Communicating Through a Phenomenological Perspective?

Philosophy Forums Philosophy
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Merleau-Ponty takes a phenomenological approach towards understanding our existence and the “other”. It is through intersubjectivity and description that one is able to communicate authentically with an other. In Phenomenology of Perception, Ponty posits “For the “other” to be more than an empty word, it is necessary that my existence should never be reduced to my bare awareness of existing.” Using her philosophical approach of “returning to things themselves,” Ponty designates a distinct separateness between individuals that must be acknowledged before any substantial communication is exchanged. The awareness of this otherness enables one to continue acting authentically oneself while requiring an intense accurate description of one’s own experience. Assumption about the other or a dishonest description of what one really experiences does not permit authentic or ethical communication to occur.

However, I question this. If we communicate from a phenomenological perspective/self will we actually relate and act more ethically to others?

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What!? Ponty was a she?

My God, I can’t believe this. They lied to me. All of them. Bastards. Never again will I trust an encyclopedia, biography, or picture image of a philosopher.

You can distort the image and lie to me about anyone else in my life, but nobody fucks with my philosophers.

I’m pissed. You better come up with something quick, Kristalyn, or I’m holding you responsible for telling me what I ought not should know. Wait, I meant to say what I should ought not to know. No, that doesn’t sound right either.

Nevermind that. Just tell me something, and fast.

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:smiley:

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how can anyone act unethically if there is nothing which exists independently
of human consciousness? is it unethical to think of murdering someone?

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This picture was taken at the peak of philosophical inquiry; Ponty must be the short one then. (God, what has this world come to when a mother names her daughter Maurice?!)

As to the topic, I believe that there is still the same question of self-interest concerning honesty. A phenomenological perspective doesn’t preclude “otherness,” which is the basis for self, which is the basis for selfishness, which is the opposing force to selfless ideas of ethics; the same questions are there, so ethics is still endangered as much as it normally is.

Trevor, murdering someone would be extinguishing human consciousness, i.e. the only type of thing that exists phenomenologically.

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oops…typo or projection…Ponty was a he :slight_smile:

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Kristalyn,

Just as Sartre would maintain that only the purest being-for-itself (i.e. individual ‘expression’ in more or less Husserl’s sense) produces authentic communication.

Herein we see one of the many logocentric prejudices of the Western tradition identified by poststructuralism, namely the ranking of the signified over the signifier. In this argument Merlot Ponty presumes that the state of humans and human experience is the ‘point of departure’ for any phenomenological enquiry concerned with communication. Now, Merleau Ponty manages more than Husserl and Sartre managed in that he theorised further than merely ‘the individual’ as posited as the origin of expression (and, implicitly, the arbiter of ‘authentic communication’) as he recognised that such an individual is not sufficient, phenomenologically or (again, implicitly) hermeneutically, to explain ‘authentic communication’. Nonetheless he doesn’t manage to get as far as Foucault and Derrida and the rest because he remains attached to the modes of phenomenology (‘the philosophy of pure experience’ - ha!) and ‘what is being signified’ without recognising that language (the signifier) is always (already) the ‘point of departure’ for ANY philosophy of communication.

And herein we see the straightforward Saussurean slip from ‘accurate description’ to ‘authentic (or ethical - why is this in here?) communication’. By running the two together such an argument enables both to rely on each other for mutual definitive validity. Like I say, Merleau Ponty manages to make of communication a phenomenological exception to Sartre’s dictatorial ‘being-for-itself’ by introducing the ‘being-for-the-other’ as the point of departure for our enquiry. Nonetheless he still suffers from the same theoretical barriers of Husserl and Sartre resulting in a certain circularity highlighted by the attempt to escape from those same barriers.

No, because all we get is a ‘more ethical’ form of communication according to those very rules (theoretical limits) of phenomenology, which are highly questionable. Of course in Merleau Ponty’s time you were looking at a French intellectual climate where one was either a phenomenologist (usually an existentialist) or one was a structuralist. One could not be both until Derrida’s ‘Speech and Phenomena’. Of course, I would say that. But even trying to put aside my passion for Derrida’s work I think that what I’m saying is essentially accurate.

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(speaking for Kristalyn)

the sky is blue , it be not my fault.

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Krystalyn,

Speech is a gesture, an indication, or a pointing toward, a certain intended signification. Speech, if it is understood, brings a certain something before us, but what is the status of that something? Firstly, given that language is equivocal, the signified necessarily goes beyond any attempt to signify it. As such, language never affords total expression, but rather, is merely the linguistic embodiment of an attempt to signify. It is therefore, the case that these significations have the status of “Ideas,” which target, or aim at total expression but are constantly outstripped by the “things themselves” which they signify. The signified is never present before the act of expression; rather, it is this act of expression which realizes it as an intention. It is, furthermore, appropriate to say that we have, or possess, a language as the sum total of available significations. The significative intention, therefore, must draw from available meanings but is also limited by the ‘world’ as the limit of possible meanings. The speaking subject, therefore, through the power of expression, is able to draw from available meaning and in turn, through them, constitute a new meaning. Understanding the meaning, therefore, is a process of taking up the signification of others, or having them “dwell within me,” such that a new ‘style’ of thought has been awakened. What has, thereby, been ‘acquired’ will remain available, without the need to reactivate the original process of constitution. A new ‘sedimentation’ has been constituted, which does not erase, or eliminate, the ‘sedimentations’ previously available. Rather the new ‘acquisition’ is incorporated into the cultural tradition that is language and is added as a new possibility for an expressive intention. The speech of others comes to “dwell” within me in a movement of transcendence, beyond the merely available meanings of the language, and is understood the moment I am able to take it within myself and express it anew. It seems to be the case, therefore, that what is available to me is not solely my ‘own,’ but ‘ours’ in the sense that what is available to me is available to everyone and only becomes mine specifically when, through my mute intention, I take it up into myself and express it anew. The ‘tradition,’ or language, is that which gives us the means of realizing our significative, or mute, intentions, however, at the same time it is constituted as the result of our expressivity.

The body seems to be that which informs me that I am not merely a kind of transcendent consciousness. The “intentional transgression,” is that which informs me that my body is not a mere ‘thing’ in the Cartesian sense. The body forces us to reckon with a ‘pre-constituted’ ‘world,’ whose as suchness is forever beyond our grasp, although, we continuously attempt to speak it through the speech of the past. Every expression seems to shed new ‘light’ upon it, but only as it is ‘recollected’ through the moment, which we cannot grasp except as something which has already gone beyond us. The ‘intentional transgression’ seems to be enacted the moment I come across my body as already constituted in the ‘world.’ Through this, ‘intentional transgression,’ I come across the body of others whose ego I am not, whose understanding, although I know nothing of it in any sense I can call my own, is not my mode of being. The expressions of ‘others’ inform, or inhabit me, in the sense that I am given over to their expression, to the ‘ways’ they demarcate through their expressivity. We, therefore, speak the ‘world’ to each other in a communal way making our ‘thought’ available to the ‘thoughts’ of others, and having the ‘thoughts’ of others available to ourselves. We transcend, or transgress, beyond limits, which, if we reflect upon them, seem insurmountable. We bring our light, and the light of our past, forward through the temporal moment.

Perhaps it is necessary to cease to envisage yourself as a self. Merleau-Ponty certainly does not envisage anything like a self, or a self sustaining "I.’

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The ‘point of departure’ is clearly the point of expressed misunderstanding.

I mean, granted the limitations of language, such limitations are moot if whatever misunderstanding that might exist is allowed to pass away, if said misunderstanding does not ‘come to a head.’ An expressed misunderstanding is an opportunity for death, division, or invention; depending on context. The relevant issue is not ‘the one’ or ‘the other’ but, how the word binds them together and to their environment; the great attractor that is the meaning of the word.

I think it’s important to recognize that language is not inherently divisive; quite the opposite.

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There was something I read a while ago that was similiar to the Chomskyesque idea of the “hardwired” capacity for communication. I eventually concluded that neither behavior or language was an infallible proof of real communication.

Later I watched the David Blaine Street Magician show on TV and the guy was in Africa somewhere showing magic tricks to primitive citizens of a tribe. Some of the organization between them, as far as understanding the requests and also the point or intention of the trick, noticing the irony and acknowledging that with an expression…etc., etc., …it all seemed to be happening without the assistance of language or even behavioral mimicry. The tribesman just knew what to do, what the trick was, what to expect, even the camera crew didn’t seem to make anything odd for them.

At any moment I could see one of the tribesmen remove the stick from his lip and suddenly shout: “you rock, Blaine! That trick with the cards was the bomb. I like your shirt too. That sleek black look carries the metaphor of the magician quite well. Elements of mystery, the unknown, and the chicks like it too cause its a muscle shirt that emphasizes your awesome bod. Say, do you drive a Toyota?”

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What is it with you of late? Your recent posts have been very amusing and in moments excellently written but where’s the characteristic bite and insanity?

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SIATD,

I have read many of your posts on Derrida and have found them rewarding in my own quest to understand, or perhaps, acquire a certain something from my encounters with Derrida.

Dealing with the abyss, and the thought of differance are incredibly taxing, and I fear for the person who chooses to remain there for an extended period. It is a difficult life site, however, as I am sure you will admit, it is incredibly fecund.

Having said all this, just so that you not interpret my statements as overly aggressive or dismissive, I think you are quick to dismiss, or charge as logocentric, the work, or oeuvre, of Merleau-Ponty. Be warned that there are those who maintain that Derrida remains closer to the metaphysical tradition than does Merleau-Ponty. Further, there are those who would call Merleau-Ponty’s oeuvre, more deconstructive than Derridean deconstruction.

Personally I have yet to make up my mind as to whether I should sing or dance at the end of metaphysics, however, I think the choice— if we are ever really in a position to choose—is far more compelling than your post would seem to suggest.

Let us just take the example of the sign, which is the point of departure for the deconstruction of Husserl in Speech and Phenomena. The signifier replaces the anarchy of the noema, such that we are entirely given over to names, rather than things. The Husserlian distinction between ‘expression’ and ‘indication,’ rests upon the certainty of self-presence within the ‘now’ of the living present. Indication, for Husserl, is useless, or unnecessary, in ‘solitary mental life’ as the thoughts, which the signs would serve to indicate, are already present for the subject within the lived moment. The indicative function of the sign would only be present in external, outward speech, when such speech is animated by a communicative intention. Derrida deconstructs Husserl by placing the sign on both sides uncovering a kind of gap, a deferral, or a delay. The sign is always already a representation, a repetitious possibility, in signifying we are, therefore, always already “involved in unlimited representation.”

The diacritics of De Saussure seems to presuppose the validity of Husserl’s reduction, it is therefore possible for Derrida to deconstruct De Saussure on very similar grounds. However, does Derrida ever really change grounds himself, or does he remain too close to Husserl? It is my contention that the strategy Derrida adopts in Difference, that is the language of necessity and irreducibility, keeps his departure in close proximity to Husserl.

I offer this, simply as a kind of thought about how Derrida seems to have gone about his work. It seems to me that Merleau-Ponty makes a clearer break with Husserl even though Derrida claims to have done so in a louder voice. Merleau-Ponty’s conception of the sign—being among the first to introduce diacritics into philosophy—is far more radical than one might recognize at an initial glance.

I would like to see if a dialogue is possible on this issue?

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There’s a lot to be taken from Derrida if you read it in the right sorts of ways but he doesn’t make it easy on his readers and doesn’t really encourage them to read him in those ways. That’s partly why I’ve written the 3 threads on Derrida (Differance, Deconstruction 101 and The Death of Derrida), to make it easier for people to grasp some of what he’s on about and it’s potential. I’m glad that you’ve got something out of it.

I don’t find it so difficult, but I’ve always thought like a deconstructionist (the historical trace of deconstruction goes back at least as far as Heraclitus) but some of the implications of deconstruction are hard to stomach. Derrida, contrary to Hegel, probably burped too much.

There are, but I’m willing to bet that their arguments are tosh. As to whether Derrida is ‘closer’ to the metaphysical tradition than Merlot-Ponty, that all depends on whether one sees the metaphor of phenomenology being ‘prior’ to natural science as a tenor with a vehicle or a vehicle-for-itself.

When Derrida talks of the ‘end of metaphysics’ he doesn’t mean the end of metaphysics per se but the closure of a particular kind of metaphysics. Just as Nietzsche trashed the metaphysics of the Englightenment (with some help from Hume and others) and called for/predicted a reevaluation of all values so too is Derrida’s work a description of a state of theory at the closure of a particular metaphysics but not the closure of all metaphysics.

I do have a tendency to understate these things, James No. 2 had the same problem with some of my comments.

Sure, you seem to have understood Derrida’s fundamental point here. Put simply, it is ‘phenomenology tries to use language to claim that it is concerned with that which precedes language, namely, thought’. For Derrida there’s little difference between an unspoken signifier (a thought) and a spoken (expressed) signifier, each is subject to the same deconstruction. As such conceiving of thought as being prior to speech (or the signified being prior to the signifier) is an assumption that cannot be proven in language. In terms of actuality, Derrida takes the Pyrrhonian position - he doesn’t know either way whether there are immutable metaphysics signifieds but in using language to display what it obviously beyond or outside (meta-) language we do beg the question.

I read it differently, more as a playing off of Saussure against Husserl to expose each. Derrida can be read as a sort of philosophical drama, a ‘what sort of dialogue might Saussure and Husserl have if we were to dig them up today’ project, mixed in with his own criticisms. He’s doing this to cover his own tracks to try to remain in keeping with his espoused ‘position’ and in doing so (I believe) led you to the reading that you’ve outlined.

Please elaborate on this because I’ll happily admit that I didn’t have enough time for the Phenomenology of Perception as I would have liked so I may well have overlooked the more subtle elements of Merlot-Ponty’s work.

There’s a lot here so we might do well to clarify exactly what the question is that we’re trying to answer but I do very much enjoy these topics so please, go ahead…

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That’s because you are taking advantage of the fact that “thought” is a word and therefore subjected to linguistic problems. It comes down to this, dude. If you truely believe that the tree in your backyard is not there right now because you are not looking at it, you can redeem yourself from such ridiculous speculation and call yourself a full idealist. If not, the world is most certainly there in all its objective glory and human perception, language, and thought are all abstractions.

“Thought” is not the final product you call “saying a word in my mind.” There are several executive functions that lead thought patterns in certain directions based on cost/effect scenarios which are regulated in the process of combining memory and present sense stimulation. There is no distinct point where the series of executive functions stop, and thinking begins, but rather a kind of “extra-autopoetic” effect, what might just be called “self-awareness,” that through the assimilation of word use and behavior patterns, generates an internal logic which conducts the system whole. Its all about keeping thresholds down to a minimum. You don’t want to piss off the limbic system.

The same objections I have against Dunamis, I have against your idea here. You are placing to much emphasis on language and using hedges to trap all semantic entities into a “possible nonsensical case” where not only specific statements can be nonsensical, but also all statements must be possibly nonsensical, the only exception being this statement: “all statements can be nonsensical.” If this is true, then it is possible that there are absolute truths that are not in language since the objection that “nothing can be proven in language” can only be maybe true or false and not certainly true or false. I know this for certain. It is proven logically and not linguistically. But you know I’m a phenomenologocisicist anyway and that a priori truths can be reached through the epoche. I keep telling you its the process and not the content of thought, SIATD, that matters.

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What about ‘recognition;’ it seems to me a doorway from unobservable conscious function (including the executive functions) to a region of formal manipulation, cogitation. To know is to name; you don’t have to associate the functional icon with a phonetic icon, you just get it. An absence of self-awareness would lead to the situation you describe but, self-awareness over time coupled with what appears to be external error might lead to a dogmatic compartmentalization. After that, self-examination, the sort that is present in the scriptural record, could create such a distiction.

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Seems to me that something like this “region of the formal” would be transcendent, or else reductionalism would stand as the best theory.

What makes the magic moment in recognition is the sense of the present and the immediate past in contrast-- what distinguishes my experience of typing right now is the fact that I remember not typing before. I am present to myself right now as “having done X,” and in the present as I reflect on that fact, I also am moving into another future in which I will look back upon the now and recall the incident. This process of self-reflection and “thinking” cannot possibly intend a future event, that is, can’t know what to intend now to achieve something I have thought about. Rather my body is involved in a habitual ensemble of internal processes that just happen to produce “thinking” as a by-product, and during all acts there is self-reflection happening on a level that can only understand its acts as intentional.

For example, the act “walking to the fridge to get a carrot” didn’t happen because I decided to walk to the fridge to get a carrot, it happened because more times than not when I exhibit behavior pattern X, those things involved in negotiating objects to either create or retrieve a food item, was stored away as a behavior routine with minimal improvisation or novelty circumstance, and enacted at the time a certain level of stasis was broken.

This is the basic reductionalist explaination. Extremely simple, though the numbers and computations of brain functions involved are magnificent, still the theory is not compromised by the inability to track or make evident all activities in the brain, and assuming these functions weren’t anomalous material events would make the entire platform of reductionalism obsolete anyway.

The sense of awareness and cogitation can only be “strange” (causing these questions to exist) because of lapses in time, which makes “layers” out of experience. I see no reason to believe that a transcendent “event” is happening while consciousness occurs.

I’m not sure I know what you mean in the rest of your post so I can’t respond.

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Agreed.

How about the actual physical compartmentalization that is evident in the regional specialization of neocortical function. Not just that it happens but, that it is consistent from person to person and presumably genetically encoded. This seems evidence of a trancendance from the conscious to the physical.

I disagree. what you describe seems to be the source of the magic of conscious experience, not of recogniton in particular. There is a region of the brain that is understood to be devoted to facial recognition; i think it’s devoted to recognition of abstract things generally. This is clearly different from what you describe. I think the rest of your post might have been an argument describing how one is built on the other but; i’d simply point to the actual existance of that region of the brain devoted to recogniton as evidenve of the trancenant nature of such.

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Sorry it took so long, but I have been busy with finals and such.

I have been thinking about this topic for a while now and have been painstakingly trying to come up with a point of convergence between Merleau-Ponty and Derrida. I think there are many, the problem becomes where should one focus a disscussion. I think we should begin, perhaps, with the status of the sign itself.

At times Speech and Phenomena and The Visible and The Invisible appear to have been written by the same author, however, at other instances they could not be more divergent. It has been propsed by Len Lawlor, a Derrida scholar, that if Merleau-Ponty had lived to finish his final work he might have renamed it Ousia and Gramme.

The key for Merleau-Ponty is the “Fundierung” model which he outlines in the Phenomenology of Perception in the chapter “The Body as Speech and Expression.” This model, however, borrowing as it does from the silence of the “tacit cogito” is subsequently revised in the Visible and the Invisible it would seem that Merleau-Ponty became aware of the problem of the use of the concept of cogito. The fundierung model becomes the basis for the reversibility thesis in the “flesh” of experience.

It would seem that we are struck by an imperative to speak a silence of the world, through the sedimentations of available speech.

I will reprint a portion of a text I wrote comparing Merleau-Ponty with Derrida, wherein I deal with Merleau-Ponty’s linguistic model.

For Merleau-Ponty the sign is diacritical, in the Saussurean sense, however, that being said, Merleau-Ponty radicalizes the sign, as it was conceived of by Saussure himself. The sign, in itself is not meaningful it is nothing more than a kind of abstraction; rather the sign serves to mark a divergence of meaning between itself and another sign. Meaning arises, rather, in the hollows, gaps, or intervals at the edges and in between signs. Merleau-Ponty locates the meaning in terms of the whole in terms of a totality, or a background of meaning. This background is historical and cultural it is the development, of the “pyramid of time” upon which I sit and protend.

“Signs are supposed to be no more than monitors which notify the hearer that he must consider such and such of his thoughts. But meaning does not actually dwell in the verbal chain or distinguish itself from the chain in this way. Since the sign has meaning only in so far as it is profiled against other signs, its meaning is entirely involved in language. Speech always comes into play against a background of speech; it is always only a fold in an immense fabric of language.”

There is no such thing as a complete statement, there is always an excess of signified over signifier, which endows the speaker with new organs which allow him to venture further still onward in a new direction. Language transforms the “things-themselves” into their meaning where they are sedimented in the field of language. Merleau-Ponty makes a distinction between originating, or authentic, speech and secondary speech. Originating speech is an expression, both for ourselves and for others, which brings into existence a novel thought. Secondary speech is a mere repetition, or perhaps a re-presentation of a thought already ‘acquired.’ Language opens a field of language, which gives us meaning in terms of itself. If we are attentive to this movement we notice the striking similarities between perceptual and linguistic existence in Merleau-Ponty’s account. It would seem that just as there is a phenomenal field, there is also a linguistic field in both cases there is something from which we ‘borrow’ in order to combine an ‘intentional’ ‘desire’ with a speech act in the constitution of an object for others; thereby accomplishing thought by conveying a certain ‘style’ into a community of speakers. Language, therefore, cannot be made to behave like any particular object; rather it becomes meaningful only when a speaking subject is engaged in it with others.