From encountering foreign languages to the language of phenomenology: Merleau-Ponty and The Problem of Speech

Abstract Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of language is a central yet underdeveloped component of his overall philosophical project. His recently published 1953–1954 lectures on The Problem of Speech (2020) shed light on his understanding of language at a critical moment in the development of his thought. In this paper, I develop some central ideas from the course materials and use them to interpret Merleau-Ponty’s views on language and their significance for philosophical method. I begin with a reconstruction of the introduction to the course, in which Merleau-Ponty provides a dialectical path into a philosophy of language that progresses alternatively through naïve, objectivist, and extreme subjectivist perspectives on language before arriving at a mature view that integrates what was true in each of the preceding views. A critical moment in this dialectic is the encounter with foreign languages, illustrated by Western linguists’ difficulties assimilating Chinese syntax to the model of the Indo-European languages. The genuine encounter with foreign languages allows Merleau-Ponty to propose a universality of human linguistic experience despite the genuine, radical differences between human languages. I suggest that we understand language as a concrete or lateral universal and situate this view within Merleau-Ponty’s thought. I then elaborate the consequences of this understanding of language for phenomenological method and practice. Because phenomenology requires a language, and because the phenomenologist’s way of being in the world is pervasively linguistic, language cannot be simply and directly suspended at the outset of phenomenology. However, Merleau-Ponty’s indirect method can bring language into view for the phenomenologist, without assuming a view from nowhere on language and experience.