We need to be able to picture the geometrical situation, to understand the configuration of the triangle, that is, to understand, for example, what an “angle” is, what “parallel” indicates, and so on. According to Merleau-Ponty, this understanding is grounded on our living experience, on the fact that our bodies are situated in, and interact with, the world. I can understand what “parallel” is because I am myself vertically positioned with respect to the ground and have to change the direction of my body when I want to go to sleep. I can understand what an angle is because my body itself forms an angle with the things it wants to grab and with the ground upon which it stands. In sum, I understand notions such as “angle” and “parallel” because they suggest to me a field of possible movements (PP, 386). I can grasp the essence of a triangle, not because I know all of its objective features, but because I see it as “the formula of an attitude, a certain modality of my hold on the world” (PP, 386).
However, it is not only the understanding of geometric notions that relies on our lived experience. Notions that do not directly refer to the way our body is oriented in space are likewise understood from our lived body. Merleau-Ponty states, for example, that we learn a new word not by memorizing its semantic meaning, but by adopting the manner in which the body needs to comport itself in order to speak this word. This involves imitating the specific position of the speech organs, as well as the facial expression and the hand movements that accompany it. It involves the global bodily context in which a word is used. In spontaneous language acquisition, it is only after this carnal context has been internalized that the semantic meaning can be isolated. I remember, for example, that as a teenager, I was already using the word hypocrite before I could explain what it actually meant. In sum, understanding concepts, geometrical or other, requires a lived body.
If we return to the geometrical proof above, we notice that something more is happening than simply understanding the geometrical configuration. The proof also asks us to draw a relation between different concepts, to deduce a conclusion from the premises. It is clear that this is not an analytic deduction, for the conclusion is not implied in the definition or eidos of the premises. There is nothing in the idea of these three angles, C, D, and E, that already refers to the sum of A, B, and C. The conclusion does not spell out what is already given in the premises, but, on the contrary, it crystallizes, reorganizes, and synchronizes the premises. The initial confusion of meaning present in the premises, the openness of different possibilities of meaning-directions,6 is now organized according to one meaning and is thus reduced and, more importantly, transformed. The process of geometrical proof is fundamentally creative, or expressive. But how does the geometer do this? What is the origin of the transformation he generates? He can deduce the conclusion from the premises because he has, while picturing the triangle, experienced the possibility of a transition. The specific modality of his hold on the world—the triangle, in this case—is traversed by lines of force that lead him to something new. Merleau-Ponty says the proof is generated from the “dynamic formula of the triangle” (PP, 386), and this, again, is a function of our being situated as a body in the world. Hence, both the picturing of premises and conclusions, as well as the deduction of the latter from the first, rely on existence, or on the general structure of the way we relate as bodies to the world. Geometry, and other expressive operations as well (language and art), is entirely devoid of meaning when separated from this existential ground (PP, 102). The lived body and the way it inhabits the world is their condition of possibility.
But is this idea that thought (along with other expressive operations) is grounded in our bodily being-to-the-world in contradiction with the aforementioned idea that self-consciousness is the condition for perception, speech, and positing thought? What is the condition of all expressive operations, our lived experience of the world, or thought’s immediate contact with itself? As Rudi Visker observes, one of the central preoccupations of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy is “the metaphysical problem concerning a creation which is not ex subjecto and yet [is] more than a mere reproduction of already pre-existing givens” (1999, 105). As the analysis of geometric thought shows, concepts cannot be considered merely products of the human mind. They are anchored in our carnal being-to-the-world. At the same time, however, the example of geometric proof showed that there is definitely a creative process involved, for these concepts are not merely reproductions of a given existence. In order to describe this reciprocal determination, Merleau-Ponty introduces the concept of “expression” in the chapter “The Cogito” in Phenomenology of Perception. In his later work, the notion will gradually gain more importance and will become one of the central concepts of his philosophy, as I will show in the chapters on Cézanne and Proust. By then, he will use it to refer to a dynamics proper to being itself, rather than to a dynamics between the human mind and being, and that is why he eventually replaces it with the notion of “institution.” As a way of introducing the concept of expression, I will discuss Merleau-Ponty’s observations on how language expresses the lived world.
Linguistic Expression. According to Merleau-Ponty (S, 17–18), we underestimate language’s creative power when we reduce it to being nothing more than a means for communicating to others ideas already formed in our head. Language is not only instrumental; and transmitting our ideas to others is not its only function, nor its most interesting characteristic. This is clear from the following experience: It sometimes happens that we can grasp the full range of meaning carried by our own words only once we have spoken them. We are, as it were, surprised about the depths our words subsequently seem to have: “They put responses on our lips we did not know we were capable of, teaching us, Sartre says, our own thought” (S, 17). What this experience illustrates is not so much that an idea can be the result of an accidental assembly of concepts, but rather that an idea can form itself in and through the process of expression. We have the feeling that the idea has arisen from the words and not from ourselves. Merleau-Ponty refers to this speech through which thought develops as “primary speech” or “speaking speech” (parole parlante).7 “Secondary speech” or “spoken speech” (parole parlée) refers to language as it is usually experienced or used, namely, as a means to communicate sedimented ideas. Merleau-Ponty illustrates this with the sobering experience we can have when we tell someone about the eye-opening conversation we had yesterday with someone else. Whereas yesterday the words had a revealing character, today they seem to have lost their magic. Instead of being telling and suggestive, they seem to have become hollow. They are merely the repetition of a thought that has taken place before: they are the sign of thought, and not the “body” through which thought can take place (PP, 181). In spoken speech, the words are merely references to an ideal reality that transcends the expression, whereas in speaking speech, language transcends itself in speech (PP, 392). In other words, in spoken speech the expression is clearly distinguished from what it expresses since it is preceded and conditioned by the latter, which is itself independent of the expression. In speaking speech, on the contrary, the expressed can appear only through the expression, which makes it dependent on the expression. However, since the expression does not come out of nowhere but is itself grounded on our lived existence—which is what is ultimately expressed—the expression also requires the expressed. Thus, in speaking speech, there is a mutual dependency of language and thought, which Merleau-Ponty describes with the Husserlian term Fundierung:
The relation of reason to fact, or eternity to time, like that of reflection to the unreflective, of thought to language or of thought to perception is this two-way relationship that phenomenology has called Fundierung: the founding term, or originator—time, the unreflective, the fact, language, perception—is primary in the sense that the originated is presented as a determinate or explicit form of the originator, which prevents the latter from reabsorbing the former, and yet the originator is not primary in the empiricist sense and the originated is not simply derived, since it is through the originated that the originator is made manifest. (PP, 394)8
Fundierung, this “two-way relationship,” bridges the gap between a classical ground and what it grounds and replaces it with a reciprocal determination: “Thought (pensée) and speech (parole) anticipate one another. [. . .] They are waypoints (relais), stimuli for one another.
