La fenomenologia della parola di Maurice Merleau-Ponty: per un ritorno al "soggetto parlante"

Abstract

In this article I propose to near a philosophical approach focused on the objective aspects of language to one based on the biologically derived epistemology drawn by the Neurosciences. This is made through the genetic/genealogic investigation of speech pursued by Maurice Merleau-Ponty. His phenomenology has re-introduced the body into the contemporary philosophical discourse, assuming it as the unitary structure that causes and sustains every aspects of life, including consciousness. Doing so, Merleau-Ponty has theorised the concept of embodiment for the first time in the history of western philosophy. In his work Merleau-Ponty has unveiled how the pre-reflexive existence of the body, its physical and biological base, is at the very root of subjective awareness. This allows us to consider verbal expressions as the emergency, in the animal realm, of an historical consequence of the parole, within the evolution of our specie. The resulting anti-dualistic perspective points out how the empathetic and relational faculties of the body are paramount to the development of linguistic behaviour. Before being considered conceptual utterance or coherent proposition, the parole is therefore existential mimesis, a realization of «the very presence of thought in the sensible world», it reveals a pre-reflexive, gestual sense that animates verbal expression. Following this direction, we can see inter-subjective communication as an «implicit meeting» of the embodied cognitive possibilities of the subject. These allow them not to comprehend unambiguous and universal meanings, but to reach a «a sort of blind recognition that precede the definition and the intellectual elaboration of sense», without any further warranty from mistaking or misunderstanding.