Voice and Phenomenon: Introduction to the Problem of the Sign in Husserl's Phenomenology
160
Voice and Phenomenon: Introduction to the Problem of the Sign in Husserl's Phenomenology
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780810127654 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Northwestern University Press |
| Publication date: | 08/30/2010 |
| Series: | Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy |
| Edition description: | New Edition |
| Pages: | 160 |
| Sales rank: | 516,746 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.50(d) |
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CHAPTER 1
Sign and Signs
<17> Husserl begins by pointing out a confusion. Within the word "sign" (Zeichen), always in ordinary language and at times in philosophical language, are hidden two heterogeneous concepts: that of expression (Ausdruck), which we often mistakenly hold as being the synonym of the sign in general, and that of indication (Anzeichen). Now, according to Husserl, there are some signs that express nothing because these signs carry — we must still say this in German — nothing that we can call Bedeutung or Sinn. This is what indication is. Certainly, indication is a sign, like expression. But it is different from expression because it is, insofar as it is an indication, deprived of Bedeutung or Sinn: bedeutunglos, sinnlos. Nevertheless it is not a sign without signification. Essentially, there cannot be a sign without signification, a signifier without a signified. This is why the traditional translation of Bedeutung by "signification," although it is established and nearly inevitable, risks blurring Husserl's entire text, rendering it unintelligible in its axial intention, and consequently rendering unintelligible all of what will depend on these first "essential distinctions." One can say with Husserl in German, without absurdity, that a sign (Zeichen) is deprived of Bedeutung (is bedeutungslos, is not bedeutsam), but one cannot say in French, without contradiction, that un signe is deprived of signification. In German one can speak of expression (Ausdruck) as a bedeutsame Zeichen, which Husserl does. One cannot, without redundancy, <18> translate bedeutsame Zeichen into French as signe signifiant, which lets us imagine, against the evidence and against Husserl's intention, that we could have des signes non signifiants. While being suspicious of the established French translations, we must nevertheless confess that it will always be difficult to replace them. This is why our remarks are nothing less than criticisms aimed at the existing, valuable translations. We shall try nevertheless to propose some solutions which will keep to being halfway between commentary and translation. They will thus be valid only within the limits of Husserl's texts. Most often, when we are confronting a difficulty, we shall, according to a procedure whose value is at times contestable, retain the German word while attempting to clarify it by means of the analysis.
In this way, it will be very quickly confirmed that, for Husserl, the expressivity of the expression — which always assumes the ideality of a Bedeutung — has an irreducible link to the possibility of spoken discourse (Rede). Expression is a purely linguistic sign and, in the first analysis, this is precisely what distinguishes it from indication. Although spoken discourse is a very complex structure, involving always, in fact, an indicative layer which, as we shall see, we shall have the greatest trouble trying to hold within its limits, Husserl reserves for it the exclusivity of the right to expression and therefore the exclusivity of pure logicity. Without violating Husserl's intention, one could define, if not translate, "bedeuten" by "vouloir-dire" at once in the sense of a speaking subject that wants to say, "expressing himself," as Husserl says, "about something"— and in the sense of an expression that means. [g] We can then be assured that the Bedeutung is always what someone or a discourse means<veulent dire>: always a sense of discourse, a discursive content.
In contrast to Frege, Husserl, as we know, does not distinguish, in the Logical Investigations, between Sinn and Bedeutung:
Besides, for us, <19>Bedeutung means the same thing as Sinn [gilt als gleichbedeutend mit Sinn]. On the one hand, it is very convenient, especially in the case of this concept, to have at one's disposal parallel, interchangeable terms, particularly since the sense of the term Bedeutung is itself to be investigated. A further consideration is our ingrained habit to use the two words as meaning the same thing. In these conditions, it seems a rather dubious step if their Bedeutungen are differentiated, and if (as G. Frege has proposed) we use one for Bedeutung in our sense, and the other for the objects expressed.
In Ideas I, the dissociation that intervenes between the two terms does not at all have the same function as in Frege, and it confirms our reading: Bedeutung is reserved for the ideal sense content of verbal expression, of spoken discourse, while sense (Sinn) covers the whole noematic sphere, including its non-expressive stratum:
We begin with the familiar distinction between the sensuous, so to speak, corporeal side of expression, and its non-sensuous or "spiritual" side. We need not enter into a closer examination of the first side; likewise, we need not consider the manner of unifying both sides. Obviously, they too designate headings for not unimportant phenomenological problems. We shall restrict our regard exclusively to "signifying" [bedeuten] and "Bedeutung." Originally, these words concerned only the linguistic sphere [sprachliche Sphäre], that of "expressing" [des Ausdrückens]. But one can scarcely avoid and, at the same time, take an important cognitive step, extending the Bedeutung of these words and suitably modifying them so that they can find application of a certain kind to the whole noetico-noematic sphere: thus application to all acts, be they now interwoven [verflochten] with expressive acts or not. Thus we have continued to speak of "sense" [Sinn] in the case of all intentional lived-experience — a word which is used in general as an equivalent <20> to Bedeutung. For the sake of distinctness we shall prefer the term Bedeutung for the old concept, and, in particular, in the complex locution of "logical Bedeutung" or "expressive Bedeutung." We shall continue to use the word "sense" as before in the most all-inclusive range.
After having asserted, in a passage to which we shall have to return, that there exists a pre-expressive stratum of lived-experience or sense, and then that this stratum of sense could always receive expression and Bedeutung, Husserl proposes that "logical Bedeutung is an expression."
The difference between indication and expression appears very quickly, over the course of the description, as a difference that is more functional than substantial. Indication and expression are functions or signifying relations and not terms. One and the same phenomenon can be apprehended as expression or as indication, as a discursive sign or as a non-discursive sign. That depends on the intentional lived-experience that animates it. The functional character of the description immediately shows the extent of the difficulty and gets us right to its center. Two functions can be interwoven or entangled in the same concatenation of signs, in the same signification. Husserl speaks first of the addition or of the juxtaposition of one function with the other: "... signs in the sense of indication [Anzeichen] (notes, marks, etc.) do not express, unless they fulfill, in addition to [Husserl's emphasis, neben, "besides"] the indicative function, a function of Bedeutung." But a few lines later, he will speak of intimate intrication, of entanglement (Verflechtung). This word will reappear often, at decisive moments, and this will not be by chance. It appears already in the first section: "Meaning [bedeuten<vouloir-dire>] — in communicative discourse [in mitteilender Rede] — is always interwoven [verflochten] in a relation with this indication-being."
We therefore already know that, in fact, the discursive sign and consequently the meaning <le vouloir-dire> is always entangled, gripped within an indicative system. <21> The expressive and logical purity of the Bedeutung that Husserl wants to grasp as the possibility of the Logos is gripped, that is, contaminated — in fact and always (allzeit verflochten ist) insofar as the Bedeutung is gripped within a communicative discourse. Of course, as we shall see, communication itself is for Husserl a stratum that is extrinsic to expression. But each time that an expression is produced in fact, it carries a communicative value, even if the expression does not exhaust itself in communication or if this value is simply associated with it.
It will be necessary to specify the modalities of this interweaving. But it is clear from now on that this factual necessity of entanglement which intimately associates expression and indication must not, in Husserl's eyes, undermine the possibility of a rigorous essential distinction. This possibility is purely juridical and phenomenological. The whole analysis will move forward therefore in this hiatus between fact and right, existence and essence, reality and the intentional function. By indeed leaping over the mediations and by reversing the apparent order, we would be tempted to say that this hiatus, which defines the very space of phenomenology, does not preexist the question of language, and it is not inserted into phenomenology as within one domain or as one problem among others. It is opened up, on the contrary, only in and by the possibility of language. And its juridical value, the right to a distinction between fact and intentional right, depends entirely on language and, in language, on the validity of a radical distinction between indication and expression.
Let us pursue our reading. Every expression would therefore be gripped, despite itself, by an indicative process. But the opposite, Husserl recognizes, is not true. We might therefore be tempted to turn the expressive sign into a species of the genus "indication." In this case, we would have to say in the end that speech, whatever the dignity or whatever the originality we still grant it, is only a form of gesture. In its essential center and not only by means of what Husserl considers as its accidents (its physical side, its communicative function), <22> speech belongs, without exceeding it, to the general system of signification. This system would be merged with the system of indication.
This is precisely what Husserl contests. In order to do that, he must therefore demonstrate that expression is not a species of indication even though all expressions are mixed with indication, the reverse not being true. Husserl writes,
If one limits oneself to expressions employed in living colloquy, as one usually does involuntarily when expression is in question, the concept of an indication seems to apply more widely than that of an expression, but this does not mean that its content is the genus of which an expression is the species. To mean [bedeuten
In order to demonstrate the rupture of the species-genus relation, we then have to rediscover, if there is any, a phenomenological situation in which expression is no longer tied up in this entanglement, is no longer interwoven with indication. Since this contamination is always produced in real colloquy (at once because in real colloquy expression indicates a content that is forever hidden from intuition, namely, the lived-experience of the other, and because the ideal content of the Bedeutung and the spiritual side of the expression are united in real colloquy with the sensible side), it is in a language without communication, in a monological discourse, in the absolutely lowest register of the voice of the "solitary life of the soul" (in einem Seelenleben) that it is necessary to track down the unmarred purity of expression. Through a strange paradox, the meaning <le vouloir-dire> would isolate the concentrated purity of ex-pressivity only when the relation to a certain outside would be suspended. Only to a certain outside, because this <23> reduction will not erase and indeed shall reveal in pure expressivity the relation to the object, the aim of an objective ideality, over and against the intention of meaning <vouloir-dire>, over and against the Bedeutungsintention. What we just called a paradox is in truth only the phenomenological project in its essence. Beyond the opposition between "idealism" and "realism," "subjectivism" and "objectivism," etc., phenomenological transcendental idealism responds to the necessity to describe the objectivity of the object (Gegenstand) and the presence of the present (Gegenwart) — and the objectivity in presence — on the basis of an "interiority" or rather on the basis of a self-proximity, of an ownness (Eigenheit) which is not a simple inside, but the intimate possibility of the relation to an over-there and to an outside in general. This is why the essence of intentional consciousness will be revealed (for example in Ideas I, §49) only in the reduction of the totality of the existing world in general.
This movement is already sketched in the First Logical Investigation in relation to expression and meaning <vouloir-dire> as being a relation to the object. Husserl says, "Expressions unfold their function of meaning [Bedeutungsfunktion<function de vouloir-dire>] even in the solitary life of the soul, where they no longer function as indications. In truth therefore the two concepts of sign are not really related to one another as concepts that are wider or narrower."
Before opening this field of the solitary life of the soul in order to recover expressivity in it, it is necessary therefore to determine and reduce the domain of indication. This is what Husserl begins by doing. But before following him in this analysis, let us pause for a moment.
The movement that we just commented upon is actually open to two possible readings.
On the one hand, Husserl seems to repress, with a dogmatic haste, a question about the structure of the sign in general. By proposing from the start a radical dissociation between two heterogeneous types of sign, between indication and expression, he does not ask himself what the sign in general is. The concept of sign in general — which he has to use <24> at the beginning and to which he would have to grant a hearthstead of sense — is able to receive its unity only from an essence. The general concept can only be patterned on the essence. And the essence must be recognized in an essential structure of experience and in the familiarity of a horizon. In order to hear the word "sign" at the opening of the problematic, we must already have a relation of pre-understanding with the essence, the function, or the essential structure of the sign in general. Then, however, will we be able eventually to distinguish between the sign as indication and the sign as expression, even if the two types of signs are not ordered according to the relations of genus and species. According to a distinction which is itself Husserlian (cf. First Logical Investigation, §13), one can say that the category of the sign in general is not a genus but rather a form.
What therefore is a sign in general? For many reasons, our ambition is not to answer this question. We only want to suggest the sense in which Husserl may seem to evade it. "Every sign is a sign for something" —"for something" (für etwas), these are Husserl's first words, the words that immediately introduce the dissociation of expression from indication: "But not every sign has a 'Bedeutung,' a 'sense' [Sinn] that the sign 'expresses.'" This presupposes that we knew implicitly what "being-for" means, in the sense of "being-in-the-place-of." We must understand in a familiar way this structure of substitution or of referral so that, in this structure, the heterogeneity between indicative referral and expressive referral becomes consequently intelligible, indeed, demonstrated — and even so that the evidentness of their relations comes to be accessible for us, perhaps in the sense in which Husserl hears it. A little later (in §8), Husserl will in fact demonstrate that expressive referral (Hinzulenken, Hinzeigen) is not indicative referral (Anzeigen). But no original question is posed about Zeigen in general, which, pointing the finger in this way at the invisible, can then be modified into Hinzeigen or into Anzeigen. However, we can already guess — and perhaps we shall later verify it — that this "Zeigen" is the place in which the root and the <25> necessity of all the "entanglements" between indication and expression are announced. "Zeigen" is the place in which all the oppositions and differences that will henceforth crisscross Husserl's analysis (and that will be wholly formed within the concepts of traditional metaphysics) are not yet sketched out. But Husserl, choosing the logicity of signification as his theme, believing already that he is able to isolate the logical a priori from pure grammar within the general a priori of grammar, is resolutely engaged in one of the modifications of the general structure of Zeigen: Hinzeigen and not Anzeigen.
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments x
Translator's Introduction: The Germinal Structure of Derrida's Thought xi
Translator's Note xxix
Introduction 3
1 Sign and Signs 15
2 The Reduction of Indication 23
3 Meaning as Soliloquy 27
4 Meaning and Representation 41
5 The Sign and the Blink of an Eye 51
6 The Voice That Keeps Silent 60
7 The Originative Supplement 75
Notes 91
Bibliography 107
Index 113