On language as a relation to the world

through Merleau-Ponty’s consideration of research on aphasia

Abstract

In his first work, The Structure of Behavior, Merleau-Ponty finds two moments of language in humans through reference to the research on aphasia at the time: first, the linguistic openness to the world through the inseparability of nascent [commençante] perception and linguistic consciousness; and second, the inherent liberating spontaneity of human beings that enables them to move between attention to the whole and to its parts through language. This work, however, only suggests two moments of language, and the “categorical attitude,” which is invoked to explain human behavior, overlaps with the intellectualism defined by Merleau-Ponty because it leaves room for linguistic acts to be taken as actions constituted by the categorical attitude. This article will discuss how Merleau-Ponty captures the relation between the two moments in language through a reading of the course notes of The Problem of Speech, because in this course Merleau- Ponty argues that the categorical attitude is not the power of thinking behind language but identifies speech acts [parole] as “inner speech form” and finds their function as a transcendental field. That is, language as a relation to the world opens subjects to the world, where the subject becomes able to exercise his or her liberating spontaneity in forming meaning through the differentiation of the lingual field.