Continental
Saussure published about lithuanian.
He spent a couple of weeks in Lithuania and only read a German commentary on the language. In Geneva he taught lithuanian then with an assistant who actually knew lithuanian. Wacky.
Language is not a substance, but exists only in the form, which is the system.
The contact between speech and thought gives rise to the sign. This is where the object of language exists. Language is a form, and not a substance.
What creates the meaning of a sign is value. You don’t need the full grasp of the value of a sign without understanding its meaning. Meaning depends on value.
As soon as things are put into a system, it has value. If it is exchangable for something else, or something similar, then it is valueable.
A word is also comparable or exchangable for another sign in another language. eg. Mutton is sheep-meat, but mouton is a sheep and its meat.
If you take out one sign, its value must necessarily be dispersed somewhere else. All the other signs that are in relationship to it must now reposition themselves within the system. There are no blindspots in a language, everything is understandable in it.
Reality as such becomes only distinguishable by the very fact of signs which themselves can refer to reality. In the case of psychological states, it is language that allows us to make these differences. A lot of things only occur when we have the names for those things.
The essence of things in french theory lies outside the thing, on the margins of it.
The whole sign has value, but also if you abstract the two dimensions of the sign, you can analyse the signifier and the signified and discover the same kind of relatedness to the outside. The signified is only insofar as it is distinguished from other signified. The signifier much alike.
The sound of a word is not important, but its phonetic contrasts which allow us to distinguish it from another.
On the level of the signifier, be it phonetic or graphic, the principle of difference over identity prevails.
The fact that we can recognise signs is a system is because it is closed within a certain number of things, as such things are demarcated entirely from their difference to that closed set of other things; what comes first are the differences, and then come the constituted differences however. Identities are nothing but the outcome of differences. Saussure unwittingly overthrows the history of metaphysics.
Living corporeality:”reveals to us an ambiguous mode of exitance”
It incorporates elements which are cognitive and carnal, mental and sensorial, subjective and objective.
Saussure criticies the idea that naively we first have the things, and then we label them.
Every concept is structurally bound to a sign. In a way the relationship to Saussure for Merleau ponty is ambiguous because he criticises him for not focusing on speech, but on the other hand he goes along with Saussure in discovering that every idea and concept is structurally bound to a sign.
For Sassure the phonetic chain, or sound pattern, is not a physical entity, but already a psychological imprint of a code. Nevertheless the idea is attached to this code. Saussure is someone who brought back to our attention not the materiality of the sign, but the structural intertwinement of ideas and things that are not ideas.
MP takes inspiration from Saussure, but criticises the intellectual tendency in him to favour linguistic structure over speech.
After the Phenomenology of perception, MP incorporates more Saussure. In the 40s, he elaborated already on an interpretation of perception which is derived from Saussurean analysis. Claude levi strauss, who imported linguistics into anthropology, was a friend of MP, and MP was very inspired by the upcoming of structuralism. MP was probalby the first to take structural linguistics seriously in philosophy.
Often we oppose phenomenology with structuralism, the one being about subjectivity and feeling, the other deconstructing that without the speaker into the collective unconscious. Meaning is created within the system alone between the differences of the sign. Language is not something that we manage freely, but somewthing we are governed by, an anonymous semantic which we are subordinated to.
Structuralism tries to explain the significance of the world by relating to an anonymous system, whilst phenomenology anchors the origin of all sense-making in the subject. The question here is whether the subject can be overthrown or kept. MP is trying to navigate between these two traditions. In the phenomenology of perception he tries to show the embeddedness of the living body which is anonymous and non-mastered. We try to master it as much as possible but it escapes us. He is already deconstructing the subject here. In his unfinished masterpiece he attempts to deconstruct it entirely.
”The spoken word is a genuine gesture, and it contains its meaning in the same way as the gesture contains its own meaning. Thisis what makes communication possible.”
Just as Saussure says that there are a lot of signs in the world, there is also one sign which allows us to understand all the others → the linguistic sign.
Saussure projects a new semiotics (the signs of signs, which we need for linguistics; linguistic signs, the study of semiology, is what allows us to construe all other studies of signs; the linguistic sign is the paradigmatic sign that allows us to understand all other signs; what Husserl calls indication, there is no meaning but a referens. We can construe all kinds of semiotics by having understood semiology)
MP adopts a similar strategy, but focuses on expressions. Bodily physical expressions, of animals and human beings. All living beings express. It is the result of having a living body that we express our supposedly internal states outside with our body. The expressive sign, is for MP the paradigmatic study we have to study to understand the linguistic sign, it should construe a semiology.
Meaning is not internal, not a purely mental process
No interpretation, no representation required to understand the other’s expression; meaning is enacted via the body and the signs.
The one who reads the signs is not a humunculus in my head, but rather my perceptive body that sees and reads the emotion at play. I see someone crying, and this affects me. The body immediately reads the expression of the other in a kind of mimetic. The body is both the speaking agent and the listening agent. If we didn’t have a body, then we couldn’t understand whether or not someone is angry. It is because I get red and hot, that I see the redness and hotness of the other that I can see the anger of another. A pure spirit could not understand a human being.
This is not to say that we are always correct, but rather there is a cultural configuration of the body. The body is shaped. If we consider it in one cultural sphere, the interpretation comes only after the fact. The whole senso-motoric apparatus is taken into account here. Clothes and such are rather however about the cognising subject and is not about immediate interpretation. He takes into account the factuality, the factic structure of our existance. Everything is not invention or creation. Pretending is possible because there is a genuine expression at the bottom line; eg Nietzsche would say the opposite.
The living body is always in transition of trying to reincorprate Körper into Leib. If he saw it as being purely subjective he would be cartesian, but he sees that our body is full of resistance and non-mastering, it is always on the edge of becoming körper, we are always fighting to keep it as Leib.
”Faced with an angry or threatening gesture, I have no need, in order to understand it, to recall the feeling which I myself experienced when I used these gestures on my own account. I know very little, from inside, I do not see anger or a threatening attitude as a psychic fact hidden behind the gesture, I read anger in it. The gesture does not make me think of anger, it is anger itself”.
We can do things without inferring through the cartesian mind behind us.
Meaning is part of the world. Linguistic meaning is part of the world itself, insofar as it is vocalised. The meaning is out there. If you hear a word, you hear the meaning. You don’t have to infer what the meaning is. As soon as you are confronted with the sign, you know the meaning. As soon as you recognise a drawing as a certain picture, you know what it is, there is no intermediate step.
There is an ontological transformation in childhood, as the moment we are part of the community, we are looking for efficiency in trying to immediately understand every immediate sign. This is why our consciousness is biassed toward certain things. Meaning is not seperable from the words that we use to express them. Here he goes along with Saussure. MP radicalises the approach by saying that we have to understand the sign as an expression.
”I do not need too visuealise th word in order to know and pronounce it. It is enough that I possess its articulatory and acoustic style as one of the modulations, one of the possible uses of my body. I reach back for the word as my hand reaches towards the part of my body whoich is being pricked; the word has a certain location in my linguistic world, and is part of my equipment. I have only one means of representing it, which is uttering it, just as the artist has only one means of representing the work on which he is engaged: by doing it!”
What your body is striving at is to produce the articulatory inner voice pattern required to remember a concept, when we can’t properly remember something. I don’t have to reflect on the words I am saying when I say them, and sometimes we don’t find the words. Usually, as long as we talk, we don’t choose the words we are uttering. It is not like going to the supermarket. This happens instantly. Our body reaches out to the words, as if they were things in the world. In making good discourse, I am reaching out to things I need to express the existential tendency I wish to communicate. What I want to communicate is merely a directional impulse, and my body, if I am skilled at it, will find the words to do this. This is not a mental activity, but rather physical. It all works by analogy. I don’t have to visualise my body doing certain things.
The notion of the body schema (or image):
(in 99 there were some English scientists, Head, who made resarch on Schilder and the body schema.)
It is a kind of automatic spatialisation that we have of our body. Automatically, I have a very precise geographic picture of my body. I do not have to think where it hurts in order to find the spot. If someone writes a letter at my back, I can read that letter.
My body schema is not restricted to the physical form of my body, but extends beyond it. Head made a crazy experiment where he made people wear inverted goggles for a long time, and after one week, people are able to see straight again. Our brain puts it in the right direction. This is because the body, in its performances has become acquinted with the inverse images, normalises the picture and inverts it again. The body takes care of the configuration of itself. The body schema is structurally intertwined with the coherency of the perceptual world.
There are some signs that still need some more conscious activity however.
Words are objects, tools which we manipulate with our body, they are prolongations of my body.
Meaning in Husserl is the directedness towars a state of affaris, or the state of affairs that appears as meant. Thinking is the directedness towards the things that are thought, and it is the concern of it, and these things are not something in my head, but something out there in the world.
The spoken word is a gesture, and its meaning, a world (plural). Always out there, be it material, ideal etc.
Thought is no internal thing, and does not exist independently of the world and of words.
Through speech, thought becomes integrated in the sensible world.
He is thinking language through art, through doing.
The artist creates an art piece, and the artist is called by a kind of thing, which they do not yet know, and the artist has to create the art piece in order to know what it was that was pushing the artist towards creation. The creative process is only a process that only at the end of itself is a point at which the artist can know what called them. We don’t know what we want to say unless we have said it. This is why it is so important to say things, we need to say them out loud in order to actually have them.
The meaning of a sonata is inseperable from the sounds which are its vehicle. It is in the music itself that the meaning lies, otherwise art pieces would be simply concepts that are linguistic signs with a univocal referens to something meant. But an art piece needs to be thick and intransparent. If we could pinpoint the message of an art piece to one slogan, it is probably quite bad. The true aestethic form animates our thinking. But our thinking can never catch up to it, there is always more to say.
The meaning is inherent, and it cannot be extracted or reduced. The meaning is in the expression.
”Aesthetic expression confers on what it expresses an existence in itself, install it in nature as thing perceived and accessible to all”.
Existential meaning and Emotional essense.
There is not only a conceptual meaning, but also an existential meaning.
”We find here, beneath the conceptual meaning of the words, an existential meaning which is not only rendered by them, but which inhabits them, and is inseperable from them”.
The words we use, they are not purely neutral. If we have a certain semantic choice for some words, this expresses a kind of existance that we have, a certain way of experiencing the world. If you use a lot of analogies contra talking in technical terms, whatever style you have, is an expression of your existential meaning in saying. The meaning of a word does not purely express a purely mental meaning, but also of a way of being-in-the-world.
Existential meaning = personal and social associations attached to an intellectual meaning both both are mutually intertwined.
Because all conceptual meaning is inhabited by an ”existential meaning”, reading a novel is more than just an intellectual pleasure. The style of an author communicates a certain way of being in the world. The word in itself lacks an existential meaning, but if it is in a discourse, it has a style, and in this style, something is shown which is beyond the pure notational function of language. It confers a way of experiencing the world.
To understand language, we need to understand poetry and novels.
MP pushes language in the direction of artistic creation. We have to adopt the eye of the artist, the viewpoint of the artist, to understand all the intellectual entities we interpret in regards to language.
”It would then be found that the words, etc. are so many ways of singing the world, and that their function is to represent things not, as the naive onomatopoietic theory had it, by reason of an objective resemblance, but because they extract, and literally express, their emotional essence”.
There is something more communicated than the mere state of affairs. We are expressing a certain value with the state of affairs, with how we exist with the state of affairs etc.
This is the ’singing’. Singing is a way of approaching the state of affairs in an existential way. This is the emotional essence.
In the style of our discourse, we render not simply the state of affairs, but also the kind of emotions that this state communicates to us.
These are indicators of how he wants to make us see language.
This lets us see a kind of language which is created for our expressive capacities etc.
He is highlighting the non-intellectual dimensions that accompany linguistic meaning.
If linguistic meaning is reducible to mere intellectual meaning, we would never talk. Why would we talk if all we wanted to do was communicate an object state of affairs.
But I communicate because I am dependent on the world. The desire, and impulse to exist, must be traceable in language.
Speaking vs. Spoken speech.
Language is not reducible to artistic creation or other non-human modes of expression.
He recognises language as still being a very specfic mode of expression.
He uses the word from Husserl ’Sedimentation’:
”Alone of all expressive processes, speech is able to settle into a sediment and constitute an acquisition for use in human relationships.”
Meaning is deposited in a sign, for potential reactivation, for the very meaning put in it.
If you read a novel, you are able to put back to life the kind of meaning intentions that the author originally put in it. The meaning is sedimented in the words and the signs, and by being able to understand them, we can bring them back to life. All meanings, are borne in the acitivty of expression. It is the living body that creates these meanings, and once they are created they are deposited in the signs like a dormant figure, only being brought back to life by a new Leib. This is what sedimentation is. And it allows us to understand everything that at some point has been said. Because language sediments we can bring back the whole meaning and being in the world of the ones who made those signs. As such, history is possible. Things can be handed over from one generation to another.
Fink, Husserls last assistant published mainly on this here in Leuven.
Newly created meaning do not vanish but are prserved and transmitted from one generation to another. As such, we can re-enact the being in the world that stood behind the sedimentations.
However, it also allows for an automatic, or inauthentic, use of language. Forms of politeness for example are often not authentic, you often don’t give a fuck about how someone feels, you just want to communicate generally. A lot of things are said that are empty of any meaning. They are not animated by an authentic intention. We only hand out the signs, without brining to meaning what is said in them.
If you calculate 10+10, we don’t go through any proof that shows that this equals 20. You use the symbols in a sedimented and automatic way. We’re not bringing the object of 20 to life. Mathematics entirely works with these sedimented usages of language.
”We live in a world where speech is an institution.” Speech is like a dead structure. We often use it without thinking about it.
”For all these many commonplace utterances, we possess within ourselves ready-made meanings. They arouse in us only second order thoughts; these in turn are translated into other words which demand from us no real effort of expression and will demand from our hearers no effort of comprehension. Thus language and the understanding of language apparently raise no problems. The linguistic and intersubjective world no longer surprises us, we no longer distinguish it from the world itself, and it is within a world already spoken and speaking that we think”.
Language as insitution and automatism is always dependent upon creation.
The act of creation is a true act of making something new. To access a new expression. This means accessing a new sphere of reality. If the child has learned to say that it is sad/happy, something has changed in the world of this child. Insofar as the child appropriates the expression, it has to go through the authentic meaning intention of it. Only thereafter can we use the word as spoken, as sedimented automatism. Learning language is to be in a continous activity of creation. It is an ontological transfiguration. New types of objects actually come to exist in it.
This is why MP distinguishes between the word in the speaking (parole parlante, speaking speech) and the spoken word (parole parlee). The spoken word is the everyday usage of language without creation. The creation is already behind us, and we use the word automatically. Speaking speech, or the word in the speaking, is a rare creative act in which a new word is formed to express things that have not existed or been understood before. It creates a real new dimension in our existance.
Language doesn’t create its object, if there is not something there as its referent, there couldn’t be a word for it. But if there isn’t a word, it is really difficult to isolate the thing. Creation and discovery goes hand in hand.
Husserl the logician also wrote as Saussure, on semiotics. The first chapter we read by Husserl was the theory of the signs. They wrote more or less in the same time. But never read each other.
What alterity.
Alterity is a topic in philosophy that is linked to the 20th century. There are a lot of historical events that have made this notion so important. It is mainly a topic that emerged after WWII. When a lot of social and political processes went on, in which the imperialism of the west became more palpable in the colonies. As such, there was military contestation of the colonisers. This made the Europeans aware of the some imperialistic and colonising tendencies of the philosophies of European thinkers. The critique of a political bias emerges as such, when people see that European culture is intrinsically a colonising activity in the world.
The notion of alterity becomes a problem then, because how can we think about otherness?
Levinas dedicated a lot of books to this question.
Levinas says that reason is unable to think alterity, because it is in the essence of reason to homogenise and reduce the other to the sameness of reason. This is because when we understand something, we are projecting the correct meanings, and as such only understand what we put there.
Thus we cannot understand something else, we can only understand how we preconceive the other.
There is a tendency to reduce everything to the sameness of reason and concepts that we already understand. These discoveries go hand in hand with the political problems of the time.
Levi-Strauss criticised already in the 50s philosophical universalism, as being incapable of thinking the other. This is a crucial problem for his anthropology. It is the study of other cultures. How can I, in a scientific discourse, understand other people without only coming to understand myself.
We also read Lacan: saying that we cannot simply understand the other, but rather we cannot understand ourselves as otherness. He is deconstructing the cartesian subject that is in identity with itself, and has a transparent understanding of itself in reflection. However, Lacan shows that our selfness is permeated by otherness. The core of ourselves is another.
Todorov, wrote on the discovery of the Americas, and the colonising wars in 1530.