[In the following essay, Charlesworth examines Merleau-Ponty's concept of words and their meanings.]

What is a word? What is the relation of word to thought? Where do words come from? What is the place of words in our lives? These are some of the questions which will be confronted in the following pages. There are two interrelated sections of this essay: the first is a dialogue with Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological observations, and the second contains a few of my own reflections.¹

Against the empiricist and intellectualist conception that the word has no significance, that it is only, “The external sign of an internal recognition, which could take place without it, and to which it makes no contribution,” Merleau-Ponty correctly argues that the word has a meaning. He bases his position upon four phenomenological observations which I believe are both perspicacious and valid. First, he argues that thought tends towards expression as towards completion. There is no mysterious haven in which thoughts contentedly recline, for a thought is not complete until it is expressed.² Second, the most familiar thing appears indeterminate as long as we have not recalled its name. We have relations with the world through active (thetic) intentionalities which depend upon words, “The spoken word is a gesture, and its meaning, a world.” (184) Third, the thinking subject is “in a kind of ignorance” of his thoughts until he has spoken or written them. Indeed we present our thoughts to ourselves through internal or external speech. Fourth, through denomination, which is itself recognition, one reaches the object intended, grasps it and gives it a place in our phenomenological perspective. (176ff.)³

To these contentions one might want to ask Merleau-Ponty if a word can lose this meaning? He would answer, yes. Profiting from the research of Gelb and Goldstein, he argues that in cases of amnesic aphasia the patient loses the meaning of words. The patient repeats the word, but it is now useless, “It tells him nothing more, it is alien and absurd, as are for us names which we go on repeating for too long a time.” (193)

From the above comments it seems clear that thought and word are inseparable.⁴ They are mutually dependent and simultaneously constituted. (183) As he states, “Speech cannot be regarded as a mere clothing for thought, or expression as the translation, into an arbitrary system of symbols, of a meaning already clear to itself.” (388) Word is both the presence of thought in the phenomenal world and its body. (182)

Words evolve from man's experiences and originative speech, parole parlante, “the speaking word.” Again it must be clarified that language does not express thoughts, but rather it is the subject's taking up of a position in the world of meanings. (193) Once the word has been spoken, parole parlée, it becomes empirical speech and a communal object. (389) The pregnant silence has burst forth with sounds, and, henceforth, we live in “a world already spoken and speaking.” (184)⁵ Since we belong to words through speaking, writing, hearing, or reading we belong to the world of language and thought.⁶ Merleau-Ponty correctly argues that, “of all bodily functions speech is the most intimately linked with communal existence, or, as we shall put it, with co-existence.” (160) We live in a linguistic world.

He talks about “the grip of my gaze.” (279) In a similar manner of speaking, one may talk about the grip of my words. My words extend my body to my interlocutor so that he is held by them and caused to react to them. Moreover, my words often are strangers in a foreign land because my voice carries centrifugally far beyond the one intended and invades the privacy of persons who remain anonymous and unperceived. Indeed, as the blind man's cane is an extention of his body, so words are an extention of our bodies. (146) Correlatively, our bodily horizons are proportional to our facility with “language.”

This indissoluble link between word and body⁷ has led me to agree with Merleau-Ponty that words have a physiognomy, because, “We adopt towards them, as towards each person, a certain form of behavior which makes its complete appearance the moment each word is given.” (235-36) As others react to my words, so my body is sensitive to their words, “It reverberates to all sounds, vibrates to all colours, and provides words with their primordial significance through the way in which it receives them.” (236) Consequently, when one is aware that the senses are united and integrated into one knowing organism⁸ one can boldly state that we see sounds. One sees a word both because his whole sensory being vibrates to its sound, and because a word is indistinguishable from the attitude which it induces.

In addition to the observations made above, there appear to be five predicates which can be attributed to word. A word is a living organism. All words which are still spoken or written are vibrantly alive. They are constantly losing old meanings and acquiring new ones.⁹ Not only transcendental or authentic speech (parole parlante) but also actions attribute to words new ideas. (For example in the last few years silicone has obtained strange new meanings.) As Merleau-Ponty remarks, words have an existential meaning which inhabits them, and the process of expression opens a new field or a new dimension to our perceptions. (182)

Somewhat like the atoms in Lucretius' De Rerum Natura, it seems that words have hooks. When a word appears to our reflective consciousness it drags along with it many other words from the dark regions of prereflective consciousness.¹⁰ Words appear to be gregarious organisms which are constantly connected with other correlative words, hence they display a way of “looking at things.”¹¹ Furthermore, a word always appears to a person, for it has supposedly appeared from the prepersonal level of consciousness to the personal. Therefore, it is always seen from a limited perspective, limited both because the individual has focused¹² upon the new arrival, and because he does so with the subjective methodical presuppositions which are his. For example if the word “light” is perceived antithetically “darkness” is dragged along, if it is perceived ethically “goodness” is linked simultaneously, if it is perceived scientifically “rays” might be the correlative word.

In a similar vein of thinking it seems that as a note in a melody is necessarily linked with the preceding and succeeding note, so a word is linked through thought with the anteceding and following word. There is a province of words.¹³ For example when silicone appeared with new meanings it brought with it a new province of thought in which the feminine breasts became more and more masculine and the human body moved perpendicularly toward an appropriation of idealized statistics.¹⁴ It seems, therefore, that a word never appears in vacuo but in context and lives in its conceptual province as a living organism, etiologically displaying heuristic overtones. Thus Hume's words showed Kant that Leibniz's perspective obtained only a limited and distorted focus upon reality.

Words are both means and ends. The parole parlée is a tool by which we obtain a particular end. Parole parlante signifies the end of a thinker's search for a thought which is now brought into existence, in the first place for himself, and then for others. For example philosophers search for parole parlante which will not only bring their conceptual thought into existence but will lucidly display it to another. Later a lawyer may use this word to save a man's life.

Finally, we are words. This bold statement seems to be true in the sense that when we speak originally we do not choose the words we use, they show themselves. We do not arrange words, they arrange themselves in accordance with the dynamism of our intentions. When we grasp and are grasped by a word-thought it is mysteriously launched from the pad of reflection by means of the power of language into time. We never see a word appear; we are conscious of it only after it has appeared.¹⁵ It is in this sense that one can say that we are neither the master of words nor mastered by them.¹⁶ We are words.

Conclusion: Of the many ramifications of the preceding words, two should be stressed. First, since a word is not one among many containers which could hold the particular idea but brings the thought into existence, one should be sensitive to the importance of each word and wonder why it appeared and not another. There are no absolute synonyms.¹⁷ Second, since speech accomplishes thought and a word-thought is linked to one's body, we meet ancient authors themselves and not their messengers.

Notes

1. “Word” in this essay is narrowly defined to represent the written or spoken symbols which are alphabetically arranged in dictionaries. Likewise, “thought” is narrowly defined to mean ideas which appear with such words (we also think mathematically, musically, etc.) All pagination refers to M. Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception (C. Smith, trans.). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1965.

2. His emphasis is upon the world in which we live, “The cradle of meaning, the direction of all directions, and ground of all thinking.” (430)

3. He correctly argues that “thought” is our hold on the world, (455) and what makes possible a return to the real world (for the patient and the sleeper) is the sense organs and language (164).

4. It is important to note that primitive man equated thought and word; in Hieroglyphs “think” and “say” were represented by one symbol.

   One objection raised against the contention that thought is dependent upon word is that Cicero had to coin for Latin its philosophical terminology to express his thoughts. This criticism is removed when one observes that he was thinking with Greek words and trying to invigorate the Latin language with such thoughts.

5. Words evolve from silence but only can exist contiguously with it, for as M. Picard states, “There is something silent in every word.” (The World of Silence. Chicago: Gateway, 1964, 8)

6. It seems that we are complex tuning forks and that a word is a tone.

7. The fact that a word is never autonomous but always connected with a person shows why one can never translate a particular text until one is in empathy with the original author and is sensitive to the nuances and overtones which accompany his words. As Merleau-Ponty states, a word derives its meaning from the sentence in which it is found, and it is impossible to establish absolutely what significance a word has because it has been used in various contexts. (388)

8. “My body is, not a collection of adjacent organs, but a synergic system, all the functions of which are exercised and linked together in the general action of being in the world, in so far as it is the congealed face of existence.” (234)

9. Hence it is that old languages do not really “die” (e.g. Dravidian, Sumerian, Proto-Semitic, Old Egyptian (Hieroglyphs), and Ancient Greek) but live on in the languages that replace them (e.g. Tamil, Babylonian, Hebrew (and Arabic), Coptic, Koine Greek).

10. The books on words present not only other words but mysterious realms of perception, hence they are grappling hooks by which we enter the depths of silence.

11. The observation that words have hooks should help solve the hermeneutical problem of the relation between the New and Old Testament, for when one pulls a word from the New, roots are exposed shooting back into the Old.

12. To think systematically seems to arrest the centrifugal dynamism of a particular word-thought and to move in one direction only, thereby necessarily overlooking nuances which appear with each word and intermittently moving away from things of the first order.

    Moreover, the danger of forcing word-thoughts to proceed according to a set of categories causes one to follow old paths, and the virgin forests of phenomenological perception are by-passed in the blind search for that which they alone obtain.

13. Failure to recognize this fact has led many biblical scholars to interpret the words in the fourth gospel in terms of either the Hellenistic province of thought or the Hebraic province of thought, not realizing that they had a province of their own.

14. There appear to be two movements in our culture. One of them is the attempt to become as a machine possessing the desired statistics with a computerized function. The other is the movement toward the appropriation of “human” qualities by machines.

15. In all written languages an arrangement of variously curved lines presents a letter, an arrangement of letters presents a word, but a word is not a word until it is in a context. If one rearranges words another thought appears. It is quite interesting to note that a new thought is actually a new arrangement of words.

16. “The tacit cogito is a cogito only when it has found expression for itself.” (404)

17. The full meaning of a language is never translatable into another. (187)