The Weakness of Language; Part 5 of "The Visible and the Invisible"

Coming towards the end of The Visible and the Invisible, we find Merleau-Ponty coming to his most penetrating ideas on Phenomenology, and philosophy as the dialectic. We saw in the last post the unextinguishable fire of Merleau-Ponty confronting himself as someone who want's to understand the invisible sense of himself; never allowing himself to be settled in one notion of an infinite dialectic that keeps moving. Even as if he tells a story by saying that one comes to full acceptance by "stepping back and just looking", he nevertheless doesn't allow himself into this "positive" notion of the dialectic in hopes of gaining the "gaping quality" of the dialectic, in other words, the movement and not the settled notions of negativity and positivity. Much like the work on Derrida's interpretation of Husserl though, Merleau-Ponty comes up against the challenge brought to all phenomenologists by language, that all pervading manifestation of sense that doesn't seem to "merely" be one manifestation of a transcendental logic that Husserl wanted to prove in his Experience and Judgment. That both Derrida and Merleau-Ponty would confront language as the source and problem of phenomenology was always going to happen. As was stated in Derrida's interpretation of Husserl, one always applies ones concept to their version or story of a genesis. Even if a story of a genesis becomes abstract by the thinking of philosophy, it still relies on this one and only manifestation of what constitutes signified thought. Merleau-Ponty addresses language as rigorously as he does the dialectic. As The Visible and the Invisible wears on, you can almost sense Merleau-Ponty racing towards something he doesn't even intend to get to. There is certainly a sense of urgency that is pervading his style, a sense not found in his Phenomenology of Perception. How then does Merleau-Ponty confront the problem of language for the phenomenologist and the philosopher? "It is by considering language that we would best see how we are to and how we are not to return to the things themselves. If we dream of finding again the natural world or time through coincidence, of being identical to the 0-point which we see yonder, or to the pure memory which from the depths of ourselves governs our acts of recall, then language is a power for error, since it cuts the continuous tissue that joins us vitally to the things and to the past and is installed between ourselves and that tissue like a screen". Certainly a simile that belongs solely to Merleau-Ponty's prose (tissue like a screen). Language is how we first start to see what it means to "return to the things themselves", but language is a screen that cuts off the connection one would want to have with Being, that one is trying to seek through language. He refers to a zero-point which is the idea of a "pure" presence and somewhat surprisingly refers to pure memory as part of the work of phenomenology, not simply the intentional object of the act in pure memory, but the sense of pure memory itself which allows us to recall something "again and again". This is only surprising because Merleau-Ponty could have chosen any theme within Phenomenology to express the inescapable link between language and what Phenomenology is trying to describe. That he states the operation of "Pure Memory" described so solipistically and mechanically by Husserl in Experience and Judgment and his work on internal time consciousness is a pleasant surprise. I for one find that Phenomenology is most insightful when speculating on the actions of memory and the operations of sedimentation. For our purposes now though, it is to absolute zero-point of the presence, if it is at all "possible" in whatever ways we attempt to come to it. For Merleau-Ponty, this absolute presence is a tissue where everything is connected and a screen comes up in the manifestation of language that invades the tissue and makes us see this presence through a screen, obviously meaning with some distortions, and a degree of difference to a presence trying to be attained. This issues are obvious. Merleau-Ponty though expands his thought further to an almost-psychoanalytical description of the Dasein (being-there) who uses language. "The philosopher speaks, but this is a weakness in him, and an inexplicable weakness: he should keep silent, coincide in silence, and rejoin in Being a philosophy that is there ready-made. But yet everything comes to pass as though he wished to put into words a certain silence he hearkens to within himself". First off, Merleau-Ponty condemns (in the abstract) the spoken word as weakness of the thinker. Adding "Inexplicable weakness" is strange because of what follows in the next part of the sentence. Whether this is a translation problem or Merleau-Ponty's in his solipsistic moments, I don't know. Regardless, he asks us to coincide in silence, and rejoin in Being a philosophy that is there read-made. By the way, if those who are reading these posts are finding tons of analogies between Phenomenology and Eastern Philosophy, they wouldn't be mistaken. It's not strange that the Japanese have produced some incredible work in Phenomenology in the 20th century which this writing space will possibly take up for it's next text, the analysis of some of these Japanese phenomenologists. What can we possibly conceive as coinciding with silence and rejoining a ready-made Being. It's simply the idea of not talking and seeing what is already there. Phenomenology always tends to be bereft of any concrete examples so lets try to use one here to describe this idea. If I wander out into the wilderness by myself, I am most likely not talking unless I'm having a monologue with myself (which isn't unusual for "philosophers") or coming to past memories that are shaping my experience in the wilderness. But when I confront the fact that I need to pass over this stream and I don't have the jumping-power to jump over the steam I am left to what is already there. I can try to find a way around it walking above or below the stream to try to find a smaller gap so I can make the jump to the other side, but what often happens during these "wilderness expeditions" is that there is something "ready-made" for Being. In this case, it's usually a log that I can use to cross to the other side, albeit a log that might be slippery because if it's being permeated by the water below it. Try crossing it in an ice storm and you will really see how slippery a log can be, but personally, this is when "wilderness trips" are more fun. So here is an example of coinciding in silence with Being and the ready-made of Being. I'm not talking to myself when trying to find my way past the steam. I'm in Being using tools already "ready-to-hand" in order to accomplish certain things, in this case, crossing a river. The analogies here are absolute to part 1 of Heidegger's Being and Time where he establishes the concept of "ready-to-handness" so lucidly, and if I allow myself the luxury of throwing in my opinion on the matter of Phenomenology as a whole, no where will you find a better explanation of these ontological concepts of Dasein Being than in part 1 of Being and Time. Thus far the true philosopher is exactly the example I just gave (hey, aren't I great! I'm a true philosopher!). I'm not speaking and in a world with things that I happen to use without knowing that they are unusable. They are already (unconsciously) there and I am (unconsciously) already coming to the sense of using the log to cross over to the other part of the the mountain. I don't need to say to myself out-loud "I think this log will do for crossing over to the other side of the river. Of course, if I was with a bunch of wafflers who thought too much on the possibility of being able to cross the stream by the log, then it would be discussed. This is why "true" philosophers and phenomeologists tend to go on wilderness expeditions on their own :). One never tends to question oneself when not around others. Merleau-Ponty faithfully continues on in his well-practiced-dialectic-method by giving the thinker the possibility of being able to hear this silence and from this "hearkening" (Merleau-Ponty found it somewhat necessary for Phenomenology to be poetical, unlike Husserl) of this silence manifests a wish to put into words. This goes back to the last post where we found Merleau-Ponty "stepping back" from the negation of language (via doubt/skepticism) to "see the world as it is". I interpolated the idea that this can bring with it a tacky holistic fast-food religious experience of the presence. Essentially, the poetical, when done from an over-exuberant feeling of awe in the fact of what is just seen can make the Dasein (the Being-There, The Human Being) somewhat inappropriate and really just hokey. We've met these people before. The people who like to sum up the world in vast over-aggrandized statements, self-satisfied beyond belief (belonging nowhere to the dialectic of Mearleau-Ponty, Hegel, or Sartre.) are operating off that double negation of a "pure affirmation" without following through to the negation of the "pure affirmation". So for Merleau-Ponty, when one comes into the fact that they should be silent and "open to the world" if one were to really be good philosophers and phenomenologists (essentially nomads) then they shouldn't speak, but there is something coming from the belly of the thinker to expatiate this silence. Merleau-Ponty talks about the "Tyranny of Vision" of the world that is endowed to man. You could also say that there is a tyranny of language to Being, essentially the fact that there is no getting around the fact that one is always expressing by language these hidden secret structure of inner-silence, that nonetheless can't be described.
"His entire 'work' is this absurd effort. He wrote in order to state his contact with Being; he did not state it, and could not state it, since it is silence. Then he recommences...One has to believe, then, that language is not simply the contrary of the truth, of coincidence, that there is or could be a language of coincidence, a manner of making the things themselves speak-and this is what he seeks. It would be a language of which he would not be the organizer, words he would not assemble, that would combine through him by virtue of a natural intertwining of their meaning, through the occult trading of the metaphor-where what counts is no longer the manifest meaning of each word and each image, but the lateral relations, the kinships that are implicated in their transfers and their exchanges". If this sounds like what we called today "steam-of-conscious" thinking, you wouldn't be mistaken. This is basic solipsism in the flesh here. A language where the subject would not be the organizer? This in attempts to achieve the things themselves? It's no wonder why Merleau-Ponty found certain poetical prose as signifying phenomenology best. I personally think that Derrida's recognition of Joyce's Finnegan's Wake as an option for phenomenology from the mechanics of Husserl is better suited for the idea of phenomenology. It's not that difficult for a poet to hide intentional ambiguity's within their prose. I personally don't see this with the later Joyce, of course, there a couple thousand ideas of what the later Joyce is, but barring this infinite interpretation of an author, Joyce strikes me as absolutely operating in a context, albeit a context that is so specific and so indigenous that you never really solve the mannerisms and colloquialisms in the texts. It's as if if I were to be playing a basketball game at a friends house and his basketball hoop is slightly tilted to the right giving him an advantage on how to shoot the ball from that corner, and then writing about it. I could write about the fact that my friend said " 'Yep, I got the home court advantage' as I sat there disparaged over the fact that basketball hoops are supposed to be universally aligned". This to me signifys no ambiguity in the text, at least no intentional ambiguity. Will many people not understand it? Of course. But there is the tendency in many poets (of course I'm overgeneralizing here, and I wouldn't for a fact, as far as I read them, attribute a compulsion of ambiguity to Holderlin or Neruda) to throw in some ambiguous prose that is completely without context. I find this often with Poetry in general. There will be a line or two that are superfluous within the many. Maybe I'm not understanding it, but with Joyce, I can fully admit that I don't understand something but say "there is a way of understanding this if I just could grasp the context of the situation and the people involved". Merleau-Ponty somewhat clears up this steam-of-consciousness and meaningless language that is to get at the heart of the things themselves by speaking of "lateral relations" and "kinships" implicated in the statements. This understanding, this sense of a statement that is unorganized would be made sense of not be the meanings of an entire statement or proposition, or even the words themselves, but the likeness's between two words in a sentence, not necessarily the semantic likeness of words, but the likeness of the fact that two words can be combined together and not signify anything specific to ones mind, but yet, have a connection with each other to the point where the statement can be made. This is sort of a "pure grammar" where the relations between words matter rather than the words themselves. This Meta-Language would dispense with the structural admissions of the Signifier/Signified context of our patterns of recognition, and instead recognize how it's possible that two seemingly meaningless words can still be stated within a proposition. What is their relations that allow for this?
Merleau-Ponty nonetheless so far takes a negative dialectic in terms of language being able to describe a zero-point or pure presence. Being faithful to the infinite dialectic though, language is always recommencing or "putting into words a certain silence that he hearkens". While understanding that language can't establish the grounds for what it wants to establish, Merleau-Ponty also understands that it's inevitable for the Thinker to not feel the compulsion of his silence, his silence that just won't stay still as silence, but flies out of him at light-speed in order to become something other, something different, but something representative of this silence. Even if there was a Meta-Language to establish "lateral-relations" between meaningless words, the language being used to express these relations would still be the expressions of language, albeit so technical that it's certainly abstract, and in being abstract, gains more ground in authority for being able to speak about what's not a matter of being spoken about. The question really is, where is it that speaking comes from, where does the Logos appear, and how has it interminably established the infinite dialectic as exactly that, infinite. Why speak? This question isn't appropriate because of it's teleological motivation. More appropriately, one should ask, "How speak?" The manifestation of language is more appropriate in this sense of appearing rather than a sense of genesis in the former question.
Silence becoming spoken, always and already the case, silence can never be alone, but among others, among what's spoken...in speakers.

History's Implication: Language; Part 6 of Derrida's interpretation of Husserl

In the last post we saw the insistence by Husserl of claiming history as an "undefinable" proposition that was still regardlessly "grounded". While not being able to yet describe history independent of using concepts (by Kant's recognition) that are already established a posteriori, we can to an obvious limit. That limit is nothing other than the possibility of language. While according to Derrida "History itself establishes the possibility of its own appearing", the way it establishes itself is by an impulse, that impulse being language...what we call "language". Husserl though addresses this regardless of his eternal supposition of pure logic almost as if he was thinking solipsistically, which is really not a stretch when approaching the methodology of Husserlian phenomenology.
Husserl though addresses language the same way that he doesn't want to address everything he doesn't want to address; by speaking about it as abstractly as possible. Husserl states "ideal formations are rooted only in language in general, not in the factuality of languages and their particular linguistic incarnations". Husserl wonders "How is any object in general possible"? Here he runs up against language in general. Derrida writes after this "For if the phenomenological reduction is taken in its fullest sense, it must also entail the reduction of constituted eidetics and then of its own language". What does this mean? It simply means that phenomenology must address how it's able to speak about what it wants to think it's independent of. Not only must it address language but it must reduce it's own linguistic significations. How an ideal is constituted must be reduced for phenomenology to be able to fulfill what it "wants" to fulfill. Language then as the constitutor of pure sense and ideal objectivity must be understood and then reduced to a possible point where it's no longer used but used only as a means (Husserl in Experience and Judgment uses 'merely' always and often to signify this) to constitute ideal objectivity.

Husserl begins his reduction of language by first realizing that for now language is our way for expressing the sense of the world. Here, "expression" and "language" are synonymous. His reduction is intuitive and starts with the fact "the same content can be intended starting from several languages, and its ideal identity assures its translatability. This ideal identity of sense expressed by lion, leo, Lowe, and so forth, is then freed from all factual linguistic subjectivity". Regardless of what language we use to express the idea of "Lion", we always mean the same thing. It has an ideal identity that makes it translatable through all languages. For Husserl then, language escapes a pyschologistic relativity/subjectivity by the fact that its signified content stays consistent, although Derrida later on goes into lengths about the problems of translatability, which any "reader" of Derrida would have to think first stems from his confrontations with Husserl. Husserl further establishes the fact that "lion" is conditioned by a "receptive intution" which he will call an "object of receptivity". Staying consistent with his theme in the Origins of Geometry, Husserl states "The Pythagorean theorem, indeed all of geometry, exists only once, no matter how often or even in what language it may be expressed". Geometry then finds its consistency in the fact that it's first constituted in an ideal language. Husserl expands his reduction to the fact that something can be stated that is empirically and inter-subjectively false but yet it's still true in the sense that it was asserted at one time and still remains a truth for that time. He uses the example of the proposition that "The automobile is the fastest means of travel" to establish this fact. Regardless of it's empirical validity, it remains an intentionality of truth. Here we must distinguish between two different truths; Empirically and scientifically verifiable truth, and Intentionality truth. Even an "absurd" intention has a truth because its pointing to the fact of it's wanting to be "counter-sensical". The fact of it's pointing takes away the posibility of it desired absurdity. In other words, lingustic absurdity can't escape the ideality of language as the constitutor for pure sense. The ever-popular 20th century distinction made by Ferdinand de Saussure between the Signifier and Signified is the concrete solidification of this idea. There is the sense of a statement and the "stuff" that makes up the statement that signifies it's sense.

Derrida thinks the reader to be surprised by the fact that Husserl "re-descends" towards language as the medium and condition of ideal objectivity, as any reader of Husserl would be by his insistence of pure sense not being dependent on any empirical conditions, language being an absolute empirical condition. But Husserl came up against it with all of his honesty which Derrida and the reader recognize and was stated in the beginning of this post. But did Husserl not just prove with the example of 'Lion', that language is first dependent on sense and not the other way around? Does this example not establish the fact that geometrical truth is "beyond every particular and factual linguistic hold"? Derrida makes an absolutely insightful remark here when he states "But the Objectivity of this truth could not be constituted without the pure possibility of an inquiry into a pure language in general. Without this pure and essential possibility, the geometrical formation would remain ineffable and solitary. Then it would be absolutely bound to the psychological life of a factual individual". Slightly later he makes the point that always needed to be made about Husserl but never was until Derrida when he states "The paradox is that without the apparent fall back into language thereby into history, a fall which would alienate the ideal purity of sense, sense would remain an empirical formation imprisoned as a fact in a psychological subjectivity-in the inventor's head." Here, finally, it must be stressed how much the project of Phenomenology and solipsism are tied together, and not just solipsism as an idea, but the actual method of Phenomenology. This is where the reader of phenomenology has to take the biggest leap they have taken, really the biggest leap any philosopher has taken since Descartes cogito and at least give freedom to solipsism as a gateway to pure sense. Later on Derrida may get to this, but for now he doesn't. When Derrida makes the absolutely necessary assertion that without language, pure sense always lies "in the inventor's head" and nowhere else, is this not exactly the point for Husserl? Did he not just prove for Derrida that there is sense in everyone's head regardless of the fact of language? Even as language is the sole constitutive act for the possibility of ideal objectivity? Here a distinction must be made. The fact that Husserl knows that language opens up speculation into a pure solipsistic sense, and the fact that this sense 'is the case' independent of the prior phenomenological 'work' to affirm it. Basically, 'work' never needed to be done to affirm transcendental sense; but Husserl tried to do it anyways from an impulse to ground science which was nothing other than what was stated in his Crises, although this was always the project of phenomenology. One wonders that this was simply a reaction to no one understanding phenomenology because of "scholars" having been under the spell of dogmatic science, history, and sociology which Husserl certainly goes into in the beginning of the Crises. The fact of the matter is that when language is reduced to Derrida's recognition that sense independent of language would be "tied to the inventors head", pure sense gains its infinite freedom by slipping past the language that was just used to constitute it. Certainly, every concept has it's sense, but not all sense has it's concept, and not everything that is making sense to me right now is conceptual. Later on in Derrida's interpretation of Husserl, the idea of passivity and reactivation become paramount regarding non-conceptual sense.

Husserl has seemingly accomplished what he wanted to accomplish. By being honest with himself and Phenomenology enough to be able to confront language and reduce it to where one recognizes that they were just making sense regardless of language, albeit constituted by language, pure sense is certainly in the inventors head...and we can say this, without it ever having to be said. It's not ironic that Phenomenology is everything that goes without saying.
Derrida comments that "To constitute an ideal object is to put it at the permanent disposition of a pure gaze. Now, before being the constituted and exceeded auxiliary of an act which proceeds toward the truth of sense, linguistic ideality is the milieu in which the ideal object settles as what is sedimented or deposited". Sense finds a place to settle; it finds it's place for depositing in language in general. Derrida in a rare rhetorical flourish states "language preserves truth, so that truth can be regarded in the henceforth nonephemeral illumination of its sojourn". Regardless of the rhetoric, it's a striking statement of the geist of language, it's movement, and possibly, its teleology. That this seems like an elaboration of Hegel should come as no surprise. While for Hegel, the movement of geist was the idea in general, it's found in Derrida via Husserl as language. The similarities and differences between the idea and language is something to be fleshed out on another day (a text rigorously comparing Hegel and Derrida would be paramount), but it is the case that some sort of depositing happens that is wholly other that what was not "at once" wholly other. For us so far then, language is the mode and place of depositing sense, a sense that can always happen regardless of the fact that it's always on it's way towards being deposited in something else.