From encountering foreign languages to the language of phenomenology: Merleau-Ponty and The Problem of Speech

Author(s): Hayden Kee Year: 2025 Type: paper (peer-reviewed journal article, Continental Philosophy Review 58: 75–97)

Kee provides an exposition and critical interpretation of Merleau-Ponty's recently published 1953–1954 lectures Le problème de la parole (PbP). The paper has three claims load-bearing for its overall argument: first, that PbP's introduction stages a five-step propaedeutic dialectic (naïve linguistic consciousness → naïve linguistic universalism → objectivist linguistic science → linguistic relativism → unity-as-concrete-universal) that mirrors the dialectical entries Merleau-Ponty constructs for behaviour, perception, and anthropology in earlier and surrounding works. Second, that this unity is a concrete / lateral universal of existence rather than essence, and is affective and volitional before being cognitive — grounded in an "expressive will" and a "drive [poussée] of speaking subjects who want to understand one another." Third, that because phenomenology requires a language and the phenomenologist is "pervasively linguistic," language cannot be directly suspended; the reduction must be indirect, lateral, and essentially incomplete — a "leading-back" (reconduit à) rather than an all-at-once Cartesian suspension. Kee uses these three claims to read PbP as the pivot point in MP's middle period: simultaneously the last sustained treatment of language as such and the source of its absorption into the late ontological problematic of vertical / wild being.

Core Arguments

Claim: PbP's introduction traces a five-stage propaedeutic dialectic — naïve linguistic consciousness → naïve linguistic universalism → objectivist linguistic science → linguistic relativism → unity of languages as concrete-universal-of-existence — that is the Merleau-Pontian entrance into the phenomenology of language. Because: Each prior stage motivates the next: encounter with foreign languages problematizes the naïve egocentrism (PbP 41); the failure of universal-grammar logicism makes science necessary; objectivism's pulverization of word and language meets a refutation by "the sheer fact of expression and communication"; relativism is overcome by showing that the limits of one language are open horizons, not closed walls (PbP 49, 205); what survives is a unity of existence, not of essence — "all acts of expression are equivalent in that they transcend their means, are all aspects of a sole language [langage]" (PbP 58). Against: "All-at-once" Husserlian (Cartesian) entries into the reduction; logicist universal grammars (German metaphysics; the Vienna School / Carnap; Husserl's Fourth Logical Investigation); pure linguistic objectivism that pulverizes the word; strong linguistic relativism; Chomsky's intellectualist universalism; and any "view from nowhere" on language and experience (Kee pp. 76–84).
Claim: The resulting unity is concrete / lateral universality, and it is affective and volitional before being cognitive. Because: Universality is "realized little by little and is found in the expressive will that animates languages more than in the transitory forms which it reaches" (1949–50 Sorbonne lectures, qtd. Kee p. 81). At the root of language is "a drive [poussée] of speaking subjects who want to understand one another" (PoW p. 50f., qtd. Kee p. 81). The infant "bathes in language" with a "general attraction to speech." These existential conditions — situational, intersubjective, temporal, embodied-enactive, volitional, affective — replace the formal-cognitive universal of essence. Kee anchors his reading in Signs "From Mauss to Lévi-Strauss" (1964a p. 120) and notes in fn 18 that the 1953 lecture course on expression (SW&WE 2020b pp. 45, 50) is the first explicit use of "lateral universal" in MP's writings — predating the 1959 Signs essay. Against: Chomskyan minimalism (a "redoubled extreme cognitivism"); Husserl's early Fourth-LI universal grammar; Saussurean orthodoxy on the diacritical and conventional sign as uniquely linguistic.
Claim: Language has no single "specificity" — no silver-bullet feature distinguishes it from other modes of expression. Because: Diacriticality belongs to all perception (V&I p. 132 on red as "less a colour or a thing… than a difference between things and colours"). Conventionality breaks down: PbP ends with an "order of quasi-natural significations" (PbP 199), revisited as a "quasi-natural life of language" in Nature III (2003 pp. 226f.). Sedimentation, special-pleaded for language in PoP (2012 p. 195f.), is softened in later texts and looks like a feature that could in principle develop in non-verbal expressive modes given different histories (Kee p. 85). Kee invokes Di Paolo, Cuffari, and De Jaegher's Linguistic Bodies (2018) for the picture of language as a "concrete open totality" — "a giant rubber-band ball knotted in a mesh of many other rubber-band balls." Against: All "silver-bullet" accounts of linguistic specificity, including Saussurean orthodoxy.
Claim: Because phenomenology requires a language and the phenomenologist is "pervasively linguistic," language cannot be directly suspended at the outset of phenomenology; the reduction must be indirect, dialectical, and essentially incomplete. Because: My historical contingent language is a thing of this world like my body, and yet a condition of the possibility of phenomenology. Direct suspension renders phenomenology impossible. The PbP propaedeutic dialectic enacts the indirect "leading-back" (reconduit à) that is MP's preferred reduction. The structure recurs across MP's introductions: in Structure of Behavior via behaviorism ("truth of naturalism," 1963 p. 201, parallel to PbP's "truth of objectivism," PbP 57); in PoP via empiricism / intellectualism; in "From Mauss to Lévi-Strauss" via Durkheim → Mauss → Lévi-Strauss; in Nature via evolutionary theory. The 1968 V&I working note (pp. 178f.) is the late confirmation: "the incompleteness of the reduction […] is not an obstacle to the reduction, it is the reduction itself, the rediscovery of vertical being. […] My 'indirect' method […] is alone conformed with being." Against: The Cartesian path into the reduction (suspension "all at once"); any pretense of a "view from nowhere" on language; any "meta-language" outside the languages we already speak.
Claim: PbP is the pivotal transitional moment of MP's middle period: it points backwards to the focus on language and expression and forward to the late ontological problematic of vertical / wild being. Because: PbP makes the reflexive methodological dimension of language explicit; it discloses the "true 'first language' of the body" (PbP 107), the "prelinguistic relation to the world" (PbP 118), the "metalinguistic element" and "preexistence of the whole, the global view upon the world, perceptive and mute, presupposed by the speech that articulates it" (PbP 85f.). The "order of quasi-natural significations" (PbP 199) is then revisited in Nature III (2003 pp. 226f.). The 1968 V&I working note ties the indirect method, language, and "vertical being" together in a single passage. PbP is, on Kee's reading, MP's last course or published work to treat language to some extent on its own; subsequent monograph projects (The Prose of the World, The Origin of Truth) are abandoned because they were "perhaps too closely wed to the idea of a distinctive characteristic of language" (Kee fn 22). Against: Reading PbP as a stand-alone treatment of language; treating MP's late work as a rupture rather than a continuation; the assumption that language is one regional topic among others rather than a methodologically reflexive medium.

Argumentative Movement

The paper combines exposition and systematic interpretation. Section 1 reconstructs PbP's introduction as a sequenced dialectic — its movement is staged, with each stage refuting the prior and contributing a "truth" that the next must integrate. Section 2 elaborates the resulting unity as concrete / lateral universal, comparing it to Lau's reading of medicine and to Di Paolo et al.'s "concrete open totality." Section 3 is methodologically reflexive: it generalizes the dialectical entry-form to Structure of Behavior, PoP, "From Mauss to Lévi-Strauss," and Nature, treating it as the form of MP's preferred reduction. Section 4 closes by reading PbP as a pivot to the late ontology. The argumentative form is hybrid: systematic-argument with strong commentary work and one methodological-reflexive turn.

Key Findings

The propaedeutic dialectic of PbP is one instance of a recurring methodological figure in MP's introductions to several subject areas: behaviour, perception, anthropology, nature, and language (§3).
The unity of languages MP identifies is a concrete universality of existence — affective, volitional, situational — not of essence (§§1.6, 2).
The 1953 lecture course on expression is, per Kee, the first explicit use of "lateral universal" in MP's corpus, predating the 1959 Signs essay (fn 18, p. 81). This refines the wiki's existing genealogy on lateral-universal.
Language has no single specificity that could be located in a unique feature; it is a "concrete open totality" with family resemblance to other modes of expression (§2).
Direct suspension of language is impossible because language is a condition of possibility of phenomenology; the reduction must be lateral, indirect, leading-back, essentially incomplete (§3).
PbP is the pivot between MP's middle-period focus on language-as-such and the late ontological problematic of vertical / wild being (§4).

Methodology

Kee combines close textual reconstruction of PbP (drawing on the 2020 French edition, with all translations Kee's own) with systematic comparison to surrounding texts: the 1949–50 Sorbonne lectures on language acquisition, the 1953 SW&WE expression course, the 1954–55 *Institution and Passivity* courses, *The Prose of the World* draft, *Signs*, *The Visible and the Invisible*, the 1959–60 Nature III lectures, and the 1946 Société française de philosophie discussion of *PoP*. He places PbP within MP's intellectual development — the last monograph-style treatment of language — and reads its reflexive methodological consequences.

The argumentative procedure is not primarily premise-conclusion. The paper enacts the dialectical-recovery method it describes: each section recovers what was true in a prior position before moving to the next. Kee's method is therefore close to MP's own; he is doing exposition through immanent reconstruction.

Concepts Developed

(Concepts where Kee does original interpretive work, beyond what an existing wiki page already captures.)

propaedeutic-dialectic — the recurring dialectical-entry figure in MP's introductions; Kee makes it explicit as one form across language, behaviour, perception, anthropology, nature.
lateral-universal — substantial reinterpretation: language is the missing exemplar; the universal is affective and volitional before cognitive; 1953 SW&WE is the first explicit naming.
expressive-will — the poussée / drive / will-to-understand-one-another that grounds the linguistic universal as existential rather than essential.
naive-linguistic-consciousness — MP's "natural attitude towards language" (PbP 41, 221); linguistic egocentrism; the transparent / tinted figure.
truth-of-objectivism — the vérité de l'objectivisme of PbP 57; the integrative dialectical step paralleled across SoB (truth of naturalism) and *PoP* (truth of empiricism).
horizons-of-language — Kee's reformulation against Wittgenstein: not the limits but the horizons of my language(s) are the horizons of my world; languages as multi-purpose tools whose uses are roughly adumbrated; situations "draw from us more than we knew we harboured" (PbP 205).
quasi-natural-signification — PbP 199's "order of quasi-natural significations"; the breakdown of the natural / conventional sign opposition; revisited in Nature III (2003 pp. 226f.).

Concepts Referenced

speaking-spoken-speech — Kee draws on the parlante / parlée distinction in his terminological note (fn 3) and at p. 76.
indirect-language — Kee ties the indirect-language doctrine to the indirect method of the reduction (§3).
indirect-ontology — PbP as transitional source for the late ontology (§4).
wild-being — the late ontology toward which PbP points (§4); V&I 178f. ties wild / vertical being to the indirect method.
sedimentation — qualified: not a uniquely linguistic feature; later MP softens the exclusivity (§2).
natural-symbolism — quasi-natural signification is the most precise version of MP's anti-bifurcation thesis on the natural / conventional sign.
ecart / implex — diacritical structure of language extends to all perception (V&I 132, qtd. Kee p. 84).
coherent-deformation — implicit; not directly thematized but compatible with Kee's open-horizons reading.
lebenswelt — Husserl's Crisis path into the reduction shapes MP's alternative.
Husserl's Ideas I §§27–30 (natural attitude); Fourth Logical Investigation (universal grammar — criticized by Kee fn 5).
Saussure's parole / langue, diacritical sign, synchrony / diachrony (PbP 59–74; problematized via Guillaume).
Lévi-Strauss / Mauss / Durkheim — "From Mauss to Lévi-Strauss" 1964a as parallel dialectical entry.

Terminology

For Le problème de la parole (PbP) and the surrounding texts. Kee's fn 2 flags three French terms that translation cannot make crisp:

French	English (Kee's usage)	Attestation locations	Translation notes
parole	speech (also: spoken language; individual linguistic acts, including written)	PbP throughout; PoP 1945 Pt I Ch VI; Signs "On the Phenomenology of Language"	Saussure's technical sense overlaps but does not coincide with MP's.
langue	a (particular) language; or linguistic structure / system	PbP throughout; Saussure	More abstract in technical Saussurean usage.
langage	language in general / language behaviour / human linguistic capacity	PbP 49, 58, 205, 211; PoP; Signs	The most general term; cognate to "language as such."
poussée	drive (of speaking subjects to understand one another)	[[merleau-ponty-1973-prose-of-the-world	PoW]] p. 50f. (qtd. Kee p. 81); cf. 2010a pp. 65f.
reconduire / reconduit à	to lead back / leads back to	PbP 57; Primacy of Perception 1964b pp. 36f.	The verb of MP's preferred reduction. Kee fn (p. 87): "The term 'lead back' [reconduire] is chosen advisedly here."
blanc / coloré	(one's own language as) blank or transparent / (other languages as) coloured or tinted	PbP 41	Kee's fn 4 notes the ambiguity: blanc may also be "white" or "empty"; "transparent / tinted lenses" is Kee's preferred figure.
Befangenheit	(linguistic) prejudice / pinnacle of [Befangenheit]	PbP 223 (MP himself uses the German); via Husserl / Fink	Kee's note 6: "MP's use of the German Befangenheit here is probably an allusion to Fink, who used it to characterize the natural attitude."

The Kee paper does not develop a glossary, and the terms above are reconstructed from Kee's discussion. PbP page numbers refer to Robert / Saint-Aubert / Andén's 2020 Metis Presses edition.

Key Passages

"I will provide an exposition and critical interpretation of some central themes from The Problem of Speech… My objective is to situate Merleau-Ponty's understanding of speech and language in this work as pointing backwards and forwards to earlier and later phases of his thought respectively." (Kee p. 76)

"We assume our native language to be 'modeled upon' (calquée—PbP 41) being—an imitation, or a copy of it—as though the contours of our language's concepts coincided with the structures of being." (Kee p. 77, citing PbP 41)

"Linguistic egocentrism does not recognize that its language is but one possible way of disclosing the world. It takes its own language to be 'transparent,' while other languages, to the extent that it recognizes them, are 'tinted.'" (Kee p. 77, citing PbP 41)

"The very desire to pass from my language to a more general logic of which my language would be a particular case manifests once again the preponderance of my language" (Kee p. 78, citing PbP 45)

"An enlarged linguistic experience, the encounter with other (non-Indo-European) languages, reveals our philosophical interrogation itself, our reflection, as the tributary of our linguistic framework, and our desire to transcend our language by simple reflection as the sublimation of that very language." (Kee p. 78, citing PbP 48)

"Through its failed attempt at utter objectification, 'science itself is the surest road to the speaking subject'" (Kee p. 79, citing PoW 1973 p. 21)

"Just as a manual tool opens a space of action in which more is possible than has until now factually been done or imagined, so, too, an actual historical language opens its speakers onto a space of possible expression that far exceeds what has thus far actually been expressed with it… infusing our languages with new meaning as the situations and instruments of speech 'draw from us more than we knew we harbored' (PbP 205)." (Kee p. 80)

"All acts of expression are equivalent in that they transcend their means, are all aspects of a sole language [langage]." (PbP 58, qtd. Kee p. 80)

"There exists only one human language [langage], identical in its basis at all latitudes." (Vendryes, qtd. PbP 58, qtd. Kee pp. 80, 81)

"Realized little by little and is found in the expressive will that animates languages more than in the transitory forms which it reaches" (1949–50 Sorbonne lectures, qtd. Kee p. 81)

"At the root of the specific historical forms language takes, and driving the acquisition of social cognition and language in the life of an individual, there is a 'drive [poussée] of speaking subjects who want to understand one another'" (PoW 1973 p. 50f., qtd. Kee p. 81)

"[The lateral universal is] no longer the overarching universal of a strictly objective method, but a sort of lateral universal which we acquire through ethnological experience and its incessant testing of the self through the other person and the other person through the self." (Signs 1964a p. 120, qtd. Kee p. 82)

"Less a color or a thing […] than a difference between things and colors" (V&I 1968 p. 132, qtd. Kee p. 84)

The "voice of no one, since it is the very voice of the things, the waves, and the forests" (V&I 1968 p. 155, qtd. Kee p. 86)

"The most important lesson of the reduction is the impossibility of a complete reduction" (PoP 2012 p. lxxvii, qtd. Kee p. 89)

"The thematization of language overcomes another stage of naivete. […] The passage of philosophy to the absolute, to the transcendental field, to the wild and 'vertical' being is by definition progressive, incomplete. This is to be understood not as an imperfection […] but as a philosophical theme: the incompleteness of the reduction […] is not an obstacle to the reduction, it is the reduction itself, the rediscovery of vertical being. […] My 'indirect' method […] is alone conformed with being." (V&I 1968 pp. 178f., qtd. Kee p. 89)

"Phenomenology could never have come about before all the other philosophical efforts of the rationalist tradition, nor prior to the construction of science. It measures the distance between our experience and this science. How could it ignore it? How could it precede it?" (1964b p. 29, qtd. Kee p. 88)

"Having passed a certain point in its development, science itself ceases to hypostatize itself; it leads us back [reconduit] to the structures of the perceived world and somehow recovers [reconquiert] them." (1964b pp. 36f., qtd. Kee p. 88)

"True 'first language' of the body" (PbP 107, qtd. Kee p. 91); "prelinguistic relation to the world" (PbP 118); "opening […] beneath language" (PbP 209); "metalinguistic element"; "preexistence of the whole"; "global view upon the world, perceptive and mute, presupposed by the speech that articulates it" (PbP 85f.).

"In the 1953 lecture course on expression (2020b, 45, 50), which immediately preceded PbP and where, to my knowledge, Merleau-Ponty for the first time explicitly speaks of a lateral universal." (Kee fn 18, p. 81 — terminological-genealogical anchor)

What's Not Obvious

Three things this text reveals that a conventional summary or book review would not.

The propaedeutic dialectic is one methodological figure across MP's corpus, not a feature of the language treatment in isolation. The same five-stage form — naïve attitude → first ill-judged universalism → objectivist science → relativist counterpressure → integrative dialectical recovery — recurs in Structure of Behavior (entered through behaviorism: "truth of naturalism"), in PoP (entered through empiricism / intellectualism), in "From Mauss to Lévi-Strauss" (entered through Durkheim → Mauss → Lévi-Strauss), and in Nature (entered through evolutionary theory). Once it has been named, MP's introductions all start to look like the same architecture in different vocabulary. PbP's contribution is to make this form methodologically reflexive: the form is the indirect reduction, and language is the case where it is forced rather than chosen. The structural-parallel claim is one of Kee's three deferred Phase 8 claim candidates (see Open Questions).
The unity of languages MP arrives at is affective and volitional before being cognitive. Kee's evidence is the 1949–50 Sorbonne lectures' "expressive will" and the *PoW* draft's "drive [poussée] of speaking subjects who want to understand one another," together with the infant's basic receptive condition: "bathes in language," "general attraction to speech." This means that the lateral-universal is not primarily a structural-relational doctrine but a desiring-striving one — the universal is what motivates the encounter, not what is conceptually shared after it. The wiki's existing lateral-universal page is rich but emphasizes the carnal and structural register; Kee's contribution is the volitional register, which on his reading is more fundamental.
Kee dates the explicit-naming of "lateral universal" to 1953, not 1959. The wiki's existing genealogy on lateral-universal traces the structural form of the doctrine back to the 1950 Sorbonne course (as "coexistence in history") and the 1954–55 *Institution and Passivity* courses (as "particularities which unite"); the explicit name "lateral universal" the page anchors in the 1956 / 1959 Signs essays. Kee's fn 18 supplies a sharper claim: "in the 1953 lecture course on expression (2020b pp. 45, 50)… Merleau-Ponty for the first time explicitly speaks of a lateral universal." If correct, this pushes the explicit-naming back to the SW&WE course, six years before "From Mauss to Lévi-Strauss." Worth verifying in the SW&WE extraction note (a Phase 8 / Phase 6 audit task).

Critique / Limitations

Kee's argument by accumulation — that the propaedeutic dialectic is one form across MP's introductions — is plausible but not conclusively demonstrated. The four cases (PbP, *SoB* / *PoP*, "From Mauss to Lévi-Strauss," Nature) all share a staging structure (naïve attitude → objectifying science → integrative recovery), but the precise content of the dialectical stages differs in each case, and the claim that the form is the form of MP's reduction depends on the reader granting that these surface variations preserve a deep identity. A skeptic could argue that Kee has assembled a family-resemblance group rather than identified a single repeated form.

Section 2's negative result — that language has no single specificity — leans hard on Di Paolo, Cuffari, and De Jaegher's enactivist picture and on a counterfactual ("if humans had not evolved language in the gestural and verbal modalities…"). The counterfactual refutes only necessary specificity, not contingent-actual specificity. Kee gestures at this distinction but does not fully resolve it.

Kee's translations of PbP are his own (fn 1), and the French edition (Robert / Saint Aubert / Andén, 2020) is a critical edition of working notes "patchy in places" (Kee's own characterization, p. 76). Wiki citations of PbP that pass through Kee should preserve both the PbP page and Kee's mediation, and in the synthetic-layer should be flagged as access-via-Kee until PbP itself is independently ingested.

Connections

applies the lateral-universal doctrine to language as the missing exemplar
reformulates lateral-universal as primarily affective–volitional rather than primarily structural-relational
extends indirect-language from doctrine-of-expression to doctrine-of-method (the indirect form of the reduction)
enacts the propaedeutic-dialectic it describes
is the methodological generalization of expressive-will and the poussée / drive-to-speak figure
is a middle term between MP's middle-period focus on language and the late ontology of wild-being / indirect-ontology — PbP marks the transition
contrasts with Cartesian-path readings of the Husserlian reduction
contests silver-bullet accounts of "specificity of language" (including Saussurean orthodoxy on conventional / diacritical sign as uniquely linguistic)
supports the V&I 178f. working note's claim that "incompleteness of the reduction is the reduction itself"

Open Questions

The Kee ingest produced three candidate synthetic claims, recorded in the extraction note's Pass 3 Part D and deferred to audit Phase 8 rather than promoted directly to claims:

language-as-missing-case-of-lateral-universal (interpretive / genealogical) — language is the example Lau noted MP never gave; the volitional-affective reading reframes lateral universality from cognitive to affective; the 1953 SW&WE explicit naming antedates 1959 by six years. Seed evidence: Kee §2; Signs 1964a p. 120; Lau 2016 p. 168; Sorbonne lectures 2010a p. 60; PoW p. 50f.; SW&WE 2020b pp. 45, 50.
language-necessitates-indirect-reduction (structural-parallel + interpretive / methodological) — the indirect, non-Cartesian form of the reduction is necessary, not contingent, given the linguistic condition of phenomenology. PbP makes this explicit. Seed evidence: Kee §3; PoP 2012 p. lxxvii; V&I 1968 pp. 178f.; SoB 1963 pp. 127, 201; PbP 57; 1964b pp. 29, 36f.; "From Mauss to Lévi-Strauss" 1964b 114–25.
pbp-as-pivot-from-language-monograph-to-late-ontology (genealogical / structural) — PbP is the inflection point at which MP abandons monograph-style treatments of language as such (the abandoned *Prose of the World* and Origin of Truth projects) and turns to the late ontology of vertical / wild being. Seed evidence: Kee §3 closing and §4; V&I 1968 pp. 155, 178f.; Nature 226f.; PbP 199, 209; Kee fn 22; Kee 2022b cited at p. 75.

Sources

kee-2025-foreign-languages-phenomenology — this page (self-reference for the sources frontmatter).

This source has not (yet) been re-cited from other wiki pages; the connections recorded above are the first wave.