Joseph Vendryes

French linguist (1875–1960). Author of Le langage. Introduction linguistique à l'histoire (1921; English trans. Language. A Linguistic Introduction to History, trans. Paul Radin, Kegan Paul 1925). Merleau-Ponty cites Vendryes repeatedly across his writings on language; in Le problème de la parole (1953–54), Vendryes is the central representative of objectifying linguistic science — the third stage of the propaedeutic dialectic of language. Crucially, Vendryes himself states the result that MP integrates as the unity of languages: "There exists only one human language [langage], identical in its basis at all latitudes" (qtd. PbP 58, qtd. Kee 2025 pp. 80, 81). Vendryes is therefore both the figure who pulverises the unity of any particular language and the figure whose statement of human-linguistic-unity MP recovers as the universal of existence.

Key Points

  • Standard work: Le langage (1921). The text MP cites in PbP. The English translation cited by Kee is the 1925 Kegan Paul edition.
  • The "powdering" of the word: PbP 52f. (per Kee p. 78) — Vendryes provides examples (e.g., the French plume meaning both "feather" and "pen") that drive the dissolution of the word's unity into "an aggregate of historical and usage facts." This is the objectivist pulverisation that PbP's third stage stages.
  • The dissolution of "a language": Vendryes (qtd. PbP 54): "What we call French does not exist in the language [langage] spoken by any human being… It is an ideal that is sought but never found; it is a force in action that one can only define by the goal towards which it tends; it is a reality in potentiality that never leads to actuality; it is a becoming that never arrives." Kee p. 79 records this as one of the key passages PbP cites; it shows that even within objectivist linguistic science, the disappearance of "a language" as a stable object is a structural finding — but Vendryes's own gloss ("a becoming that never arrives") has a Hegelian-existentialist register that exceeds strict objectivism.
  • The langage universal: Vendryes (qtd. PbP 58): "There exists only one human language [langage], identical in its basis at all latitudes." This is what MP recovers in the integrative-recovery stage. Importantly, Vendryes himself moves beyond strict objectivism in stating it; the universal-of-existence MP names is not Vendryes's discovery alone but one Vendryes had already glimpsed. PbP 76 quotes this passage a second time.
  • Vendryes as the boundary case of objectivism: Vendryes's own remarks point past the strict objectivist programme. MP reads this as confirmation that "science itself is the surest road to the speaking subject" (PoW 1973 p. 21, qtd. Kee p. 79) — i.e., that objectivism carried far enough leads back to the phenomenon it set out to eliminate.

Connections

  • cited centrally in PbP, the Kee 2025 paper, and in MP's 1949–50 lectures on language acquisition (2010a p. 60)
  • represents the objectifying-science stage of the propaedeutic dialectic of language
  • anticipates the unity-of-languages MP recovers in the integrative-recovery stage — the langage-as-one statement is Vendryes's own
  • is structurally analogous to Durkheim's role in "From Mauss to Lévi-Strauss" — the rigorous objectivist whose findings are integrated, not refuted

Sources

  • kee-2025-foreign-languages-phenomenology — pp. 78, 79, 80, 81. Kee p. 79 records the "what we call French does not exist…" passage; pp. 80, 81 record the langage-as-one statement. The bibliographic anchor in the Cont Philos Rev article is "Vendryes, J. (1925). Language. A Linguistic Introduction to History. Translated by Paul Radin. Kegan."