Husserl's Phenomenology of Natural Language

Intersubjectivity and Communality in the Nachlass

Horst Ruthrof

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350230897
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Phenomenology in Philosophy

Horst Ruthrof revisits Husserl's phenomenology of language and highlights his late writings as essential to understanding the full range of his ideas. Focusing on the idea of language as imaginable as well as the role of a speech community in constituting it, Ruthrof provides a powerful re-assessment of his methodological phenomenology. From the Logical Investigations to untranslated portions of his Nachlass, Ruthrof charts all the developments and amendments in his theorizations. Ruthrof argues that it is the intersubjective character to linguistic meaning that is so emblematic of Husserl's position. Bringing his study up to the present day, Ruthrof discusses mental time travel, the evolution of language, and protosyntax in the context of Husserl's late writings, progressing a comprehensive new phenomenological ontology of language with wide-ranging implications for philosophy, linguistics, and cultural studies.

1

Introduction

Language and Intersubjective Intentionality

Meaning is a such and such coloured act-character, which presupposes an act of vividly imaginable presentation (anschaulichen Vorstellens) as necessary foundation.

(Hua XIX/1, p. 81)¹

Methodological Remarks

In this study, language is understood as a set of social instructions for imagining, and acting in, a world. This conception of language is derived from Husserl’s writings and particularly from his Nachlass, where concepts such as Anschaulichkeit (vividness, picturability, imaginability), Anschauung (intuition), Ton (tone, voice), and Zumutung (imposition) play important roles and where perception and imagination are treated as equally valid sources of semantic value. In Husserl’s treatment of natural language, it is linguistic meaning, not existence, that is the focus. Truth, though important for Husserl, cannot be taken as a foundation for the theorization of natural language. This is why throughout the book, the concept of imaginability (Vorstellbarkeit) will occupy center stage, in two senses, one, as our ability to imagine something in response to the sounds of linguistic expressions and, two, in the sense of language being able to carry and convey imaginable content. Neither of the two meanings of imaginability will be used in an optional sense. In the performance of natural language both appear at the same time. In the first sense, it will be treated as a form of communal constraint on individual speech performance, and in the second, as a necessary feature of language.²

The title of the book Husserl’s Phenomenology of Natural Language: Intersubjectivity and Communality in the Nachlass is meant to draw the reader’s attention to the modifications that Husserl added in his later work, and especially in his Nachlass, to what he had to say about language in his Logical Investigations (1900/1901), and how we can build on his subsequent insights. In addition, I want to shift the customary emphasis on subjective linguistic, intentional acts toward their social dependence relations, a move for which I believe there is significant justification in Husserl’s later writings and, again, in the Nachlass. The accentuation of the social is not meant as an elaborate confirmation of the fact that language is fundamentally a collective activity. The observable, social features of language as they are displayed in public discourse have been well canvassed in the philosophy of language, various forms of linguistics, pragmatics, in Peircean semiotics, and Saussurean semiology. Language is clearly a social phenomenon as a visible and audible form of communication. What is not so obvious is that the acts of consciousness that we cannot but perform when we engage in language are likewise fundamentally social, but in diverse and intricate ways. It is the broad aim of the book to demonstrate in what ways the social deep ground of natural language is reflected in our individual intentional, linguistic acts. The method of investigation chosen is a Husserlian form of phenomenology committed to the description and eidetic distillation of the kind of intentionality that characterizes linguistic communication.

But why language as communication rather than simply language? Following Husserl, the restriction of language to an observable objectivity in isolation is the kind of presupposition to be avoided at all cost. The unwarranted assumption here would be that what we can see and hear is all to language that matters. Instead, this study wants to heed Husserl motto “to the things themselves (zu den Sachen selbst),” by way of intentional act description.³ In approaching such a description from a number of adumbrational angles, the study grants predominance to two sets of volumes in the Husserliana edition, Hua XX/1 and Hua XX/2, both dedicated to revisions of Logical Investigations, and Hua XIII, XIV, and XV on the phenomenology of intersubjectivity.⁴ Together, they form the bedrock on which I will propose my imaginability thesis of natural language. Formulated simply, the thesis states, “If I can imagine what you are talking about, including the manner in which you are, there is meaning. If not, not. And vice versa, if you can imagine the aboutness of my expressions and its mode of presentation, there is meaning. If not, not.”

The skeptical reader may object that our standard, empirical, quantitative, and qualitative research methods are precisely designed for getting us to the things as they are. Husserl answers with an emphatic “No.” In the ordinary and scientific way of viewing the world, we are guilty of remaining at the level of the prescientific, natural attitude (natürliche Einstellung) and the scientific, naturalistic attitude, which fail to question our preconceptions of how things are. For Husserl, “the natural attitude is the form in which the total life of humanity is realized in running its natural, practical course.”⁵ From this stance, we conceive of things as the sum of their properties in contingent relations with all other naturally appearing things in the world around us. The naturalistic attitude can be understood as the natural attitude as far as it appears in the natural sciences. In phenomenology, the sum of the properties of objects is regarded as the unacknowledged result of the sum of intentional acts that we typically and of necessity conduct when we experience things. In doing so, we constitute things, not in the sense that we create what is not there but as realizing them in relation to ourselves within community constraints. While the difference between these two attitudes is not immediately obvious in our experience of ordinary objects, his point can be dramatically demonstrated in the viewing of novel artworks where we cannot rely on preconceived, sedimented typifications. Picasso’s Guernica or puzzle plot films make us aware of the constitutional, interpretive labor that is involved in the process of making objectivities meaningful, that is, what they are for us, an experience, I want to stress, that is always already a communal, intersubjective form of intentionality rather than a merely subjective one. Husserl concedes that this switch in attitude to the phenomenological stance is not easy to make. After all, he says, the phenomenological method demands “thought running counter to deeply ingrained habits.”⁶ Husserl’s critique of the natural attitude demands a reversal of our assumed sequence of priorities. Instead of regarding the world as the natural starting point, what we actually do is the obverse. From our act responses to the world we draw inferences about the world. What appears first, then, is evidence beyond doubt as it appears to us, always given in a certain mode of consciousness. Husserl calls this evidence apodictic.⁷

The shift to the phenomenological gaze is theorized by Husserl as the phenomenological reduction, a technique by which we abandon as much as possible all natural and theoretical preconceptions. However, Husserl’s idea of Voraussetzungslosigkeit as an absence of presuppositions or the act of bracketing (einklammern) should not be confused with acts of eliminationism. “To bracket a belief,” Dorion Cairns explains, “is not to destroy it—it is not even to shut one’s eyes to it.”⁸ Read charitably, the Husserlian epoché is a methodological constraint in preparation for the description of intentional acts. In the study of language, this amounts to leaving behind all ordinary assumptions about how linguistic expressions work, and especially all theoretical, that is, all linguistic, semiotic, semiological, and philosophical premises with which we happen to be familiar. The very first task, then, is to define the scope of our investigation. Here the book adopts Husserl’s broad strategy of viewing language as communication.⁹ As we shall see, this choice has many consequences, one of which is that from the very start we are forced to acknowledge the social nature of language, a realization that would be less obvious if we were to restrict our focus, for instance, to the analysis of language as a system of sentences. From a phenomenological perspective such a reductive choice is unwarranted. The answer to a question like “Is there in a sentence a moment of ‘act’?”¹⁰ would reveal that sentences are abstractions of utterances from which intentionality has been excised. Only in utterances can intentional acts be individually and socially realized. While the early Husserl still thought that there could be non...