Ontology and Phenomenology of Speech

An Existential Theory of Speech

Marklen E. Konurbaev

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9783319711980
• Topic: Lingue e linguistica
• Subtopic: Psicolinguistica

This book applies phenomenological methodology to examine the transformations of messages as they pass from the mind to the linear world of human speech, and then back again. Rapid development of linguistic science in the second half of the 20th century, and cognitive science in the beginning of the 21st century has brought us through various stages of natural human language analysis and comprehension – from deep structures, transformational grammar and behaviorism to cognitive linguistics, theory of encapsulation, and mentalism. Thus, drawing upon new developments in cognitive science, philosophy and hermeneutics, the author reveals how to obtain the real vision of life lurking behind the spoken word.
Applying methodology introduced by Edmund Husserl and developed by Martin Heidegger, the author examines how we can see the 'living' and dynamic essence of speech hidden in the world of linear linguistic strings and casual utterances. This uniquely researched work will be a valuable resource for students and scholars of cognitive stylistics, pragmatics and the psychology of language.

© The Author(s) 2018

Marklen E. KonurbaevOntology and Phenomenology of Speechhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71198-0_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Marklen E. Konurbaev¹

(1)

English Linguistics, The Lomonosov Moscow State University, Moscow, Russia

End Abstract

A thought mirrors the world and is rarely clear in representing its true essence. Being dark, obscure and blurry, it often resembles hallucination, which every person prefers to keep to oneself. And when, through one reason or another, one is forced to share this vision with the world by means of language, there is always an excuse that follows, ‘That’s the way I see it’. However, language does not make this vision any clearer either, but disguises the thought even further and hence, the world that this particular thought represents. The only choice left to us is to contemplate the speaker’s own world—the vast vacuity spanning in the murky recesses of his or her mind. But this is all we need. Objectivity is not an aim, but rather, the experience and perception that leaves us totally at peace with the world, irrespective of the veracity of our representation.

Behold, this is the ‘rule of the perception mirror’ in speech: the speaker conceives an idea and then says, ‘I was a hidden treasure and I desired to be known; and I spake and made myself known to the multitudes and they harkened unto the manner of my speech and then unto the matter thereof; and then spake in return and while beholding how I felt about their speech they knew me, and I, in beholding their reaction unto what I ere said—knew them; and, finally, I began to know myself through the contemplation of these people’s reaction unto my words and, alas, gained but little satisfaction in this pursuit, but am still struggling in good earnest to understand if I actually live and have the enthralling vigour of life in my veins or have already evaporated into the thin air of ephemeral illusions of the multitude’.

This book is about the phenomenon of ‘the genesis of life’ in our minds during speech perception. It explores connected animated, visual and aural images that are actualized in our brain during the course of our interpersonal communication. Following al-Ghazali (2008), a Persian philosopher of the twelfth century (to whom we are grateful for the revealing comments of Aristotle and his Organon), we call this process احياء ( ihya ) [´ɪʰ´ja], that is, reviving the content of speech, awakening the pictures in your imagination triggered by the language we use, vivifying or breathing life into the world that we perceive in our minds while reading and speaking. The main purpose of the phenomenology of speech therefore, as of every other phenomenological research, actually, is, according to Taylor Carman, ‘an attempt to describe the basic structures of human experience and understanding from a first person point of view, in contrast to the reflective, third person perspective that tends to dominate scientific knowledge and common sense’ (Merleau-Ponty, 2013). The experience of life awakening in our minds in response to natural human speech as an organized linguistic material is one of the most intricate, unusual and mysterious phenomena that forms the basis of all interpersonal communication and surely deserves a special study within the framework of phenomenology as a philosophical study. Phenomenology is ‘a philosophy that places essences back within existence and thinks that the only way to understand man and the world is by beginning from their “facticity”’ (Merleau-Ponty, 2013). This stance is much in keeping with Husserl’s call to return ‘back to facts’, rather than opinions, and to proceed from observations, rather than abstract reasoning. ‘Now to pass rational or scientific judgment upon facts (Sachen) means being guided by the facts themselves, getting away from talk and opinion back to the facts, questioning them in their self-givenness, and laying aside all prejudices alien to their nature’ (Husserl, 2012).

In defining the essence of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1998) Bertrand Russell drew up four aspects of the ‘mind-language-reality’ relationship that are being studied by different scholars and disciplines: psychology, epistemology, sciences dealing with the subject matter of sentences, and finally, logic (Russell, 2007 [1922]). However, I distinctly feel that there should be one more. At least, I do not find in these approaches any explanation of the ‘sensation of life’, the phenomenon of actual living in a metaphysical reality of speech that invariably appears in my mind when I read and listen. As long as the words of speech remain merely a part of a complex linguistic expression, I understand nothing and feel nothing. But once these words, their syntactic and logical relations begin to trigger my memory and life experience and then forthwith disappear behind the images of a moving life in the speech that I currently perceive, I begin to feel that I understand what I read or hear in the speech that is addressed to me and am ready to express my attitude to it.

Language as an advanced semiotic system forming the basis of all our verbal communication has been under a thorough scrutiny since antiquity. But the vision of the ideal linguistic structures carefully explored by structural linguistics, transformational grammar and behaviourism gave us little understanding of how the living language actually operates in our minds and how interpersonal communication is made possible.

Arguably, the mental representation of the reality that we perceive with our senses is far from being a mere series of abstract idealized logical strings quickened by our emotions. We’ll hardly perceive such expression as reality unless the actually uttered ‘strings of speech’ (including its linguistic forms, intonation and the meaning of words) turn into a mental substance that is ontologically very similar to what we see in ‘our mind’s eye’ when we are confronted with the real world. Otherwise stated, speech has the potential to ‘generate life’ in our minds in exactly the same manner as we perceive the real life through our five senses. Ihya (phenomenological awakening) then must be the sixth feeling that awakens life during communication by means of the written word or oral speech.

Since our early childhood, we strive to express ourselves in speech with the purpose of exploring the world and understanding who we are, and why we are here, and what the limits of our existence are. Beginning with a certain age, every child does it most fervently, as if his or her whole life depends on it. And when a child fails to achieve a certain level of success in this direction by the age, let us say, of three or four, we, adults, may suspect that something is wrong with the child’s development and sometimes may even worry about his or her mental health. So great is the power and place of the language in our lives that every effort is now being made in the education system and further on, during our professional activities, aiming to secure normal intellectual development and protect our mental or psychological health.

Mental representation of the world in which we live seems to be so natural that we often forget that the perception of speech is an attempt at representing the already perceived world delivered to us in a new, linear linguistic form. In fact, we are trying to identify the world presented to us in speech through the ‘curved mirror’ of our intuition and the generalized vision of the world—our Weltanschauung. Curiously, a speaker addressing another speech agent wishes him or her to perceive this reflection in the first place and not the source-reality that actually caused such reflection. Failure to experience this type of representation (even when the vision of the original reality is correct) ruins the whole of the communication process and causes quarrels and misunderstanding.

Paradoxically, in this modern world of people, we are less interested in perceiving the real world of material objects than the world of the interconnected and interdependent visions belonging to the socially integrated personalities expressed in their speech. Oddly enough, this ‘reality’ is never stable, but changes with the way people ‘feel the world’ of other people in their hearts and minds. We are considerably more interested in adequately representing this virtual world of people’s representations, than in the perception of the actual trees, grass, flowers, insects and animals. Here comes one of the greatest phenomenological challenges of the modern world: your five senses will always mislead you, because instead of contemplating the world, you will have to interpret reflections. And however adequate your perception may be, your interlocutor will always have the right to say that his or her world was misrepresented in your head because your own ‘mirror’ was too dark or abnormally curved or, which is even more important, the real moving world of the speech agent’s representations was transformed into a flat and dead enumeration of reflected primitive items of the world.

The ability ‘to read’ a reflection of the world in other people’s speech in such a manner that the speech agent recognizes it in your responses becomes the fundamental skill of the modern reader of texts. And it does not include the skill of a psychological analysis only—but the speech agent’s ability to see the ‘life of moving and interacting items’ in the speech addressed to him or her.

‘Life’ in this theory is a phenomenon that is largely dependent on the speech agent’s ability to build in his or her mind a dynamic, evolving and balanced reflection of interrelated objects caused by the act of linguistic communication (be it an individual instance of speech addressed to an agent or a piece of paper read by an agent in the silence of his or her premises).

In fact, man is capable of generating the phenomenon of ‘life’ in another speech agent’s mind by relying on his or her ability to complete the unfinished forms and predict the possible, based on the experiences of his or her past. We play this ‘game of image building’ since our early childhood when we try, for example, to guess which animal is represented by an evasive cloud, or by fearing the noises and shapes in the dark garden, by ‘recognizing’ monsters and other ‘devilish creatures’ in the depth of the ocean or by predicting the course of events on the basis of our knowledge of how such events usually ended in the past (or in fairy tales, as the case may be). As a result, instead of tracing the correctness of the logical argumentation in speech, a speech agent will intuitively complete the foregrounded parts of speech into recognizable shapes. And when these shapes begin to be even remotely discernible, a speech agent will naturally add a certain dynamic perspective to them and consequently express an attitude.

There is a wonderful episode in the Old Testament of the Bible (Isaiah 6:1–13) where Prophet Isaiah tells his people of his vision of the King and sadly admits that he, being a man ‘of unclean lips, dwelling in the midst of a people of unclean lips’, could see the Lord of hosts. After an angel ‘purged his lips’ with a live coal, God commanded Isaiah to go to his people and speak in a very special manner:

And he said, Go, and tell this people, Hear ye indeed, but understand not; and see ye indeed, but perceive not. Make the heart of this people fat, and make their ears heavy, and shut their eyes; lest they see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their heart, and convert, and be healed.

This ‘instruction’ was meant to push people to the new experiences, unfamiliar to them, to the...