heidegger preserves the difference between ordinary and phenomenological terms, it does so only by leaving unexplained just how an ordinary term might redirect us to the phenomenological domain of experience. When we think of a phenomenological text as not only or perhaps even in the first place a record of phenomenological insights but instead as a mode of writing conveying possibilities for philosophical analysis, a mode of speech introducing phenomenology to the uninitiated, the problem of language becomes heightened. Language is there not simply to remind us of insights but to occasion them. How can the direction of these indications be ascertained by the reader? Before attending to this question, let me consider an objection: how novel is this appeal to indication? After all, any unknown word—everyday or phenomenological—appears at first as an expression that points rather than expresses. The listener or reader is rebuffed by the new combination of characters or the word-sound; that is to say, she cannot find her way into the word and through the word to the meant thing in the way she does automatically and without trouble for those words she knows. The unknown wordsound elicits our attention and instigates a wonder: “What does ‘intercalate’ mean?” To be told, “It means to interweave, such as fingers interlocked,” fills in the expression’s empty meaning. The unknown word-sound intimates the unknown thoughts of the speaker who speaks with understanding. To learn the meaning is to learn those selfsame thoughts. Thereafter, the word fulfills its nature; it no longer points but expresses. Although every unknown word occurs first in conversation as a pointer, phenomenological terms are different in that they cannot be learned by furnishing a definition or by attending to linguistic context. Instead the interlocutor must first look to see what is there to be seen and thereby discover the meaning of the words in question. In this way, phenomenological indications are in fact ostensions or words whose meanings are clarified by an act of pointing that is brought to completion by the auditor’s looking and understanding the referent for herself. In place of phenomenological definitions, there are only phenomenological exhibitions achieved by following up the promptings of phenomenological indications. Nonetheless, the problem remains: just how do these indications indicate? 3 Indication’s Problem of Indeterminacy Because phenomenological terms arise through ostension, they are subject to Quine’s worries about indeterminacy. Quine (1969) illustrates these worries by imagining a linguist in the field eavesdropping on the unknown speech of a native. When a rabbit hops past, the native says, “Gavagai.” What, Quine asks, should the linguist write down as the meaning of the word, “gavagai”? Is it animal, rabbitness, hopping, moving, whiteness, furriness,

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or what? Quine’s analysis underscores an observation made earlier by Wittgenstein (1958) and much earlier by Augustine (1995): any act of pointing is inherently ambiguous concerning its scope, for it cannot specify which present thing or which level of the present thing is being pointed out (Quine 1969, 31). The ambiguity is aggravated when it comes to making sense of phenomenological language, because phenomenology points to something, the field of experience, that will remain inconspicuous unless the person does something determinate, but this determinate action is just what is unknown. A reader comes across the word “Dasein.” What does it mean? Is it ego, self, person, existent, rational animal, homo sapiens, or what? Heidegger aims to indicate not one of these things but rather to designate something that can be fixed only thanks to a series of phenomenological analyses. In this way, phenomenological indications are cases of linguistic ostensions. They are indications that have the implicit conditional, if you follow my lead, you will see what I mean. Indication preserves the difference between ordinary and phenomenological terms but only by exacerbating worries about indeterminacy. In a somewhat different context, Daniel Dahlstrom calls for mediating terms to clarify the relation between the ontic and the ontological: “Yet the danger of confusing or collapsing the levels (ontic and ontological) is all the greater the more ambiguously their relations are construed or the more they are left unaddressed” (Dahlstrom 2001, 452). How, then, can the relation be clarified? Commentators have made several suggestions for disambiguating indication, for providing a needed direction for its deployment: analogy, metaphor, and metonymy. In my view, these are helpful but insufficient. 3.1 Analogy Eugen Fink’s Sixth Cartesian Meditation, written in consultation with Husserl, has the great merit of focusing on the question of phenomenological language. However, rather than framing the problem of such language in a fruitful way, the text makes it insoluble. As Steven Crowell remarks, Fink gives us a “gnostic” phenomenology that represents the phenomenological reduction after the fashion of Hegel as a kind of inverted world (Crowell 2001, 246). Fink, starkly contrasting the everyday and the phenomenological, attempts to bridge them in terms of a doubled analogy. Ordinarily, we speak of existent things in the world. Phenomenologically, we speak instead about what transcends the world. To speak phenomenologically, then, we have to help ourselves to a unique analogy: not the analogy of two things in the world, but an analogy of one thing in the world to the transcendental consciousness outside of the world: If, now, natural language, which is exhibited by the phenomenological epoche as a dispositional habituality of the constituting I, is claimed by the phenomenologizing onlooker for the explication of his “theoretical

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experience”—which does not deal with what is “existent” (with that which is end-constituted), but with that constituting life which actualizes itself and the world in stages of “pre-being”—then the natural meanings of words and sentences cannot stand in a relationship of analogical predication to the intended transcendental sense-elements. This is because ontic meanings just cannot form an analogy to “non-ontic” transcendental meanings, for the two cannot be at all compared with one another . . . . The “transcendental analogy of signifying” which governs the whole of phenomenological predicative explication is thus not an analogy possible within natural speech, but an analogy to the analogy that is found within natural speech; and it is the phenomenological reduction that makes that possible. (Fink 1995, 90–1) For Fink, then, the phenomenological logos emerges by means of a doubled analogy that exceeds natural speech. In my view, Fink rightly underscores the limits of ontic relations for exhibiting phenomenological ones, but he fails to appreciate the amplitude of natural speech, which includes not only the ontic but also the transcendental, and that failure presents an insurmountable obstacle to the acquisition of phenomenological speech. It is indeed a gnostic path. 3.2  Metaphor and Metonymy Sokolowski handles the problem of phenomenological speech by underscoring the way in which ordinary language and experience ever remain on the verge of phenomenological experience and speech. He points out that talk about such topics as “truth” and “presence” are “scraps of transcendentalese in the vernacular” (Sokolowski 1974, 254). Attempts to make sense of them without entering into phenomenology result in hopeless confusion. “But failure to make the transcendental turn prevents one from speaking coherently about truth and presencing, because objects will always be intruding where the presence of objects should be discussed” (Sokolowski 1974, 254). He also suggests that some phenomenological terms arise at first as metaphors and they retain a residue of their pre-metaphorical or ordinary, everyday meaning (Sokolowski 1974, 255; 2008, 33, 304, 312). A related strategy can be found in Crowell, who thinks that phenomenological terms are not analogous to ordinary ones but are instead bound up with them due to the way contexts shift meaning. The reduction is not a rupture but a change of focus that presents for consideration that which was already there in experience. He thinks the transition from ontic to transcendental discourse happens thanks to “metonymy.” Here a word is substituted for something it is associated with. In this account, terms like ‘experience’ or ‘life’ make sense in a transcendental context because the natural attitude is already pervaded by

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the transcendental—not as something radically other, a gnostic spark hidden within it, but as something customarily overlooked, anonymous. (Crowell 2001, 262) According to the Sokolowksi–Crowell thesis, then, everyday life is not tidily restricted to mundane talk about things: instead, the transcendental is a possibility of the vernacular. There remains in our mother tongue terms such as “truth,” “life,” “presence,” and “experience” that do not express things but instead our having a world. In this way, an ordinary speaker of English, who bemoans the absence of a friend or who invokes the word “truth” in a thoughtful way, is on the verge of the phenomenological enterprise. These terms mean more than our ordinary grammar can express. They implicate us in a phenomenological grammar that requires an explicit appropriation to be understood as such. These are ordinary terms with transcendental meanings. Given the Sokolowksi–Crowell thesis, what should we make of their particular proposals that the phenomenological logos is helped by metonymy—the transposition of meaning via contiguity—or metaphor—the transposition of meaning via similarity? The problem is that both metaphor and metonymy appear to be based on relations among things; they thus appear ill-suited for expressing the essential shift to the experience of things.3 Only if we understand metaphor and metonymy according to the new grammar of experience instead of the old grammar of things will metaphor and metonymy be able to function in a phenomenological context. In the new grammar, contiguity and similarity can indeed take us beyond things: we can speak, for example, metaphorically about the domain of experience as a “clearing” or metonymically (and metaphorically) about a thing’s “adumbrations.” Sokolowski, for his part, recognizes that metaphor works only against the backdrop of literal meaning (1974, 255). Hence the crucial question, which must be addressed, concerns how the new grammar can be established, that is, how the ordinary, anonymous scraps of transcendentalese might be appropriated in the first place so that the domain might open and specific terms be introduced via metaphor and metonymy. I therefore want to follow the Sokolowski– Crowell thesis that terms such as experience, life, truth, and presence, while found in ordinary speech, carry a transcendental meaning, but I want to explain how these transcendental meanings become activated. 4 The Solution to the Problem: Inflection Carnap’s misunderstanding of phenomenology reminds us of the need to mind the difference between ontic speech about things and transcendental speech about their presence; Derrida’s critique of phenomenology reminds us of the need to see this difference as a distinction, not a separation. Indication on its own cannot explain the redirection needed to move from ordinary speech about things to phenomenological speech about the structure of experience.

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Analogy, metaphor, and metonymy, as prima facie relations among things, cannot save indication from indeterminacy when it concerns the turn to experience. To meet the challenge, phenomenology must give an account of how its speech expresses a distinction in experience, a distinction that can be expressed in words and understood by others. The Sokolowski–Crowell thesis rightly advances the view that transcendental terms naturally occur in the vernacular but in an incoherent manner. The question then becomes how these ordinary terms can be appropriated phenomenologically. In my view, phenomenology begins by a process I call “inflection”— language speakers alter the syntax but not the semantics of certain critical everyday experiential terms and thereby allow these terms to emerge in their interconnection with one another as the first expression of the phenomenological domain. The manner in which a neophyte acquires phenomenological speech repeats the manner in which an infant acquires ordinary speech. Infants break into speech by first selecting out and inflecting animate movement—movement which enables sharing joint experience—from other sorts of movement; philosophers break into phenomenological speech by selecting out and inflecting experiential terms from other sorts of speech. The acquisition of phenomenology therefore comes as the specific appropriation of what makes the acquisition of ordinary speech possible. Phenomenology brings joint experience to expression. 4.1 Inflected Animate Action and Ostension How do infants acquire their mother tongue? How do they come to learn the conventional words spoken around them so that they can become fellow speakers of that speech? Once words are learned, they can bring about joint presence, but how can prelinguistic joint presence be achieved so that an infant’s first words may be learned? Before inquiring into the how of prelinguistic joint presence we would do well to clarify just what it is. I offer it as a phenomenological appropriation of the terminology of “joint attention” employed by psychologists to explain the means of first word learning; the term “attention” is mental and thus internal and individual: What can join prelinguistic attention? The concept goes along with appeals to inferential “mind-reading” skills. Following Merleau-Ponty, I think it is rather external and intersubjective presence, established relative to the exploratory movements of our animate bodies, that makes first word learning possible (Engelland 2014). Joint presence suggests the way that presence happens for each of us together thanks to our bodies; our joints join together our experiential explorations of a world of things. Hence, I think the term “joint presence” more adequately expresses the phenomenon that enables infants to learn their first words: it is not thanks to mind-reading attentions but understanding embodied presences. How can prelinguistic presence occur, and how can prelinguistic presence give way to linguistic transcendence of immediate presence? Here

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our phenomenological project concerning word learning will be helped by availing ourselves of the phenomenological insights of Wittgenstein and Augustine (Engelland 2014; 2018). Though Wittgenstein (1958) criticizes Augustine (1991) as an account of the nature of language, he does not do so as an account of how infants break into speech; Wittgenstein acknowledges that the way they do so will depend on (1) ostension in the context of routine behavior and (2) a language more primitive than our own. 4.1.1 Ostension Wittgenstein follows Augustine in thinking that there must be a prelinguistic “common human way of acting [Handlungsweise]” (Wittgenstein 1958, 82, trans. mod.). Merleau-Ponty (1973; 2012) likewise emphasizes the way our flesh advertises our affective lives to each other. Hence, the child can look to the language speaker and see what that speaker is attending to. The first words a child learns comes by way of the child tuning in to the prelinguistic meaning of bodily exploration. This tuning in consists in the natural ability to select out from movement in general movements manifesting experiential engagement: the movement toward and away from things, the tone of excitement or the tone of disappointment, the gesture of pointing or the face that either grimaces or melts with recognition. Other movements, such as sitting or standing, respiring or coughing, scratching and rubbing, are not directly relevant to making sense of the intentional, experiential lives of language users. Hence, in order for bodily movement to serve as the prelinguistic basis for joint presence, it is necessary to thematize a particular aspect of movement, movement as manifesting experiential engagement. To learn their first words children must first clue in to this aspect of bodily movement, the way it discloses our engagement with the things we might talk about. It should be emphasized that this class of movement need not be deployed with the intention to communicate—just insofar as I experientially explore the world, I must move and in doing so others can see this whether or not I am trying to get them to do so. Beginning around nine months of age, expressive movement is, as it were, emphasized or inflected, and that is what establishes prelinguistic joint presence, affording the child the possibility of breaking into speech (Engelland 2014; Tomasello 1999). The advent of ordinary speech, then, involves highlighting movement expressing experiential engagement from the full range of bodily movements. This expressive movement enables ostensions: unknown words can thereby be converted to identifications via attending to joint presence. The child hears a word, looks to see the highlighted item of interest, and registers that word’s meaning. Of course any appeal to ostension is hounded by the notorious ambiguity of pointing gestures. Wittgenstein thinks the language teacher solves the Gavagai-problem for the auditor by correcting mistakes; Quine thinks that the linguist solves the Gavagai-problem by projecting his own

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understanding on what is objectively indeterminate: “The implicit maxim guiding his choice of ‘rabbit,’ and similar choices for other native words, is that an enduring and relatively homogeneous object, moving as a whole against a contrasting background, is a likely reference for a short expression” (Quine 1969, 34). In Ostension, I argue that a child handles radical indeterminacy, because there is more to experience than Wittgenstein and Quine fathom (Engelland 2014). In particular, the transcendental structure of human experience naturally profiles movement over rest and difference over sameness. A gesture accordingly attracts our attention but routine sitting still does not. There are certain natural constraints such as a bias toward the novel, toward certain-sized objects, toward a certain kind of thing, toward essential rather than accidental properties, and toward a certain level of generalization. The child’s natural wants, the context of everyday routines and games, and repetition across various contexts helps constrain the logically endless possibilities of ostension, thereby enabling children to learn the meaning of their words. The logic of experience makes prelinguistic joint presence possible and its natural ambiguity manageable. 4.1.2 From Protolanguage to Language Insofar as language is a system of signs and any given move in a language game makes sense only relative to a whole complex of others, it seems silly to say that there can be such a thing as a first word: “What sort of folly is it to say that a child speaks a ‘first’ word” (Gadamer 1976, 63). And yet every parent recalls the first words of a child: “mom,” “dad,” “ball,” “dog.” These words are blunt instruments at first, lacking the art of careful contextual embedding that will come later with syntax, but there remains a continuity between “Mom!” said as a first word and “Mom, may I borrow the car, please?” said years later. Wittgenstein rightly points out that learning language as a system of signs requires an intermediary mode of speaking that introduces the first assortment of terms: “A child uses such primitive forms of language when it learns to talk” (Wittgenstein 1958, 4). Before one learns to play chess, one has to be able to distinguish the pieces from one another; before speaking full-blown speech, children must get a handle on some characteristic pieces, although this first grasp cannot be equated with mature language: “Naming is so far not a move in the language-game— any more than putting a piece in its place on the board is a move in chess” (Wittgenstein 1958, 24). This first language, protolanguage, is semantics bereft of syntax, and it is typical of four language groups: children from about one to two years of age, trained chimps, feral children, and speakers of pidgin (that is, speakers of different languages thrown together who improvise a new system of communicating). From about ages one to two, children are able to learn words, but they do not combine the words syntactically. Instead they string them together serially. But who gave what to whom and when remains

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undetermined, although context proves helpful (Bickerton 1990, 1995; Sokolowski 2008). Contra Wittgenstein, but in accord with Augustine, the infant need not be taught this primitive language game; rather, the child is able to pick up speech by eavesdropping on conversations (Bloom 2000). The novel wordsounds constitute so many indications or invitations for the child to look into the field of joint experience and register identities and meanings. While eavesdropping, a child must look about for relevant items, ignoring much that is said, for the environment does not afford the possibility of learning the meaning of all the words spoken; a child cannot learn as its first words terms for things that are not present or on the verge of being present. “The milk’s not warm enough,” says the mother as she passes the bottle back to the father. The child can pair the word-sound milk and milk in this way. But consider an infant overhearing this sentence: “There’s no way the president will win reelection.” Here president and reelection cannot be paired with these absent objects. Note the situation is no different for the child of the president. The referents for such terms as “president” and “reelection” cannot be present in the way medium-sized perceptual objects, such as milk, ball, mom, dad, and truck, can be made present. The child can achieve a beachhead in speech only regarding things and actions present to perception. Beginning about age two, though, infants start to combine words in increasingly unambiguous ways thanks to the ordering clarity of syntactical arrangement: protolanguage yields to language, which differentiates subjects from objects and makes definitions possible. Where does syntax come from? The very part–whole structures at work in the experienced world instigate the child, who is primed by nature to register such things, to bring together words as parts into sentential wholes (Husserl 1948; Sokolowski 2008, 48–67). The terms are fitted together or inflected in order to express the fitted togetherness or flexion of experience. Now, once syntax kicks in, the field of joint presence ranges beyond one’s immediate reach; heretofore absent or abstract terms can be adopted. Thanks to the part–whole structure of syntax, the child can identify missing parts and venture to ask the question, “What is that?” While first words must be learned through perceptual presence, second words can be learned through definition in the absence of their referents. Thanks to syntax, the child can solicit definitions and be able thereby to learn what president and reelection mean, and then the child might even bring about a kind of presence to these terms, as she watches the victory speech of the president or sees him sign some piece of legislation. Protolanguage brings about presences—“Milk!” the child cries—or registers presences—“Digger!”—but it cannot articulate the presence and absence of things. It targets things in a holistic way from within the ambit of desire or interest but without being able to articulate this desire and interest. Syntax not only allows us to articulate the structures of things and relations at work in states of affairs; it also centrally requires us to tense our actions, and these tenses involve us in a continual navigation

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of the presence and absence of what we’re talking about. It rained yesterday, but it is sunny today. Syntax’s structure enables the speaker of language to do something that the speaker of protolanguage cannot: to track the interplay of presence and absence and speak of things to others in a variegated manner. In this way, speech catches up to the complex interplay constitutive of experience itself. 4.2 The Ordinary Vocabulary Inflected We can therefore distinguish first words, requiring joint presence, from second words, which arise through definition and syntax relative to these first words. The first words, established by joint presence, allow the second words, marked by absence or abstraction, to be acquired. Just as ordinary language comes about in two stages, the acquisition of phenomenological speech requires two stages. In the first, there are the inconspicuous but transcendental features of ordinary language. Only having acquired these terms as such is it possible to enter the second stage: making sense of indications that point in the direction of phenomenological experience. Phenomenological initiation is a matter of calling attention to these strange everyday words, of highlighting them, of explicating and thematizing them. How do the elemental phenomenological terms arise so that advanced terms can be indicated? For a phenomenological indication to function, the general domain must first be expressed, however obscurely, thanks to heretofore unnoticed horizons of ordinary speech. Phenomenology converts these terms into phenomenological ones, not by inverting or transforming their meaning but by noticing them. The phenomenological act of appropriating an ordinary term while preserving the ordinary meaning I call inflection. In doing so, I would highlight three of the word’s ordinary senses outlined by the Oxford English Dictionary: (1) Regarding movement, inflection names a bending of something in toward oneself. Charles Darwin, for example, writes of the inflection of a plant’s tentacle. (2) Regarding the spoken word, it names a modulation of voice. (3) Regarding grammar, it speaks of the way the same words can enter into different grammatical relations, including declension, conjugation, and comparison, precisely in order to comprise a single linguistic whole; instead of being serially arranged, they are interconnected. Phenomenology begins by inflecting or bending toward oneself a set of ordinary transcendental terms by stressing them in speech; it thereby alters not the meaning but the interconnected grammar of these words; in doing so, it talks not about things per se but about our experience of them. In Ideas I, Husserl says that in transcendental reflection ordinary terms, such as apple tree, should appear only in quotation marks to mark the difference in approach (Husserl 2014, 176); conversely, I think we might consider transcendental terms as carrying implicit quotation marks when they occur in ordinary speech. Phenomenology actualizes these ordinary terms by dropping the quotation marks and speaking about them straightforwardly.

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Let’s take the phenomenological claim that experience is the interplay of presence and absence or that perception is a matter of making something present.4 In ordinary speech, we talk about the presence or absence of something or someone—a lifeguard, for example—but not presence and absence as such: “Samantha, the sign says no swimming when the lifeguard is not present.” Or, when we say, “Absence makes the heart grow fonder,” we have in mind not absence per se but the absence of a loved one. To inflect presence and absence means to shift from something or someone to presence and absence as such. The implicit interplay becomes explicit. In doing so the experiential agency relative to which presence and absence occur becomes heighted. Having become inflected, presence and absence becomes the syntax for a thoroughgoing exploration of all the structures of experience. We can now speak, for example, of the interplay of presence and absence even regarding a present object of perception, arrayed necessarily in such a way that some sides are absent while others are present. Hence, inflection retains the meaning of these ordinary experiential terms but places them in a new context determined by the experiential engagement with things. The working out of phenomenology is the development of this new syntax of experience. Presence and absence are rooted in our bodily being which situates us in a particular locale, a “here” relative to other “theres.” It is the interchange of these locative terms—the fact that my here is your there and your here is my there—that lies at the basis of Husserl’s account of transcendental intersubjectivity in the fifth of the Cartesian Meditations (Husserl 1977). Such thoughts occur to us slowly but they are experienced quite early. The infant lives in the interplay of the presence and absence of what it needs and wants; the joy of crawling and then walking concerns in part the ability to take the play of presence and absence into one’s own hands. The child’s game of peekaboo takes its joy from interpersonal absence-canceling-presence. The poet’s pen too touches on this theme. The presence and the absence of the beloved affects our experience of the whole field of experience. In Sonnet 15, Shakespeare writes, “When I consider every thing that grows/Holds in perfection but a little moment,/That this huge stage presenteth nought but shows/Whereon the stars in secret influence comment.” In this case, the field of presence makes changing things manifest in their manifestation. This field of presence in turn affects the experience of others. In Sonnet 97, he likewise writes, “How like a winter hath my absence been/From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year!/What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen!/What old December’s bareness every where!” Here the absence of the beloved’s field of presence makes the world of nature mean nothing: its springtime therefore becomes as winter without the transfiguring presence of the beloved’s field of experience. Shakespeare’s speech demonstrates that the interplay of the beloved’s presence and absence interests us in the interplay of presence and absence. Inflection takes such interest and makes it thematic. Presence entails the presence in the flesh of something or someone to someone against the backdrop of possible absence. Experience takes place thanks

290 Chad Engelland Table 15.1 Two features of inflection

Mereology Shift

Uninflected

Inflected

Disparate pieces: presence, absence Something present

Interconnected moments: presence and absence Presence of something to us

to the interplay of the presence and absence of things to us. Now things are the things they are, independently of whether they are present or absent; presence and absence, moreover, remain what they are, independently of what happens to be present or absent. Things transcend experience, and experience transcends things. Nevertheless, it is due to experience that we can experience things as transcending that selfsame experience. In the field of presence, things can come to presence or return to absence while remaining the things they are. Phenomenology arises as the possibility of thinking about and experiencing presence and absence as such. The inflection that stands at the basis of phenomenological speech resembles the inflection at the basis of ordinary speech. For it is only by inflecting specifically purposive bodily movement from the general class of bodily movements that one establishes the prelinguistic joint presence necessary for acquiring an initial vocabulary, and it is only by inflecting such terms as presence and absence that one establishes the domain necessary for instituting an initial phenomenological vocabulary (Table 15.1). 4.3 The Technical Vocabulary Indicated, Exemplified, and Expressed Inflection communicates the opening of the domain: terms such as presence and absence become changed in their syntax but not their semantics. No longer are they attributes of things; thanks to inflection they become distinguished from the things that are present and absent. Once inflection expresses the opened phenomenological domain, it becomes possible to introduce phenomenology’s suite of technical terms. Ordinary speech is not adequate for all aspects of the domain of experience. There are equivocations to be worked out, and words such as “noesis” must be coined to name new aspects of the domain (Husserl 2014, 167). Such technical terms can be introduced through directional negation. That is, introducing the phenomenological term involves identifying a term from ordinary discourse or creating a new one while establishing the term’s present incomprehensibility. “On pain of absurdity, phenomenon1 is not x, y, or z.” Well, what is it? The negations do not merely eliminate candidates. They also move in a particular direction; that is, they convert an ambiguous or unknown term into an indication. Recall Wundt’s observations, mentioned above, concerning the roundabout way Husserl’s breakthrough work, Logical Investigations, introduces its novel

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vocabulary, including truth and knowledge, but also meaning-intention, meaning-fulfillment, confirmation, and categorial perception. Husserl takes a term and makes it questionable in such a way that a peculiar direction is established toward its fulfillment. Or Heidegger introduces a term such as “being-in-the-world” by telling us he does not mean by “in” the sense in which some object is inside another, he does not mean by “being” the sense in which something is an object or a tool, and he does not mean by “world” a spatial container. The exasperated reader runs out of options for understanding and feels keenly the question, “Well, what then!?” One is eavesdropping here in the specific sense that one is not yet able to understand this speech let alone produce it. It may indeed be addressed to the interlocutor as a reader or as a student, but insofar as it cannot yet be understood as addressed, it remains a message intercepted rather than one that is properly one’s own. Phenomenology is a science built not on indications but on expressions, although these expressions must necessarily first be understood as indications before they can be confirmed and understood as such. It is here that the philosophical example becomes crucial, for the described example provides the occasion for the reader to fix the meaning of the phenomenological terms. Phenomenology, Husserl says, has to place before its eyes pure occurrences of consciousness as exemplars; it has to bring them to ever more perfect clarity; within this clarity it has to analyze them and apprehend their essences, it has to pursue the patently discernible connections among the essences and take up what is respectively seen into faithful conceptual expressions that allows them to dictate their sense purely through what is seen or generally discerned, and so forth. (Husserl 2014, 119) For example, in the Logical Investigations Husserl points out that one and the same perceived event, such as the blackbird’s flying away, can be expressed through a variety of sentences. In doing so, he provides a window for the reader onto his distinction between meaning-intention and meaningfulfillment. Similarly, Heidegger’s classic example of the hammer that becomes an object of thematic regard when it is broken or missing provides a window for the reader onto the inconspicuousness of everyday presence and the way in which such presences are related to human projects and the transcendental structure of world. The importance of examples in this respect approaches that of the role ascribed to them by Kuhn (1977) for scientific revolutions. It is not by mastering rules that a scientific shift occurs; it is by thinking through a new paradigmatic example that one starts to think of the whole in a new way. One glimpses Plato’s doctrine of forms by following a discussion of piety or justice, and one makes sense of Descartes’s res extensa by thinking through the wax example in the second of the Meditations on First Philosophy. So it is with phenomenology: the phenomenological

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indications are converted into phenomenological expressions by means of thinking through the articulation of examples. Husserl underscores the importance of exemplars, delineated by imagination, for fulfilling the meaning of scientific terms (Husserl 1980, 86). By considering the ostended examples, we can convert the indication into an expression, the pointer into a term. Heidegger’s infamous inaugural lecture, “What Is Metaphysics?” serves to accomplish the initiation into phenomenological experience and speech. He takes an ordinary word, “nothing,” and introduces it through strategic negations: though it is presupposed by access to things, it is not any thing. Perhaps he thinks he is inflecting a term, but in fact he presses the word into a new meaning, one that it does not enjoy in the vernacular. He has thereby sought to convert an ordinary word into an indication by highlighting its halo of confusion. And he further wants to convert the indication to an expression by getting us to see it as the correlate of angst. The real obstacle to understanding this text is its failure to inflect ordinary words and instead to lead with an indication. Carnap demonstrates the perils of the procedure. He eavesdrops, but being disoriented by Heidegger’s failure to inflect the natural transcendental language of experience, does not mind the negations and so cannot grasp the indication as indication. Carnap reads the indication within the horizon of ordinary speech about things. He does not fathom the fact that phenomenology instead expresses the presence of things. To ward off such misunderstandings, phenomenology does well to begin with inflection rather than indication, and then to indicate only while being continually perspicacious and forthright about the character—and limits—of such indication (Engelland 2020b). Phenomenology, it is true, will not travel far without indication, but it will not get started without inflection (Table 15.2). 5 Conclusion Phenomenological speech is not disconnected from ordinary language. It arises as a distinct possibility within ordinary speech, a possibility that when enacted unfolds as a new manner of speaking, based in part on inflecting the old and acquiring novel terms through exemplification. We learn to speak our mother tongue thanks to joint presence; and we learn to speak Table 15.2 Stages of phenomenological initiation

Neophyte Amateur Proficient Expert

Auditor

Speaker

Eavesdropping on nonsense Inflection of vernacular’s transcendental terms Established indications Indications converted to expressions via elucidation

Inflection of vernacular’s transcendental terms Dialectical differentiationçs establishing indications Indications elucidated via examples Phenomenological conversation

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our phenomenological tongue by speaking directly about what is ordinarily inconspicuous: the interplay of presence and absence thanks to which things and others are experienced as intelligible and sayable. Just as animate movement harbors the possibility of joint presence and thus semantics, which subverts itself by opening the possibility of language and joint absence, so language itself harbors the possibility of making presence and absence itself into an explicit theme. Like the child’s breakthrough into speech, the breakthrough into phenomenology presupposes prior powers while transcending them. It is not the case that ordinary language must become what it is not. It is rather the case that the vernacular, harboring within it not only the power to speak about things but also about their presence, naturally affords possibilities that phenomenology explicitly enacts and on the basis of which its novel terms can be pointed out. The inflection of the vernacular’s transcendental terms achieves linguistic articulation of the logic of experience, and it was just this logic of experience that enabled the joint presence necessary for acquiring our mother tongue. In this way, phenomenological speech is nothing other than the expression of ordinary speech’s own origins in joint experience. Inflected terms in turn make understandable the introduction of indications, which are often made less indeterminate by means of analogies, metaphors, and metonymies. Such indications are converted into expressions through following dialectical differentiation and the elucidation of examples. Gary Gutting (2012) observed, “The continental-analytic gap will begin to be bridged only when seminal thinkers of the Continent begin to write more clearly.” They will begin to write more clearly, I submit, only when they explicitly recognize the origin of the phenomenological logos in the inflection of certain terms already operative in everyday language. For, as the poets bear witness and everyday life attests, there is more to our mother tongue than just more and more talk about the properties of things. Readers of phenomenological texts should be put on notice that phenomenologists will have them speaking in ways that are both familiar and strange. Notes 1 Heraclitus (1979, 29). For helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper, I am indebted to Molly McGrath, Scott Roniger, and many participants of the 2019 North Texas Philosophical Association meeting. 2 On “interesting,” see Engelland (2020a). 3 This seems to be the thought behind Heidegger’s rejection of metaphor as “the norm for our conception of the essence of language” (Heidegger 1991, 48). 4 See Heidegger’s remarks concerning Husserl’s characterization of perception as “making present” in the Logical Investigations (Heidegger 1962, 363n23).

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———. (1980), Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Third Book: Phenomenology and the Foundations of the Sciences, trans. and ed. E. Klein and W. E. Pohl, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. ———. (2001a), Logical Investigations, Vol. 1, trans. J. N. Findlay, New York: Routledge. ———. (2001b), Logical Investigations, Vol. 2, trans. J. N. Findlay, New York: Routledge. ———. (2014), Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy: First Book: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, trans. D. Dahlstrom, Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co. Kisiel, T. (1995), “The Genetic Difference in Reading Being and Time,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 69: 171–87. Kuhn, T. (1977), The Essential Tension, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1973), Consciousness and the Acquisition of Language, trans. H. J. Silverman, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. ———. (2012), Phenomenology of Perception, trans. D. A. Landes, New York: Routledge. Plato (1997), “Letter VII,” in J. Cooper (ed.) and G. R. Morrow (trans.), Complete Works, 1646–67, Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Co. Quine, W. v. O. (1969), “Ontological Relativity,” in Ontological Relativity and Other Essays, New York: Columbia University Press. Ricoeur, P. (1967), “New Developments of Phenomenology in France—The Phenomenology of Language,” Social Research 34: 1–30. ———. (2014), “The Later Wittgenstein and the Later Husserl on Language,” Études Ricœuriennes/Ricœur Studies 5 (1): 28–48. Scheler, M. (1973a), “Phenomenology and the Theory of Cognition,” in D. R. Lachterman (trans.) Selected Philosophical Essays, 136–201, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. ———. (1973b), Formalism in Ethics and Non-formal Ethics of Values: A New Attempt toward the Foundation of an Ethical Personalism, trans. M. S. Frings and R. L. Funk, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Sokolowski, R. (1974), Husserlian Meditations: How Words Present Things, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. ———. (2008), Phenomenology of the Human Person, New York: Cambridge University Press. Stein, E. (2007), “Martin Heidegger’s Existential Philosophy,” trans. M. Lebech, Maynooth Philosophical Papers 4: 55–98. Tomasello, M. (1999), The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wittgenstein, L. (1958), Philosophical Investigations, second edition, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.

Notes on Contributors

Michele Averchi (PhD University of Milan 2010) is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the Catholic University of America. His publications on language and emotions have appeared in such venues as Husserl Studies, Thaumazein, and Studia Phaenomenologica. Scott Campbell is Professor and Chair of the Philosophy Department at Nazareth College in Rochester, NY. He focuses on the work of Martin Heidegger, having published a monograph on the philosopher’s early work, The Early Heidegger’s Philosophy of Life (Fordham University Press, 2012), and translated one of Heidegger’s early lecture courses, GA 58 Grundprobleme der Phanomenologie, as Basic Problems of Phenomenology: Winter Semester 1919/1920 (Continuum, 2013). He also co-edited a volume on the philosophy of life, The Science, Politics, and Ontology of Life-philosophy (Bloomsbury, 2013). Taylor Carman is professor of philosophy at Barnard College, Columbia University. He is the author of Heidegger’s Analytic (2003) and Merleau-Ponty (2008, 2nd ed. 2020) and co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to MerleauPonty (2005). He has written on topics in phenomenology, existentialism, and contemporary European and analytical philosophy and is currently writing a book on the history and critique of metaphysics in Heidegger’s later works. Carolyn Culbertson  is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Florida Gulf Coast University. She is the author of Words Underway: Continental Philosophy of Language (Rowman and Littlefield International, 2019) as well as a number of articles in journals such as Continental Philosophy Review, Philosophy Today, and Comparative and Continental Philosophy. She currently serves as Vice President of the North American Society for Philosophical Hermeneutics. Daniel O. Dahlstrom, John R. Silber Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Department of Philosophy at Boston University, is the author of Das logische Vorurteil (1994), Heidegger’s Concept of Truth (2001), Philosophical Legacies: Essays on the Thought of Kant, Hegel, and Their Contemporaries (2008), The Heidegger Dictionary (2013), and Identity, Authenticity, and

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Humility (2017). His translations include works by Mendelssohn, Schiller, Hegel, Feuerbach, Husserl, and Heidegger. In addition to co-editing (with Andreas Elpidorou and Walter Hopp) Philosophy of Mind and Phenomenology: Conceptual and Empirical Approaches (2015), he is editor of Interpreting Heidegger: New Essays (2010) and Kant and His Contemporaries, Volume II (2019). Chad Engelland  is Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Philosophy Department at the University of Dallas. He is the author of several books, including Ostension: Word Learning and the Embodied Mind (MIT Press, 2014), Heidegger’s Shadow: Kant, Husserl, and the Transcendental Turn (Routledge, 2017), and Phenomenology (MIT Press, 2020). Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei is the Kurrelmeyer Professor in German and Professor in Philosophy at The Johns Hopkins University. She is author of On Being and Becoming: An Existentialist Approach to Life (Oxford University Press); The Life of Imagination: Revealing and Making the World (Columbia University Press); Exotic Spaces in German Modernism (Oxford University Press); The Ecstatic Quotidian: Phenomenological Sightings in Modern Art and Literature (Penn State University Press); Heidegger, Hölderlin, and the Subject of Poetic Language (Fordham University Press); and a book of poetry, After the Palace Burns, which won The Paris Review Prize. Lawrence J. Hatab is Louis I. Jaffe Professor of Philosophy and Eminent Scholar Emeritus at Old Dominion University. He is the author of seven books and over 50 articles, mostly on Heidegger, Nietzsche, and ancient thought. His books include: Ethics and Finitude: Heideggerian Contributions to Moral Philosophy (2000), Nietzsche’s Life Sentence: Coming to Terms with Eternal Recurrence (2005), Proto-Phenomenology and the Nature of Language: Dwelling in Speech I (2017), and Language Acquisition, Orality, and Literacy: Dwelling in Speech II (2019). Andrew Inkpin  is a lecturer in Contemporary European Philosophy at the University of Melbourne. His research centres on phenomenological approaches to meaning, particularly with regard to language, practice, and pictorial representation. His recent publications include Disclosing the World: On the Phenomenology of Language (MIT Press, 2016). Richard Kearney is the Charles Seelig Professor in Philosophy at Boston College. He is the author of over 20 books on European philosophy and literature (including two novels and a volume of poetry) and has edited or co-edited 14 more. Among these are volumes on Ricoeur, narrativity, and hospitality. Leslie MacAvoy is Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Department of Philosophy and Humanities at East Tennessee State University. She works on issues in phenomenology and hermeneutics, and has published essays on Heidegger and Levinas. Her interests include the philosophical

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debates among the early phenomenologists, and she is currently doing research on the role of intentionality and temporality in the constitution of meaning in Heidegger’s phenomenology. Dominique Pradelle is since 2013 Professor at the Philosophy Department at Sorbonne University and scientific director of the Husserl-Archives at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. The domain of his philosophical research and thought includes Kantian philosophy, Husserlian and Heideggerian phenomenology, the philosophy of mathematics and musical aesthetics. He published in French Archeology of the World (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2000), Beyond the Copernican Revolution (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2012), Genealogy of Reason (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2013), and Intuition and Idealities. Phenomenology of Mathematical Objects (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2020). Jacob Rump is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Creighton University (Omaha, NE), where he works on issues at the intersection of the theory of meaning, epistemology, and the philosophy of mind. He approaches these topics from a broadly phenomenological perspective and with an eye to the tradition of transcendental philosophy and the history of the Analytic-Continental divide. Pol Vandevelde  is Professor of Philosophy at Marquette University (Milwaukee, USA). His monographs include: Être et Discours: La question du langage dans l’itinéraire de Heidegger (1927–1938) (Académie Royale de Belgique, 1994), which was awarded the “First Prize” by the Royal Academy of Belgium; The Task of the Interpreter: Text, Meaning, and Negotiation (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005); and Heidegger and the Romantics: The Literary Invention of Meaning (Routledge, 2012). He is the co-director of the book series Issues in Phenomenology and Hermeneutics (Bloomsbury) and of the bi-lingual journal Études phénoménologiques – Phenomenological Studies. Katherine Withy is Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Georgetown University. Her book Heidegger on Being Uncanny was published by Harvard University Press in 2015.

Index

absence see presence and absence acquisition see language acquisition Adorno, Theodor 151, 171 ale¯theia 40, 101, 108, 110, 112, 151; see also truth ambiguity 2, 11, 136, 154–155, 206, 281, 285–286 analogy 281–282, 284, 293 analytic philosophy 2, 4, 11–13, 21, 43, 80–81, 293 animal 101, 118, 129, 134, 140, 219, 222–223, 234, 242, 268 Apostolopoulos, Dimitris 5 apperception 86, 199–201, 205–206, 209, 216; see also perception appropriation see linguistic appropriation Aquinas, Thomas 105 Aristotle 11; on being human 101, 119, 144; on discursivity 123–125; on interpretation 251; on judgment 59, 120–121, 128; on logos 27–28, 117–120, 129; on perception 120–126; his rhetoric 104–106, 140; on truth 108, 128; on voice 134 assertions or judgments 7, 28, 39, 106, 132–136, 144, 145; assertion as other than judgment 225; Heidegger on 27–28, 102–103, 106, 108–109, 117, 120–122, 128, 129, 132–134, 153; Husserl on 37, 59–60, 84–86, 89, 213–215, 219–220, 225–226; and the pre-predicative 9–10, 29–35, 37, 58–64, 67–68, 74, 117, 120–122 Augustine 11, 274, 281, 285, 287 Aurora, Simone 37 Bachelard, Gaston 150, 158–160, 162, 171 Barinaga, Marcia 236 Baumeister, Roy 208 Bedeutung see meaning

behavior see comportment behaviorism 22, 37, 94 being-in-the-world 29–35, 102–106, 116–118, 127, 136, 143, 250, 291 Benn, Gottfried 151 Benoist, Jocelyn 37, 208 Benveniste, Emile 267 Berlin, Isaiah 50, 54 Berman, Antoine 267 Bernet, Rudolf 208 Beyer, Christian 4 Bishop, Elizabeth, 162–164 Blackburn, Simon 21, 37, 38, 40 Blanchot, Maurice 149–151, 158–159, 169–171 Boghossian, Paul 76 Borge, Steffen 236 Bowman, Curtis 208 Breitling, Andris 5–6 Bruner, Jerome 194–195, 207, 236, 238–239, 245 Bruns, Gerald 152, 158 Burge, Tyler 190, 191 Campbell, Scott 5 Carman, Taylor 5, 39, 54, 116–117, 128, 136, 144, 145 Carnap, Rudolf 61, 277, 292 Carpenter, Malinda 245 Carr, David 69, 86 Carruthers, Peter 196–197, 201, 207–209 Cavallaro, Marco 227 Chemero, Anthony 243 child: development 207–208, 261; feral 245, 286; and language learning 5, 194–197, 236–243, 251–252, 262, 285–287, 293; and phenomenology 234–236; and play 253–256, 260; and primitive normativity 79–84, 86–87; and understanding 258; see also education

302 Index Chomsky, Noam 37, 44, 54 Clark, Adam 245 Clark, Eve 242 clearing 36, 283 Cobb-Stevens, Richard 93–96, 112 cognition, 54, 179, 227; and cognitive science 6, 24, 243; and conversation 249, 255–261; and development 194–198, 207, 208, 241, 251, 256, 260–261; and history 201; and poetry 156, 166; and pointing 52; and pre-predicative 63, 65; social 251, 256, 259; see also understanding communication 21, 24, 27–29, 33–34, 39, 46, 53, 78, 89, 103–104, 117–118, 121, 125–126, 134–135, 139–140, 142, 150, 154–155, 159, 179, 195, 212–227, 231–236, 238–239, 242, 257, 259–261, 275, 277, 286 community 86–87, 139–140, 144, 207, 260, 270; analogical 186; complex 187–190; cultural 70; linguistic 22, 44, 67–69, 201–202, 205, 260; simple 178–180 comportment 29, 98, 104, 115, 121, 127, 133, 135–136, 142–144, 259, 261; as behavior 29, 31, 32, 43–45, 51, 53, 196, 234–236, 238–239, 241–243, 285; bodily 33, 39, 45, 66, 86; practical 52, 117 conversation 6, 25, 104, 121, 142–144, 206, 213–215, 230–231, 241–242, 248–249, 255–262, 273, 280, 287; see also dialogue Cook, Eleanor 172 Crowell, Steven, 4, 7, 10, 90, 281–284 Culbertson, Carolyn 5, 261 culture 49, 69–71, 140, 142, 184, 186, 195–198, 200–201, 206, 229–236, 239, 242–244, 257, 262, 265, 267, 269–270 Cunningham, Suzanne 208 Dahlstrom, Daniel, 7, 37, 38, 281 Dasein (human existence) 10, 30, 104–109, 112, 115, 127, 150, 229, 261, 279, 281 Dastur, Francoise 95, 97, 98, 100–101, 105, 114 Davidson, Donald, 37, 39, 179, 191, 245 deconstruction 57, 61, 65–67, 245, 268 Derrida, Jacques, 2–3, 9–10, 171, 227, 245, 267–268, 271, 277 Detienne, Marcel 171

diachronic 45, 48, 49, 195, 198 dialogue 92, 101, 139–141, 144, 146, 150, 155, 241–242, 254–256; see also conversation disclosure 2, 5–8, 24–26, 29–31, 33–34, 67, 108, 110, 115–121, 124–125, 127–128, 136–139, 141, 150–164, 169–170, 229–244, 249, 252–253, 256–261, 274–276, 285 discourse or talk 10, 23, 27–28, 30–32, 34, 37, 48, 80, 92, 94, 102–108, 111, 115–117, 119–129, 132–137, 139–140, 142–145, 150, 277, 282, 290 dispositions or moods 10, 105–107, 111, 134–135, 139–140, 145, 150, 229, 235, 238 Dodd, James 4 Dreyfus, Hubert 128, 250, 261 Drummond, John 90 dwelling 126, 135, 140, 143, 229–233, 237, 243–244, 252, 261, 264, 266 eavesdropping see language acquisition education 248–262; see also child eidetic intuition 156, 166–167 eidetic phenomenology see phenomenology embodiment 1, 5, 6, 11, 32–36, 38–39, 43–53, 84–89, 159, 202, 229–239, 243–244, 284; see also comportment, gesture, joint presence, ostension empathetic presentification 216–219, 224–226, 269 Engelland, Chad 5, 6, 7, 11–12, 39, 40, 54, 111, 190, 245, 252, 262, 274, 279, 284–286, 292, 293 Escudero, Jesús Adrián 113 existence 10, 22, 29–32, 93, 102, 106–110, 115, 237, 244, 279 existential phenomenology see phenomenology existentials 15, 29–32, 39, 116, 119–120, 128, 136, 139, 232 experience 22–24, 37–38, 43–44, 51, 53, 56–57, 65–71, 81–82, 88–89, 123, 127–128, 196, 230, 232, 234–235, 237, 240–242, 249, 252, 255–258, 273–276; everyday 7, 77, 93, 101–111, 161; of language use 21–36, 48, 120, 179–180, 190; language of 1–13, 96–102, 273–293; of others 50, 212–227; phenomenological versus Kantian 8, 57; and poetry 151–160; pre-predicative 60–62, 64–65, 68, 94–95, 108–111; secondary 224–225;

Index see also lived experience, perception, pre-predicative, presence and absence expression 2, 13, 24–35, 43–50, 53, 63–63, 71–72, 89, 92–93, 100–103, 109, 200, 203, 206, 209, 213, 220, 222–224, 242, 255–256, 278–280, 291–293; bodily 33, 70, 140, 216, 236, 243 expressivism 50 expressivity, 48, 70 everyday: experience 6, 8, 10, 25, 75, 77, 93, 102, 160–162, 171, 284, 291, 293; language 2, 10, 12, 25, 34, 36, 93, 101–111, 152, 155, 215, 273, 276–277, 281–283, 288, 293; objects 70, 85; practice 268, 273, 286 everyday discourse see discourse factical: language 121, 233–237, 244; life 93–101, 108–109, 113, 242–243 Fairfield, Paul 257–258, 262 Fernyhough, Charles 240 Fink, Eugen 281–282 Fischer, Luke 172 Flack, Patrick 37 flesh 9, 274, 285, 289; see also embodiment flexion: of being 274; of experience 275, 287 formal indication 98, 112–113, 231, 235, 279–280; see also Heidegger Fóti, Veronique 171 Freire, Paulo 248 Froman, Wayne 35, 40 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 1, 15, 92–93, 111, 112, 154–157, 160, 248–261, 269, 286 Gallagher, Shaun 255, 257, 259, 262 genetic phenomenology see phenomenology George, Stefan 151–152 gesture 32–35, 38–40, 46–50, 53, 135, 145, 209, 233, 236, 244, 251–252, 285–286; see also comportment, embodiment, ostension Ginsborg, Hannah 78–81, 84, 86–87, 90 Goldstein, Kurt 38, 50–52 Golob, Sacha 7, 129, 144 Goodale, Melvyn 51 Gosetti-Ferencei, Jennifer Anna 5, 154, 171, 172 Grice, Herbert Paul, 36–37 Gutting, Gary 293 Hamburger, Käte 166, 172 Hatab, Lawrence 5, 6–7, 190, 191, 229, 230, 232, 235, 244, 245, 250, 261

303

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm 57, 68 Heidegger, Martin. 1–10, 12, 23–36, 92–111, 115–128, 132–144, 149–158, 160, 170, 250, 259, 277–281, 291; on assertion 27–28, 102–103, 106, 108–109, 117, 120–122, 128, 129, 132–134, 153; early 26, 95, 97, 101, 105, 110–111; his Being and Time 2, 5, 7–9, 15, 27–32, 34, 39, 92, 95, 97, 102–112, 115–124, 128–129, 132, 137, 144–145, 150, 154, 170, 250, 261; his On the Way to Language 151; see also being-in-the-world; comportment; Dasein; disclosure; discourse; disposition; dwelling; everyday; existence; existential; existentials; factical; house of being; phenomenology; pre-reflective; takingnotice; uncovering Henry, Michel, 2 hermeneutic “as” 10, 103, 122–125 hermeneutic phenomenology see phenomenology Higginbotham, James, 37 Hirsch, E. D. 257 history 44–45, 48, 54, 57–58, 61, 95, 151, 185, 195–196, 198, 201, 204–207, 233, 242, 244, 266–271 Hobbes, Thomas 46 Hölderlin, Friedrich 141, 143–144, 146, 149, 151, 171, 262 hospitality 264–271 house of being 3, 137–138, 140–141, 143, 145 Huizinga, Johan 262 Husserl, Edmund 1–12, 23, 26–28, 45, 56–72, 74, 81–89, 93–98, 109–111, 149, 158, 166–167, 184–188, 198–207, 212–227, 274, 277–279, 287–292; on assertion and judgment 37, 59–60, 84–86, 89, 213–215, 219–220, 225–226; his Crisis 85, 184, 191, 279; his Experience and Judgment 10, 37, 56, 58, 59, 62, 65, 110; his Formal and Transcendental Logic 37, 56; his Ideas 11, 198, 279, 288; his Logical Investigations 1, 4, 9, 10, 97, 194, 198, 208, 213, 216, 220–222, 225, 278, 290–291; his “Origin of Geometry” 184, 191, 198; see also apperception; eidetic intuition; empathetic presentification; experience; expression; indication; institution; intentionality; intimation; linguistic appropriation;

304

Index

perception; phenomenology; pre-predicative; presence and absence; rule-following idealization 45, 57, 65–71, 182, 190 ideas 13, 27–28, 46, 49–50, 160, 195, 232, 257 idle talk 32, 92, 103–108, 111, 194 idiolect 37, 179, 182–183, 189–190 indeterminacy 34, 48–49, 85, 87, 89, 90, 206, 280–286, 293 indication 11, 32–33, 118, 134, 199, 201–204, 220–224, 238, 252, 278–283, 287–293; see also formal indication individualism 43, 178–180, 189 inflection 274–275, 283–293 institution 33, 177, 184–189, 290 intentionality, 11, 21, 26–29, 32–33, 38–39, 49, 62–72, 81–90, 95, 150, 153–155, 159–160, 185, 205, 213–214, 217–219, 223, 227, 231, 252, 262, 285; empty and filled 9, 94, 112–113, 152, 291; motor 43, 51–53; see also embodiment; noema internalism–externalism debate 4 intersubjectivity 4, 8, 11, 33, 66–71, 84–87, 200–202, 204, 284, 289 intimation 145, 213–224, 231, 238–239, 242, 280 Inkpin, Andrew 5–7, 12, 15, 38, 39, 128, 191, 192 Jackendoff, Ray 241, 245 Jani, Anna 112 joint attention 39, 54, 191, 238–239, 242, 251–252, 261, 284; see also joint presence joint presence 5, 39, 274, 284–286, 288, 290, 293; preferable to joint attention 284; see also joint attention judgment see assertion Kant 8, 56, 57, 79, 81, 84–85, 88, 90, 151 Kearney, Richard 269 Keller, Helen 233–234, 240, 245 Kirkham, Julie 241 Kisiel, Theodore 99–100, 109, 277 Knowles, Adam 145 Kramsch, Claire 245 Krell, David 171 Kripke, Saul, 75–77, 86–88, 90, 191 Kuhn, Thomas 141, 291 Kukla, Rebecca 145

Lafont, Cristina 39 Laing, Catherine 236 Lakoff, George 245 Landgrebe, Ludwig 56, 65 langage 25, 49–50 Langland-Hassan, Peter 208 language: community 22, 44, 67–69, 201–202, 205, 260; experience of 21–36, 48, 120, 179–180, 190; of experience 1–13, 96–102, 273–293; games 34, 177, 181–183, 187, 190, 191; natural 21, 34, 40, 137, 182, 197–204, 206–208, 232, 236, 281; ordinary 2, 11, 13, 21, 36, 149–151, 157, 212, 274–275, 277–279, 282, 288, 292–293; scaffolding role of 31, 72, 177, 189, 194–207, 238–239, 241, 243, 245; and thought 24, 34–35, 105, 178, 194–208, 214, 233, 237, 240, 242, 244, 256, 280; see also language acquisition language acquisition: account of everyday 235–239, 252–257, 284–288; by eavesdropping 262, 273, 280, 287, 291–292; phenomenological problem of 276–278, 288–293 Lee, Nam-In 10 Levinas, Emmanuel 72, 158 lifeworld 65–66, 83–87, 111, 113, 267 linguistics 6, 23, 43–46, 54, 153 linguistic appropriation 188–189, 212–213, 224–227, 274–275, 283–284, 288 linguistic hospitality 264–271 literacy 229, 243–244 lived experience 23, 37, 44–45, 79, 88–89, 92–93, 95–101, 109–111, 120, 127–128, 177–180, 190; see also experience Locke, John 27–28, 38 logic 7, 43, 105, 121, 279; of experience 1, 13, 278, 286, 293; genealogy of 2, 10, 58–65, 71; of language 180; of painting 185; transcendental 56 logos 1–3, 27–28, 58, 62–63, 65, 71–72, 97, 101, 107–108, 117–120, 127, 132, 134, 143–144, 265; apophantikos 10, 59, 72, 108, 120–121, 128, 144; in Aristotle 27–28, 117–120, 129; and taking-as 122–125, 126; its ontological function 126–128; and perception 120–126; and phenomenology 1–3, 27, 92, 106, 273, 282–283, 292–293 Lohmar, Dieter 227

Index Luft, Sebastian 86 Luks, Leo 172 MacAvoy, Leslie 112, 113, 128 Malcolm, Norman 191 Maly, Kenneth 5 Mampe, Birgit 236 Mattens, Filip 4 McDowell, John 68 McMullin, Irene 128, 136, 145 meaning 4, 24, 28–36, 43–54, 62–64, 69, 74–89, 97–98, 110, 119, 122, 141, 143, 149, 155, 178–179, 185–186, 196–209, 212–216, 218, 221–226, 229–242, 252–254, 256–261, 265, 273–274, 276, 278–280, 282–283, 285–289, 291–292; and antireductionism 75–78; and history 44–45, 48, 54, 57–58, 61, 95, 151, 185, 195–196, 198, 201, 204–207, 233, 242, 244, 266–271; normativity of 5, 50, 71, 74–90, 191, 203, 230, 265; and partial reductionism 78–80; and perception 3, 9, 26, 36, 38, 56, 80–89, 115, 117, 120–128, 287; and reductionism 75–78; structure of 31, 44, 119, 124–127, 137; see also meaning-intention; pre-predicative; reference meaning-intention 76–77, 198–207 meaning skepticism 75 Melle, Ullrich 208 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 1–2, 5–6, 11, 21–25, 28–29, 32–36, 43–54, 56–57, 72, 149, 184–189, 245, 256, 274, 284–285; his Phenomenology of Perception 32, 37, 47, 50; on Schneider 50–52, 54; see also embodiment; gesture; perception; phenomenology metaphor 36, 39, 164–168, 170, 243, 245, 282–284, 293 method see phenomenology metonymy 29, 35, 282–284, 293 Meyer, Jan 252 Mildenberg, Ariane 172 Miller, Alexander 90 Milner, David 51 Mohanty, J. N. 37, 208 moods see dispositions Moran, Dermot 111–112 Mundy, Peter 251 Natanson, Maurice 172 Nelson, Eric 112

305

Nelson, Katherine 236, 242, 245 Nielsen, Cynthia 262 narrative see hospitality noema 59–60, 63, 65, 82–83, 90, 98; see also intentionality normativity 5, 50, 71, 74–90, 191, 203, 230, 265 ontic 86, 274, 277, 281–283 ontological 29, 65, 67, 100, 116–117, 126–128, 136–138, 150, 152–153, 165, 171, 230, 249–250, 253, 267, 281 ostension 11, 33, 39, 43, 50, 52, 53, 54, 145, 252, 262, 280, 281, 285–286 Papineau, David 38 parole 25, 33, 44–45, 49–50 Paul, St. 99–100, 109 perception 32, 37, 40, 63–64, 85, 90, 217, 242, 289; and bodily agency 11, 32, 245; as fulfillment of meaning-intention 9, 26, 36, 38; judgments of 67, 215, 218; and language 56, 115, 117, 120–126, 287; normativity of 80–86; ontological function of 126–128; and poetry 160, 164–166, 168, 170; sensual 69, 71; widening of 3, 274–275; see also apperception Perricone, Christopher 160–161, 170, 172 phenomenological reduction see phenomenology phenomenology; eidetic 56, 69, 90, 98, 112, 156, 160, 166–167; existential 23, 29–32, 39, 92, 171, 229, 249–252, 261; genetic 57–58, 90, 112; hermeneutic 5, 10, 12, 15, 92–94, 101, 109–111, 112–113, 149, 153–155, 169, 257–259, 265, 268–269; its language 2–3, 273–293; and logos 1–3, 27, 92, 106, 273, 282–283, 292–293; minimalist 6, 8, 191; as a philosophy of language 1–2, 9, 11, 13, 28, 32, 36, 43, 74, 88, 109; proto- 6, 8, 229–237, 244; and reduction 9, 81–82, 86, 88, 113, 276, 281–282; transcendental 6–9, 56, 71, 88, 90, 93–95, 113, 184–185, 187, 231, 274–275, 282–284, 286, 288–289, 291–293 philosophy of language 1–2, 4, 9, 11, 13, 21, 28, 32, 36, 43, 74, 88, 109 Pimentel, Dror 154 play 195, 249, 252–262 poetry, 13, 23, 140–141, 145–146, 149–171, 206, 244, 289

306

Index

pointing 11, 33, 38, 43, 50–53, 219, 221, 238, 251–252, 280–281, 285; see also gesture, indication, ostension pointing out 28, 102–103, 121, 132; see also assertion, predication Powell, Jeffrey 5, 39, 150, 153 pragmatic 10, 21, 31, 112, 116, 133, 145, 177, 212, 238, 245, 251, 253, 255–257 praxeological 180–183, 187–190 predication 10, 27–28, 37, 39, 44, 56, 59–61, 70–72, 85, 96, 102–103, 106, 108–110, 132–133, 144, 274 prelinguistic 15, 53, 57, 116, 235–236, 238, 240–241, 255, 259, 274, 284–286, 290 presence and absence 3, 5, 9–11, 39, 156, 158–159, 161, 166, 179, 217, 221–224, 227, 244, 258, 273–277, 282–293 pre-predicative 10, 56–72, 94–97, 102, 106, 108–111, 122 pre-reflective, 21, 24–26, 30, 94, 229, 232 primitive normativity 78–81, 84, 87, 89 principle of reducibility 61 psychology 6, 8, 22, 24, 29–35, 43, 45, 99, 105, 139, 194–195, 214, 231, 237, 240, 242, 251, 284 Putnam, Hilary 190, 191 Quine, Willard van Orman 37, 280–281, 285–286 reference 21, 26–27, 30, 39, 43, 53, 61, 69–70, 118–119, 125, 200, 214, 223, 242, 278–280, 286–287; and poetry 156–157; see also meaning regressive method see logic, genealogy of rhetoric 23, 99, 101, 105–106, 108–110, 140–141 Ricoeur, Paul, 8–9, 264–271, 275–276 Rieckmann, Jens 171 Rilke, Rainer Maria 149, 164–167 robot 226–227 Rorty, Richard 189, 191, 192 rule-following 21–22, 26, 38, 66, 71, 74–89, 181, 190, 192, 205, 239, 253–254, 256, 262, 268, 291 Rump, Jacob 90 Sartre, Jean-Paul 37, 40, 149, 157 Saussure, Ferdinand de 6, 25, 38, 40, 44–49, 54 Savage, Robert 171

scaffolding role of language 31, 72, 177, 189, 194–207, 238–239, 241, 243, 245 Schear, Joseph 144, 146 Scheler, Max, 1, 13, 278 Schemen, Naomi 181 Searle, John, 11, 245 Seebohm, Thomas 69 Seeman, Axel 245 self-awareness 13, 25, 97, 230, 235, 239–243 self-expression 38, 117, 142, 146, 242 self-evidence 60, 62, 71, 97 self-reflection 93, 95–96, 108, 249, 258–259, 262 self-understanding 115, 157, 162, 178, 242 semantics 44, 46, 71, 238, 275, 277, 284, 286, 290, 293 sense 3, 24, 28, 30–34, 47–48, 54, 69–70, 84–85, 90, 95, 100, 124, 157, 185, 196, 207–209, 223–224, 226, 278 Seyfarth, Robert 227 signs 11, 24, 29, 46–47, 141, 153, 200, 204, 209, 213–214, 220–222, 232–233; system of 153, 180, 183–190, 286; see also expression, indication Simms, Eva 245 Smith, Barry 191 Smith, David Woodruff 37, 208 social holism 177–180, 192 Soffer, Gail 10 Sokolowski, Robert, 3–4, 6, 9–12, 37, 113, 282–284, 287 speech 1–5, 7–8, 25, 28, 33–35, 44–49, 105–109, 117–119, 129, 155, 192, 195–198, 207–208, 212–214, 216–218, 225–226, 231–233, 243–244, 236–243, 256–257, 264–266, 273–293 see also logos speech acts, 38, 44–45, 105–106, 225, 238 Spelke, Elizabeth 242 Staiti, Andrea 59, 66, 67, 69, 71 Stawarska, Beata 6, 37 Stein, Edith 277 Stern, Daniel 236 Stevens, Wallace 167–170 Storey, Robert 238 structuralism 44 structure: of community 177, 236; of comporting 29, 217; of culture 65, 70; of discourse 136; of experience 1, 3, 48, 58, 63, 65, 81–82, 88, 94–95, 120, 275, 279, 283, 286, 289; of gesturing 32, 34; of interpretation 122–125, 133;

Index of language, 44–45, 49, 53, 181; of logic 43, 65; of meaning 31, 44, 127, 137; of parts and wholes 274, 287; of practices 180, 187, 189; of predication 59–60, 109, 128; of shared experience 6; of speech 3; of syntax 56, 63–64, 288; of world 115, 118–119, 126–128, 149, 150, 238, 241, 291 synchronic 45, 48, 49, 195, 198 syntax 6, 25, 44, 64, 71, 205, 256, 275, 277, 284, 286–290 talk see discourse taking as see hermeneutic “as” taking-notice (Kenntnisnehmen) 96–98, 109 Taylor, Charles 5, 50, 54, 136, 140, 144, 145, 190 Taylor, Talbot 245 Theiner, Georg 243 Tobias, Rochelle 172 Tomasello, Michael 54, 227, 239, 245, 251, 285 Trakl, Georg 153–154 transcendental phenomenology see phenomenology translation 39, 139, 264–271, 276 Travers, Martin 171 truth 7, 11, 13, 48, 56, 61, 67, 80, 94–95, 99, 101–102, 105–110, 112, 121, 149–151, 155, 158, 160, 168, 170, 219, 254, 258, 260; see also ale¯theia uncovering 108, 110, 118, 132–144, 151 understanding 10, 24, 30, 34–35, 43, 54, 68–70, 77, 84–85, 93, 103–105, 109, 115, 117, 124–125, 127, 136, 143, 150, 155, 163, 170, 179, 185, 206, 213, 233, 236, 243, 279–280, 286, 291–292; and conversation 216–219,

307

225–226, 255–261; existential conception of 249–252; role of play in 252–255 usage 45, 75–77, 89, 230–231, 233, 237–238, 242; see also pragmatic Vandevelde, Pol, 208 Vilhauer, Monica 262 Villela-Petit, Maria 71 Vicente, Agustin 210 Vohs, Kathleeen 208 Vygotsky, Lev 194–198, 201, 207–208, 240–241 Watsuji, Tetsuro¯ 250–251, 261 Welsh, Talia 245 Welton, Don 208 Wiercinski, Andrej 257, 262 Williams, William Carlos 160–162 Winch, Peter 191 Winkler, Michael 171 Winsler, Adam 240, 241, 245 Withy, Katherine 145 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 12, 43–45, 75, 89, 145, 157, 180–183, 187–189, 237, 274, 281, 285–287 Wolfson, Elliot 171 word 24, 28–29, 33, 38, 46–47, 67, 76–78, 141, 146, 151–155, 157, 169, 196–204, 208–209, 232–233, 256, 266, 281, 285 Wrathall, Mark 5, 145, 146 Wright, Crispin 191 writing 25, 96, 188–190, 243–244, 256, 280 Zahavi, Dan, 4 Ziarek, Krzysztof 5 Zhu, Lei 37 Zlatev, Jordan 37