Authors and Servants: A Contribution to Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy of Speech

Abstract

The article aims to clarify and elaborate on Merleau-Ponty’s concept of speaking speech in contrast to spoken speech. Merleau-Ponty discusses the spoken speech in the context of creative expressive acts, especially art, and believes that its primary role is to open new horizons of experience and leads to cognitive enrichment of the recipient. The spoken speech, on the other hand, is a sedimentation of cultural meaning which makes it possible to transmit established cognitive patterns. In the first part of the study, we explain how speaking speech is formed against the background of ordinary spoken speech and how it relates to the perceived world. Then, we focus on two specific cases of speech that are not explicitly addresses by Merleau-Ponty. Firstly, secondary literature serves an original authorial work and does not by itself create a new style-forming image of the world, yet it moderates the way in which we understand original works, and sometimes even make such an understanding possible. Secondly, we clarify that some cases of speaking speech are manipulative, that is, they do not lead to a richer knowledge of the world, but are still able to establish a newly shared pattern.

Keywords

• merleau-ponty
• speaking speech
• spoken speech
• perceived world
• secondary literature
• manipulation