Zôon Logon Ekhon*

Lester Embree

 

Introduction

 

Many today would interpret Aristotle to have defined the human as the animal that has speech. Aron Gurwitsch tended toward the more traditional interpretation, that of the human as the rational animal.[1] Rationality for him involved the capacity for what Kurt Goldstein called the "abstract attitude" and, beyond that, theoria.[2] Where speech in relation to humanity is concerned, however, the following passage from an all but forgotten critical study expresses a fundamental view that Gurwitsch never abandoned.

 

Like everything of the human and cultural [spiritual] order, language attracts scientific interest and does so from numerous standpoints. Forming one of the distinctive and, perhaps (as many believe), the most important and the most essential characteristics of the humanity of the human, language at the same time serves humans as an instrument. It presents itself as a fact in the mental evolution of the individual that on the one hand results in the progressive acquisition of language and on the other hand undergoes the influences of this process to such an extent that the psychology of the adult indi­vidual is fundamentally determined by the fact that he has language at his disposal and is palpably modified by alterations in this aptitude. At the same time, language is one of the most prominent facts of social life; it is what makes the constitution of a society possible but, on the other hand, through a dialectic analogous to that just pointed out in the psychology of the indi­vidual, it contains traces of the structure of this society.

…………….

The general or, if one prefers, philosophical problem of language is to know whether or not language can be considered as a totally and exclusively natural datum. This would be to say that it is perfectly explained by the facts of human anatomy and physiology, by such and such psychological tendencies innate in human nature (e.g., the tendency to imitate, which so many psychologists have given a privileged place), and also by the conditions of communal life, by the fact that the human being always and forever finds himself placed in the midst of society. Such and such facts, such ten­dencies, such general conditions of human life being given, language would arise in a quasi-automatic fashion and without anything like a mental effort or a spiritual inititive, as one will, needing to intervene. It would come forward as a power, as a reality that imposes itself on the human, not only on this or that individual but on the human tout court, on the indi­vidual qua human. Hence we take the term "nature" in a very broad sense, for it hardly matters essentially whether the reality in question is imposed on the indi­vidual from without, e.g., by a social constraint, or whether it emanates from human nature as it is actual­ized in each individual. In either case, it would not be his work and creation. If, on the contrary, one con­siders language as a creation issuing from something like the inititive, the free effort of the human and if one finds traces of this origin even in his most evolved state, then one would be led to think that language evidences the presence of something in human nature that goes beyond the purely natural plane, however one would characterize this "non-natural" element in a positive way. And, by reason of the importance of the fact of language one can make this "non-natural" factor the core of the humanity of the human to the point of definitively opening the gap that separates the human being from the purely natural beings. One can then play on an equivocation and say that the nature of the hum-in (his humanity) consists in not being (in the sense given above) a natural being. Even where the human seems to act like a brute [a l’air de se comporter en être animal], he would not be one truly; even then his actions and reactions are within the framework of the humanity of the human and are marked by it.[3]

 

The present essay develops an approach to the human that evades the question of the humanity of the human and instead uses some other Gurwitschean opinions as starting point for the development of an explanation of the human in which speech holds a central place as explanans rather than as explanandum. By the above passage this seems to have been a possibility Gurwitsch recognized, but it is difficult to say whether he would have agreed with the account offered below. One can hope he would have at least deemed it worthy of the serious research activity he called "discussion."

Something more general about Gurwitsch and the speech pro­blematics may additionally be inserted here because few are aware that he was long if peripherally interested in linguistics as well as the psychology, psychopathology, and philosophy of language. Philosophy is often affected by major scientific advances. Phenomenology's taproot, for example, is in des­criptive psychology. Excesses, however, are always possible, e.g., the logical and the transcendental psychologisms against which Husserl never ceased to struggle. The error in general consists in unjustifiably extending attractive and plausible special-scientific doctrines and methods beyond their specific regions and in correlatively elevating a special science to the status of first philosophy (perhaps the deepest assumption that needs questioning in this regard is that of first philo­sophy as exclusively cognitive or scientific[4]). Specifically, the excessive effect (which requires philosophic complicity) of the scientific investigation of speech may be called on the model of psychologism "linguisticism."

Aron Gurwitsch had an interest in the investigation of speech from his student days, when he worked with Gelb and Goldstein and knew the patient Schneider. According to Holenstein, "he wrote one of the earliest philosophical responses to the new phonology.”[5] Later, he reviewed H. J. Pos's "Phénoménologie et linguistique.”[6] And later still he taught "Philosophy and Psychology of Language" at the New School during the 1960s. It might be that his various remarks about language could be gathered into an interesting little study. Systematically speaking, one could wish he had explored the convergencies of gestalt-descriptive and structural-analytic findings on auditory as well as visual perception himself, but that is now left for others. Despite the interest, speech seems a marginal problematics in Gurwitsch's research field. Moreover, while there is a definite starting place, there is no movement toward the structuralist variety of linguisticism. That error would have been most unlikely in any case, be­cause Gurwitsch made a sharp distinction between what can be called "verbal" and "non-verbal" communication,[7] and because, from the inception of his own thinking, he opposed Husserl's tacit extension of the Sinngebung theory of speech (which he accepted) to all consciousnesses,[8] an opposition that opened the way for the development of what may be called his "gestalt phenomenology of perception," for which he is known and by which he has influenced Merleau-Ponty, among others.[9] For the same reasons, but without even a starting place, the generalization of text-interpretive methodology into the species of linguisticism that may be called "philologism" or even "hermeneuticism" is even more alien to Gurwitsch's standpoint.

 

Problem and Thesis

 

If one can reflect on speech phenomenologically without going to extremes, there is a problem with the contemporary inter­pretation of Aristotle's definition. On the assumptions that speech is the capacity for expressing and comprehending significations and that communication among brutes involves nothing more than the instinctual and learned capacities for displaying and perceiving signals (and hence no signifi­cations), then speech does differentiate humans from sub­human animals or brutes (whether there are super-human animals and how humans might differ from them may be ignored here). Might there be, however, a difference of the human that is more than a capacity? To be sure, the capacity for speech brings infants under the definition and the quali­fication of it as a normal capacity brings mutes and imbeciles into the human class. Still, even those who can speak do not always do so and a constantly actual difference for the human would be preferable. (The abstract attitude and even theoria, not to speak of reason, are plainly less frequently actualized human potentialities.)

The present essay will investigate the possibility that speech is not the difference but rather basically contributes to making the difference of the human. As means to that end, how phenomenology can render explanatory in addition to strictly descriptive accounts will first be discussed and then Gurwitsch's theory of natural-scientific psychological expla­nation will be transformed into a model for aitiological explanation in the human sciences at large. At the end it should appear that speech is but one of many factors for human life and the problem of whether- it is the central or fundamental factor, as litterati and public speakers might suppose, etc., will be raised.

 

"Phenomenological Explanation"

 

In his lectures at the New School, Aron Gurwitsch often made a distinction: “to describe” a matter is to account for it in its own terms, while “to explain” a matter is to account for it in terms of other matters. This view can be interpreted in the following manner without holding Gurwitsch responsible for the results: (1) "To explain" is often used to express a broad signification that it is preferable to express as "to account for," since it then enables a more distinct recognition of "to describe" and "to explain" as coordinate species in that genus. (2) That phenomenology is interested in theoretical accounts (which may be descriptive as well as explanatory) does not preclude accounts being offered in non-theoretical discourse. (3) Descriptive and explanatory accounts can be factual ("empirical") or eidetic, something that does not need to be pursued here, except to suggest that when a fact or an eidos is subsumed under higher eide, this is still a des­cription, i.e., the reference to universals is not an accounting for the fact or more specific eidos in terms not its own. (4) Explanations incorporate or imply descriptions, but the contrary is not necessary; many explanations fail because they are based on bad descriptions.

(5) There are many usages of "to explain," some of which occur in sciences of ideal matters, although "to prove" seems more usual there. Where temporal matters are concerned, some explanations in the special sciences involve the positing of unobservable "theo­retical" entities, but that will also not be dealt with here. Where one is confined to observable temporal matters that in­volve intentive life, i.e., "vital matters," which is the case in the human sciences fundamentally, then there are two sub­species of phenomenological explanation, one where the chief explanans is a purpose and in (he future of the explanandum ("teleological explanation") and the other where the explanans is a cause in the past of the explanandum ("aitiological ex­planation").

(6) Since some consider any account restricted to observables "descriptive" (by which loose notion the two subspecies of explanation just denominated are "descriptions"), it should be stressed that in strict signification, one only describes what the matter is and does not address the questions of why it is in terms of purposes or causes, which terms refer to matters other than the matter to be described.

(7) On the present phenomenological view of explanation, Husserl's attempt to ground the world in transmundane intersubjectivity is a third subspecies of explanation, perhaps best called "grounding explanation." There may be other species of explanation, but all but two and, in a moment, one will be left out of consideration in this essay.

Aitiological explanation is possible in the human sciences. Perhaps "understanding" can also designate a situation where someone is observed to hear something behind her and turn to see what it is, the hearing motivating the turning as a cause just as much as the projected seeing motivates it as a purpose. (That one can in the same way aitiologically explain in a natural-scientific standpoint does not diminish the possibility of such explanation in human science as well.) Many pheno­menologists (Scheler, Gurwitsch, Schutz, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, etc.) advocate what may be called "reflection on others" as a species of observation comparable to self-observation. In that case, one would be able to observe events in the other as well as in oneself and thus develop explan­ations as well as descriptions. Such a panoply is most plausible for immediate psychological (including social-psychological) situations, where the directly pursued purposes and the directly prompting causes of actions and passions can be observed "in contact," as it were, with the matters that can be explained with reference to them. If one seeks more distant factors in future and past, there must be recourse to thought as well as observation.[10] This holds even more clearly where historical as well as social-scientific research is concerned.

If this brief attempt at specifying aitiological or causal explanation in contrast to teleological and other sorts of accounting for matters in terms of other matters has not only intimated that explanatory thinking may range well beyond the understood situation but also has its source in such situations and if urgent epistemological questions about how thought that reaches beyond what is given can be accepted are set aside, then a restatement of the thesis of this essay may now be more significant for the reader: Not all phenomena of human life can be described as including speech, but they may in part be aitiologically explained in terms of earlier occurrences of phenomena that do include speech. In anti­cipation, one may wonder whether the world of the French is not only a human world because the French speak but also a French world because the French speak French.

 

Speech as Human-Scientific Explanans

 

Only obliquely have the human sciences been addressed thus far. If speech plays a large role in making the difference of the human, it would be relevant for differentiating the en­tire family of the psychological, social, and historical dis­ciplines. After showing a problem with Gurwitsch's specification of the human sciences that gives the present inquiry some ur­gency, the anti-dualistic natural-scientific explanatory-psycho­logical model that he offers can be adapted for general human science-theoretical purposes and then a description of speech fitted to it as an explanans.

For Gurwitsch (and seemingly against Husserl and Schutz, at least as he comprehended their thoughts), the human sciences are specified by how the matters they address include the functional characters they originally have in non-scientific life.[11] Such functional characters can also be called "use characteristics" in a broad signification whereby end characteristic or purpose is use characteristic just as much as means character is. One might wish to broaden this account explicitly to include value characteristic as well and thus speak in a fully significant way about "cultural objects" rather than functional objects. Objects, situations, and worlds, including own and other somatopsychic subjects (brute and human animals), are originally encountered as having use or serving purposes. By some means, natural scientists learn to abstract from or neutralize such characters when they are in their disciplinary attitudes. The human scientist is also qua theoretician neutral with respect to the purposes and uses to which she might practically put the matters she investigates, were she in a practical attitude, but those matters involve humans who live their worlds as fraught with use, purpose, value, etc.

This is an interesting specification of the human-scientific subject matter and thereby the human sciences until one re­members that the notion of use object was developed in Wolfgang Köhler's investigations of chimpanzees during World War I (a decade, incidentally, before Heidegger discussed the equipmental world of Dasein similarly, which discussion, by the way, Gurwitsch deeply appreciated[12]). While it is a great advantage for human-science theory to emphasize how the human world is a system of originally useful items, more specification is needed if anthropoid apes are to be excluded from the class of the human. The present author does not yet have a definite specification to suggest. The present essay explores the possibility that the differentiating determination of the human, whatever it may be, is due to speech.

In his magnum opus, The Field of Consciousness, Aron Gurwitsch offers a model for naturalistic explanation in psychology.[13] Like Husserl, although he believed that the human sciences pertained to the natural attitude and are indeed prior to the natural sciences and include psycho­logy, he tended to focus on the natural sciences, including natural-scientific psychology. Both are legitimate sciences of individual as opposed to collective life, although human-scientific psychology is at once narrower in focusing on humans to the exclusion of brutes and broader in including not only psychic life (which the physical and some biological sciences abstract from) but also the fully cultural character of human selves, lives, objects, situations, and worlds.[14]

Various dualistic accounts of perception are specifically ex­amined by Gurwitsch. These have it in common to hold that perceptual objects have a sensuous infrastratum that is the effect of external and unobservable factors, such as light waves, and some sort of a superstratum that is due to in­ternal factors, such as attitude and past experience. The mind is then like a baker's assistant who receives cupcakes from the oven of Nature and, in accordance with her training, adds frosting, perhaps of meaning, to complete them.[15] The fundamental phenomenological difficulty of such accounts is that perceived natural objects do not disclose themselves as having two strata, but instead present themselves as in­tegral and homogeneous. A melody, for example, is not a sequence of auditory sensa ("notes") that is then organized by the intellect, for the heard melodic structure is as much an abstractum from the concrete percept as the notes are, and one is then left to wonder whether conceptual models ex­pressed in musical notation or the eidetic structures approxi­mated to and exemplified by particular melodies are not some­times mistaken for what they are about or for what approxi­mates or exemplifies them.

Gurwitsch does not object to unobservable external conditions for perception in the specific perspective of natural-scientific psychology, although it is clear from other parts of his science theory that he would consider such to be reified con­structs, objects of scientific faith not really "out there." He also does not abandon the explanatory model simply be­cause the description of the explanandum must be corrected. There is simply no need for the number of explanatory factors to be mirrored in the explanandum. If there were and the in­ternal conditions were attitude and past experience (nowise a complete list), then the perceptual object would need to have two superstrata and hence be more like a layer cake. The unitary percept has a diversity of external and internal conditions. Thus, if four equidistant objects are perceived at one time as "a foursome" and at another time as "two pair," the object presents itself differently due, probably, to changes in the perceiver's attitude, other internal and ex­ternal factors remaining constant (and not due to one set of sensa being interpreted differently).[16]

As mentioned, this model is offered for natural-scientific psy­chology. Two moves are needed to relate it to human science in general. In the first place, matters for the human sciences are more than merely perceptual since they include uses and values. It may seem quite plausible to non-phenomenologists that cultural objects are cultural due to the attitudes and pasts of those who live or encounter them. But this position can be misconstrued in at least two ways. First, one might identify the cultural character of cultural objects with the significations that expressions convey and the correlative affective and conative components in intentive life with think­ing or interpretation. But valuing and striving are not species of thinking in anything but the unreasonably broad Cartesian signification of "thinking" and cultural objects as such do not refer or signify as expressions do by virtue of the significations they convey, something that is abstracted from in the formalizing techniques of logic and linguistics (all expressions conversely are, however, cultural objects). Second, if the cultural object is, unlike the natural object, something of a cupcake, the superstratum of cultural character being distinguishable from the homogeneously sensuous infra-stratum, it is one from which the frosting nevertheless cannot be removed. Every object is a cultural object, even when the use and value of it has somehow been abstracted from in a natural-scientific or even a naturalistic-philosophical way.

If the habitual refraining intrinsic to the natural-scientific psychological attitude is reversed, so that one abstains from abstaining from the use and value that matters always al­ready have in human life, then one can engage in human-scientific psychological investigation. In order now to adapt Gurwitsch's aitiological model, if the natural-scientifically discernable natural object contained within the cultural object is considered the external condition or factor (and thus re­sort to unobservables is not necessary) and this factor held constant, than differences between individuals, between stages of personal development, etc., are due to internal factors, such as attitude, past experience, and training.

The first step in adapting Gurwitsch's model thus fits it to human-scientific psychology (on the assumption that humans can be differentiated from brutes). The second step supple­ments the thematization of the individual person with the thematization of communities at a given time for synchronic social science and with the thematization of communal change over time for diachronic historical science. It should be even more plausible that such matters as tradition and common out­look condition how the human cultural world is collectively encountered. In a synchronic treatment, where all is treated as if occurring in the same now, aitiological and teleological explanation undergo certain curious changes.

At this point the contention of this essay may be even more significant for the reader: because speech is part of communal human life and is always already there in the past, the world is lived differently for those with speech than those without it. Even if the difference thus effected in human life as explanandum cannot be specified (perhaps because it is merely a matter of degree of subtlety, richness, complexity, etc.), some things can be said about the proposed explanans. Except for terminological refinements, the following descrip­tion of speech is not novel; Aron Gurwitsch would have accepted it.

There is a species of cultural object called "expressions." These do have two distinguishable strata in them (the pro­blems come when one linguistically models natural and cultural objects on verbal expressions). The infrastratum is perceptible and can vary with the sensuous mode that pre­dominates, being sometimes predominantly audible, sometimes predominantly visible, sometime predominantly tangible (some sighted Braille teachers can, allegedly, read the bumps with their eyes as well as with their fingers), etc. The super­stratum is conceptual and as such intellectually but not sensuously intuitable. To speak of sense-bestowal or—better—signification-bestowal (Bedeutungsgebung?) is appropriate with respect to verbal expressions. Reading, hearing, writing, and speaking do have thinking or interpreting as essential components.

The signification that is carried in the sensuous vehicle thus indicates the specific intentive processes in which it is con­stituted. By virtue of the signification that is expressed in it, an expression refers to or is about some matter or other, i.e., designates, denotes, connotes, 'or—in general—signifies a matter. One can call expressions in a broad signification that covers comprehending and its derivatives "the spoken" and notice that the spoken has relations not only with "the spoken about" and "the speaking" but also with "the spoken to," i.e., the intended "comprehender" (who may also be "the speaker"). That, however, all requires reflective observation. In practical life, which is originally unreflective, and so long as verbal communication is moderately successful, what speaker and comprehender thematize is either the spoken about or the spoken to. Human scientists, however, are usually taught also to thematize at least the spoken or the compre­hended as such, i.e. the words, if not also the speaker and the comprehender.

Speaking in the narrow signification is parallel to writing as species of expressing and hearing is a species of compre­hending parallel to reading. Speaking and hearing are at least psychogenetically and historically prior to the lexical, i.e., writing and reading, much as the latter has indeed con­tributed to the elevation of literate elites during the past 5,000 years. If it is now true that half of humanity is literate, this is quite an achievement after several million years. Is there a priority of the passive over the active mode of verbalization, i.e., of hearing over speaking? In the ex­planation proposed here, children can begin to be humanized while still "infants," i.e., before they engage in verbal ex­pressing. The sounds of speech may even play a role in this before they are comprehended and thus are words for them. Con­crete investigations of how expression and especially comprehension, which must precede it developmentally, emerge in human life, where the infant is surrounded by speaking others, should be most instructive, especially if compared with the development of subhuman animals and if one controls for the signaling aspects, e.g., voice tone, which are present in verbal as well as in non-verbal communication.

Is humanization due solely to speech? All human sciences investigate humanization in their overlapping and comple­mentary specific and subspecific ways. Certainly the world into which humans are born is already structured by artistic, communicational, economic, educational, ethnic, gendered, geographical, legal, musical, political, religious, social, technological, and other factors besides the specifically linguistic. Yet if speech plays the central role after the brute biological factors in the nurturing situation and if it is essential to the full im­pact of other factors, e.g., if right conduct must be talked about as well as inculcated through conditioning, then a cer­tain primacy (but still no exclusivity) must be accorded it. Even Aristotle knew that the human was not only the animal that has speech but also the animal that lives in community.

 

Speech and Reason

 

The present essay has sought to reorient rather than settle the issue of what the human is. Drawing on views of Gurwitsch, it has developed an explanatory model for human-scientific investigation of non-verbal as well as verbal life and sug­gested that speech might be the predominant factor in original humanization. In the way of much philosophical reflection, however, it has a generally speculative air and thus calls out to be compared with results of factual research. To what extent, e.g., do provincial worlds correlate to dialects and to what extent are differences like that between Germanic Northern Europe and Romantic Southern Europe as well as dif­ferences between Chinese, Greek, Zulu, and other societies, not to speak of class differences, etc. attributable to dif­ferences in language? Factual variants along such dimensions need to be considered on the way toward eidetic insight into how the human world in general is what it is due largely to speech. Whether the present account conducted for science-theoretical and ultimately for first-philosophical purposes might be of assistance to human scientists is for the scientists to decide.

Two other questions are even more philosophical. First, that human life (including human worlds) is always already human signifies not that the problem of the origin of science is eliminated but rather that it is more clearly located. Perhaps speech is not only the means for the communication and preservation of scientific as well as other thought but specific merits of concrete speech foster and inhibit the abstract attitude and even theoria. But, again, it cannot be more than the first among many factors. Second, if it is correct that expressing and especially comprehending are factors for what humans believe, value, and will, then something of the mechanism of persuasion has been disclosed and, if there can be justifiable believing, valuing, and willing, i.e., reason in the full signification, then such reason is plainly more than rational speech and yet the present account discloses something about how speech can function to foster rational human life.



* Originally published in Essays in Memory of Aron Gurwitsch, ed. Lester Embree, Copyright 1984, The Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology, Inc. and co-published by arrangement with The University Press of America, Inc., Washington, D.C., U.S.A.

[1] Aron Gurwitsch, “On Contemporary Nihilism,” The Review of Politics, Vol. 7 (1945); reprinted in Lester Embree, ed., Essays in Memory of Aron Gurwitsch, Washington, D.C.: Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology and University Press of America, 1983, passim.

[2] Aron Gurwitsch, “Quelques aspects et quelques developements de la psychologie de la forme,” Journal de Psychologie Normale et Pathologique, Vol. 33 (1936); Translated as “Some Aspects and Developments of Gestalt Psychology” by Richard Zaner, in Aron Gurwitsch, Studies in Phenomenology and Psychology, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1966, p. 55.

[3] Aron Gurwitsch, “Psychologie du langage,” Revue Philosophique de la France et de l’Étranger, vol. 120 (1935), pp. 99-101, my translation. Cf. also Aron Gurwitsch, “L’Acquisition du langage d’après H. Delacroix,” Revue de Synthese, vol. 12 (1936).

 

[4] Cf. Dorion Cairns, “Philosophy as Striving for sophia in the Integral Sense,” in Essays in Memory of Aron Gurwitsch, ed. Lester Embree, Washington, D.C.: Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology and University Press of America, 1983 and Gerhard Funke, “The Primacy of Practical Reason in Kant and Husserl,” trans. John Burkey and Thomas M. Seebohm, in Kant and Phenomenology, ed. Thomas M. Seebohm and Joseph J. Kockelmans, Washington, D.C.: Center for Advance Research in Phenomenology and University Press of America, 1983.

[5] Elmar Holenstein, Roman Jakobson’s Approach to Language, Phenomenological Structuralism, trans. Catherin Schelbert and Tarcisius Schelbert, Bloomington and London: Indian University Press, 1974, p. 55. The reference is to the first article cited above in n. 3.

[6] Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 2 (1941), pp. 253-257. In this review, Gurwitsch argues with Pos on the relativity of linguistics to the lifeworld.

[7] “The Phenomenology of Signals and Significations,” in Aron Gurwitsch, Marginal Consciousness, ed. Lester Embree, Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, forthcoming.

[8] “Phänomenologie der Thematik und des reinen Ich,” Psychologische Forschung, Vol. 12 (1929); translated as “Phenomenology of Thematics and of the Pure Ego: Studies of the Relation between Gestalt Theory and Phenomenology” by Fred Kersten, in SPP, pp. 253-56.

[9] See Lester Embree, “Merleau-Ponty’s Examination of Gestalt Psychology,” Research in Phenomenology, Vol. 10 (1980), “Gurwitsch’s Critique of Merleau-Ponty,” The Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, Vol. 12 (1981), and the essay cited below in n. 16 for bibliography on the Gurwitsch/ Merleau-Ponty relationship in this and other respects.

[10] For the possibility of social psychology done in this mode, see Lester Embree, “Phenomenological Speculations on Lived Marriageability,” in Philosophy and Archaic Experience, Essays for Edward G. Ballard, ed. John Sallis, Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1982.

[11] Aron Gurwitsch, Phenomenology and the Theory of Science, ed. Lester Embree, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1974, Chs. 6 & 7 and Lester Embree, “Life Before Signification,” ms. 1984.

[12] Phenomenology and the Theory of Science, p. 143.

[13] Aron Gurwitsch, The Field of Consciousness, Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1964, pp. 87, 102.

[14] Cf. Lester Embree, “The Natural Scientific Constitutive Phenomenological Psychology of Humans in the Earliest Sartre,” Research in Phenomenology, Vol. 11 (1981).

[15] Two opinions that may find plausible form a conundrum if put together: (1) If the dualistic position Gurwitsch opposes is accepted, then if perceiving is going on, thinking is going on. One could say that perceiving is “infected” with thinking. (2) It is difficult to distinguish thinking and speaking. Strictly, there may be an equivalence here, for if a case of vocalizing or inscribing is speech, thinking is going on in it, but it is also plausible to contend for the contrary, for when we are thinking and not speaking aloud we seem always to engage in a fictive “speaking to ourselves.” This second implication can be taken alone and stated: If thinking is going on, speaking is going on. Next, if we combine the two implications, (3) if perceiving is going on, speaking is going on follows (CKCptCtsCps). Yet while it is plausible that at least waking life always involves perceiving, it is hardly plausible to suggest that we are always at least speaking to ourselves; this proposition is false if one can clearly observe but one moment when one is not engaged in either outward or inward speech. The present essay is concerned not with how human life might be (incurably) infected but rather with how it is always affected by speech: nevertheless, it might be suggested that the above conundrum is best overcome by rejecting the first implication.

[16] Cf. Lester Embree, “Gestalt Law in Phenomenological Perspective,” Journal of Phenomenological Psychology, Vol. 10 (1978). For an explicit connection of Gurwitsch’s objection to the “‘interpretation-’ or ‘meaning-’ theory,” see Aron Gurwitsch, “Outline of a Projected Book to be entitled Phenomenology of Perception” in Lester Embree, ed., Essays in Memory of Gurwitsch, Washington, D.C.: Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology and University Press of America, 1983, p. xvii.