ABSTRACT
This chapter highlights four common features of Heidegger’s and Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenologies of language. The first feature is the experience of language itself as irreducibly world-disclosing and thus as an experience presupposed by and not to be confused with either use of language as a tool or the natural phenomenon of language that forms the subject matter of various sciences. The second feature is the pre-reflectiveness of this experience in belabored composition no less than in spontaneous discourse. The third feature is the intentionality of language that entails its grounding not in mental representations but in the ways things present themselves (where these ways are the meanings presupposed or even accomplished by language). The fourth feature is language’s embeddedness in and co-extensiveness with our worldly existence. In this connection I identify shortcomings with Heidegger’s existential account of language (e.g., ambiguities about the relation between non-linguistic and linguistic meanings, neglect of novel linguistic meanings). After noting how Merleau-Ponty steers clear of these shortcomings through his emphasis on the centrality of gestures as embodied, intersubjective, and historical phenomena, I register the lingering problem of the place of thought in his account of this fourth feature.
