speaking and meaning: the phenomenology of language

International Phenomenological Society

Speaking and Meaning: The Phenomenology of Language by James EdieReview by: Fred KerstenPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 39, No. 1 (Sep., 1978), pp. 136-139Published by: International Phenomenological SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2107039 .

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136 PHILOSOPHY AND PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH

The attack on thesis pragmatism and the defense of method pragmatism make exciting philosophic reading. There is a fine final chapter on the history of pragmatism, well-stated objections from an imaginary critic and objector throughout the book that anticipate many of the standard criticisms of the new and old pragmatisms, ser- viceable diagrams that make difficult points easy to grasp, and numerous concept-twisting Rescherian neologisms that remind us that at times philosophers can still make the best cause appear the worst. Here's one of my favorite opacities: If certain preconditions are satisfied within the setting of a method-community ... then the historical course of this community's methodological proceedings will parallel an essentially justificatory cause. Under the indicated circumstances, the historical ontogenesis of methods will replicate a probativey ordered line of ra- tional justification: the course of historical evolution reflects the unfolding of a dynamic rationale of warrant. (p. 10) I still do not know what that means, but this is a grand book and well worth the trouble any reader takes to read it through.

A. L. HERMAN. UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN, STEVENS POINT.

Speaking and Meaning: The Phenomenology of Language. JAMES EDIE. Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1976. Pp. xiii, 271. Based primarily on the work of Husserl and Merleau Ponty, this

carefully written book discusses the problems of the ideality of language, the various levels of meaning, and the conceptions of the grammatical and metaphorical expressions. The various problems themselves are united in the thoroughgoing attempt to "study the experience of meaning in language." The first chapter considers the important philosophical role of language as the essential instrument for the phenomenological reduction in consequence of which one "turns away" from perceptual consciousness to the realm of the meant and meaning, to words and sentences, to the "linguistic apriori" (pp. 14f., 48). Although the eidetic realm of objectivities discovered is more comprehensive than the specific "idealities of language," it is only through the latter that the former becomes given. Edie interestingly finds qualified support for this, approach to language in the work of other philosophers such as Goodman (pp. 30ff.), Alston (pp.36ff.), and Searle (pp. 42ff., 61f., 70f.). In the second chapter, by establishing the formal categories of meaning (pp. 51ff.), by further exposing the laws of the composition of partial meaning into well- formed wholes or sentences (pp. 53ff.), and by constructing a closed system of basic syntactical forms (pp. 56f.), the study of the grammatical made accessible in the "linguistic turn" is raised to the



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philosophical level of the study of language in general as part of the logical investigation into the formal conditions of thought (p. 57). On the basis of a comparison of Husserl and Chomsky (pp. 58ff.), Edie concludes that no language is "human" unless it has means to express units of independent and unified meaning that can be thematized in logical propositions (pp. 7if.), and that recognition of this fact depends on an "eidetic" claim about the nature of language and thought as such, rather than on probabilities or an appeal to possible future experience.

This idea is further explored in the third chapter where the relevance of Merleau Ponty's work to contemporary structuralism is found not only in the valuable discussions of the central phenomenon of "phonological meaning" (pp. 82, 102, 125ff.), and the ways in which "linguistic truth" originates in and refers back to experience. The relevance is also found in the problem that emerges when jux- taposing Merleau Ponty's early and late work: Do we have the ex- perienced world we do because of what experience has accomplished "prior" to language-using consciousness, or is it because of the poten- tialities introduced by linguistic expression into experience? (pp. 100f., 107). Merleau Ponty's earlier work affirms the first alternative, his later work the second. But Edie perceives a compromise by which he can, on the one hand, resort to the universal structures of an eidetics of language (p. 118) and, on the other hand, account for the participation of those same structures in history and contingency. The laws of the structures prove to be the necessary conditions of the experience of which they are laws in the correlativity of "fact" and 'essence." This correlativity is the occasion for a discussion of the role and nature of the word in the fourth chapter. With the emergence of the word in speaking, meaning becomes "dependent on syntactic (and semantic) rules and structures not accounted for by phonology and morphology" (p. 131). Regarding the word as the primary, though not the complete, element of syntax, which must be arranged according to strict syntactical rules to make sense (pp. 132ff.), and in line with Husserl's account of the appresentational nature of experience (pp. 123f., 154ff.), Edie develops Ricoeur's view that the word is both the appresenting sign and the bearer of meaning. Never- theless, there remains an organizing principle of meaningfulness in language higher than the sentence since meaningful sentences do not follow each other in a random order (p. 143).

At least part of the reason for this lies in the fact that there are no rules for what has not been said. Involved is a freedom of usage pointing to the fact that linguistic experience and grammar can be coextensive but not identical (p. 146): while the meaning of a word



138 PHILOSOPHY AND PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH

may be its grammatical usage, for instance, the rules of grammatical usage are hardly, nor must they ever be, fully respected for expression of meaning (p. 147). If that is the case, then the "text" of expression itself has a life and structure of its own which is not wholly confined to usage, time, place, and user. Meaning will then always be more than intended (pp. 148f.). Indeed, any given meaning, Edie argues, is a morphological eidos similar to an idea in the Kantian sense (pp. 159f.), hence it always involves ambiguity (pp. 160, 184f.) and leaves room for novelty and creativity (pp. 181, 193f.). Understood as speaking to someone about something in words, language therefore has a "transcendental" foundation of meaning (p. 150).

No matter how and where we start with the investigation of language, we are always led back to the ideality of words as they occur in sentences. That is, the word can take on a new sense, can be metaphorical (Chapter Five) only because it can enable us to take it as something else without losing its ability to signify its own original meaning (p. 187). In a closely argued and detailed account, Edie sets out to show that presupposed by the metaphorical expression is the attempt to articulate in language the structure and meaning of the perceptual life-world based on the power of consciousness to analogize, to appresent similarities and differences, and to synthesize them into a new whole. This creative facet of metaphor leads, finally, to the idea of necessary metaphor, i.e., to metaphors that create resemblance among affairs or events and therefore found, in turn, our conceptual grasp of the world and things in it (pp. 193f.).

At one stroke, in other words, the centricity of the metaphor in our linguistic experience emerges: metaphorical -expression discloses the various sublinguistic appresentational functions of our experience at the same time that it reveals, by bringing into play, the ideality of meaning in 'expressing the primordial percept of the life-world. At the same time that the "linguistic turn" from the perceptual life- world is made, it returns us- to that world by means of the metaphor which shapes and contributes to the meaning of the world. In this way, the study of metaphorical expression, as fundamental to study- ing the experience of meaning in language, is also a test case confirm- ing the correlativity of "fact" and "essence."

This summary of Edie's book only indicates, but cannot do justice to, the many ideas and problems he explores. Without becom- ing eclectic or dogmatic, the book provides an exemplary handling of both phenomenological and nonphenomenological literature on the study of language. There is detailed documentation and a good bibliography.

While admitting at the beginning that there is no complete phenomenology of language, and that a completed theory of



REVIEWS 139

language may even be an impossibility, Edie's expectation is that, in his book, the "'whole' of language will gradually become more clear and our 'theory' of it more articulate." It is my judgment that his expectation is more than adequately fulfilled.

FRED KERSTEN. UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-GREEN BAY.

Kierkegaard. BERNARD BYKHOVSKII. Translated by Henry F. Mins. Philosophical Currents, Vol. 16. Amsterdam: B. R. Gruner B. V., 1976. Pp. ix, 122. Professor Bykhovskii, who holds the chair of philosophy at the

Plekhanov Institute of National Economy in Moscow, has established himself as a specialist in important historical figures such as Descartes, Berkeley, Hegel, and Feuerbach, and in contemporary schools such as bourgeois philosophy, personalism, idealism, and neopragmatism. The present work, translated by the American Henry F. Mins, was first published in Moscow in 1972. It carries a succinct and appreciative Foreword by Marvin Farber, and appears in the series edited by David H. DeGrood. Kierkegaard shows that the author is richly equipped to describe, explain, and criticize his subject.

Bykhovskii demonstrates that "Hegel's idealist dialectics" issued in two opposite roads. The pretersensual Schelling, the right-wing heir of Hegel, involuntarily showed the impossibility of reaching the actual material world through absolute idealism; and the anti- Schellingian young Hegelians-Feuerbach, Engels, and Marx-followed "the Ariadne's thread" of dialectical logic down the road of materialism. (p. 15) The conflict of idealism (as in Kierkegaard)- and dialectical materialism remains a major philosophical battle today.

An anxious, morbid, brooding, lonely man, Soren was born to a morose, guilt-ridden, despotic father who forced the puny, deformed boy to study theology against his will. It is revelatory of the sickness of our own contemporary bourgeois culture that the "sickness unto death" of this young man, ill in body and mind, would be taken up as a large-scale intellectual fashion.

After his break with Regina and his affluent inheritance from his father, kierkegaard settled down in Copenhagen to "creative seclu- sion" and in twelve years wrote thirty-five volumes. Bykhovskii agrees with the critics that he was psychotic, but holds that the "social func- tion" of his doctrine is more important than his illness. (p. 22) Kierkegaard rejected Hegel's idealism because of its claim to systemic



speaking and meaning: the phenomenology of language

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