The Prose of the World

Author(s): Maurice Merleau-Ponty; edited by Claude Lefort; translated by John O'Neill Year: Written ~1950-52; published posthumously 1969 (French) / 1973 (English) Type: book (unfinished)

An unfinished manuscript of ~170 pages, written between 1950 and 1952, intended as the first part of a two-part work on a theory of truth. Merleau-Ponty abandoned it, probably in autumn 1951, as his thought moved toward the more fundamental ontological project that became The Visible and the Invisible. The book develops a theory of expression through extended analyses of literary language, painting, linguistics (Saussure), the algorithm, dialogue, and the child's drawing. Chapter 3 was reworked into "Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence" in Signs, making The Prose of the World the original — and in many respects more extensive — source for the concepts of indirect-language, coherent-deformation, and two-historicities.

Core Arguments

  1. Against pure language: The rationalist dream of a language that would cipher pre-existing thought into conventional signs makes communication impossible. If signs merely code what both parties already possess, "everything happens between them as though language had not existed" (ch.1, p.8, citing Paulhan). The algorithm, Leibniz's universal language, and La Bruyère's conviction that each thought has one perfect expression are all variants of this "specter." Because: Expression so conceived has no creative power; it is a closed loop. But we manifestly learn from one another — the book "catches" like a fire. Against: Rationalism and its secular successor, the algorithmic ideal.

  2. Language as system of differences: Saussure's diacritical principle reveals that language signifies through the internal organization of differences, not through point-by-point correspondence of signs to significations. "In language, there are only differences without positive terms" (ch.2, p.31, citing Saussure). This "liberates history from historicism" — the chaos of diachronic accidents is redeemed by the synchronic system that speaking subjects maintain. Because: Objective history of language leads to skepticism; but the "I speak" — the speaking subject's inalienable subjectivity — makes synchrony possible and ends doubt about language as the "I think" ended universal doubt. Against: Valéry's nominalism (words as accumulated misunderstandings) and Husserl's early "pure grammar" (which unconsciously projects its own language's categories onto all languages).

  3. Expression as coherent deformation: Style is "the system of equivalences he builds for himself for this work of manifestation" — the "general and concrete index of the 'coherent deformation'" (ch.3, pp.60-61). Perception already stylizes: a passing woman is not first a corporeal contour but "an individual, sentimental, sexual expression." Because: The painter does not project pre-formed meaning onto a neutral canvas. The world itself, through perception, offers the dimensions to which expression gives form. Signification occurs "where we subject the given elements of the world to a 'coherent deformation.'" Against: Malraux's formulations, which are "retrospective" — they describe style's consequences, not the point where style is at work.

  4. Two historicities: The Museum kills painting's vehemence by converting efforts into works and creating the illusion of "superartists." Against this derisory historicity of death stands the living historicity that "dwells in the painter at work when, in a single gesture, he binds the tradition he continues into the tradition he founds" (ch.3, p.73). Husserl's Stiftung captures the fecundity: "the power to forget origins" and to give the past "the efficacy of renewal or 'repetition,' which is the noble form of memory." Because: The painter's triple resumption — continuing while going beyond, conserving while destroying, interpreting through deviation — is "not simply a metamorphosis in the fairy tale sense." Against: Malraux's "imaginary superartists" and "fatalities"; Hegel as the Museum of philosophy.

  5. The algorithm as secondary: Mathematical truth is not contemplation of pre-existing essences but creative restructuring. The formula n/2(n+1) for the sum of n integers is not "contained" in the series but emerges through an operation of decentering. "The algorithmic expression is therefore secondary. It is a special case of language" (ch.4, p.129). Because: The "shift" of restructuring — noticing symmetry, reconceiving n as both ordinal and cardinal — is the same kind of creative gesture that characterizes literary expression. Once we arrive at the formula, we forget this shift and believe in the "preexistence" of the result. Against: Platonism about mathematical objects; the view that the algorithm is the "mature form" of language.

  6. Primordial expression: "Every human use of the body is already primordial expression" (ch.3, p.80). The body's oriented motion — grasping, looking, moving through space — is the foundation of all expressive arts. Painting "amplifies but also prolongs the miracle of oriented motion or grasping movements." Because: Handwriting is recognizable across scales (pencil on paper or chalk on blackboard) because it is "a general capacity to formulate a constant type of gesture." The body bridges diversity without requiring a Spirit of Painting to guide it. Against: Malraux's "subterranean torrent of history" and any appeal to occult forces behind artistic convergences.

  7. Dialogue as mutual encroachment: The other is never present "face to face" but is a "wandering double" who haunts my surroundings. In dialogue, "it is the same thing to speak to and to be spoken to" (ch.5, p.141). Speech is not transmission of pre-formed thoughts but mutual transformation: "my speech is intersected laterally by the other's speech, and I hear myself in him, while he speaks in me." Because: Intersubjectivity is grounded in corporeal generality — "there is a universality of feeling" through which my body's exposure to the world is always already exposure to other bodies. Against: The "projection" theory of intersubjectivity; the model of the "statement" as paradigm of speech.

Key Findings

  • The Prose of the World is the original locus of MP's appropriation of Malraux's "coherent deformation," the distinction between speaking and spoken speech (in extended form), the Museum critique, and the painting-language parallel — all predating Signs by nearly a decade.
  • The painting-language parallel is ultimately shown to be unworkable: "the first painting opens up a world, but the first word opens up a universe" (ch.3, p.99). Language has a cumulative, self-recovering power that painting lacks. This asymmetry — not noted in the wiki's current treatment of indirect-language — is crucial.
  • The extended treatment of the algorithm (ch.4) has no equivalent in Signs and represents a distinctive contribution: the argument that exact science's apparent self-transparency conceals the same creative "shift" that operates in language.
  • Chapter 5's treatment of dialogue and the other anticipates the later concept of intercorporeity but grounds it in the pre-ontological "universality of feeling" rather than the later vocabulary of flesh and chiasm.

Methodology

The book proceeds by progressive deepening: Ch.1 poses the problem (the illusion of pure language), Ch.2 draws on Saussure and psychology to reveal the diacritical structure of language, Ch.3 develops the parallel with painting at length, Ch.4 tests the thesis against the hardest case (the algorithm), Ch.5 extends it to dialogue and intersubjectivity, and Ch.6 (the briefest, perhaps most incomplete) applies it to the child's drawing. Each chapter takes a domain that seems to resist the thesis and shows that expression operates there too. The method is not argumentative in a linear sense but spiral — the same insight (expression as creative deformation) is tested at increasing levels of abstraction.

Concepts Developed

  • speaking-spoken-speech — the earliest extended treatment of langage parlant / langage parlé, with the reading-as-fire metaphor and the full argument about how sedimented language becomes creative speech
  • coherent-deformation — the original appropriation of Malraux's phrase, with the argument that perception already stylizes and that style works "at the point of contact between the painter and the world"
  • two-historicities — the most extensive Museum/Library critique, with the Stiftung argument and the distinction between advent and event
  • primordial-expression — "every human use of the body is already primordial expression"; the body's oriented motion as the foundation of all expressive arts
  • indirect-language — the thesis that all language is indirect and allusive, meaning arising "between" the words

Concepts Referenced

  • sedimentation — language after the fact, "sedimented language"; the accumulation of expressive operations
  • institution — Husserl's Stiftung deployed for the painter's tradition and the philosopher's relation to history
  • perceptual-faith — implicit as the "world-thesis" that mathematical thought "always understands"
  • motor-intentionality — presupposed in the argument about the body as expressive organ
  • lateral-universal — anticipated in the "concrete universality of language" argument (ch.2, p.40)
  • intercorporeity — anticipated in ch.5's "universality of feeling"

Key Passages

"We may say that there are two languages. First, there is language after the fact, or language as an institution, which effaces itself in order to yield the meaning which it conveys. Second, there is the language which creates itself in its expressive acts, which sweeps me on from the signs toward meaning — sedimented language and speech." (Ch.2, p.12)

"In language, there are only differences without positive terms. Whether one takes the signified or the signifying, language contains neither ideas nor sounds that could preexist before the linguistic system, but only conceptual differences and phonic differences which result from this system." (Ch.2, p.31, citing Saussure)

"The clarity of language is not behind it in a universal grammar we may carry upon our person; it is before language, in what the infinitesimal gestures of any scrawling on the paper or each vocal inflection reveals to the horizon as their meaning." (Ch.2, p.29)

"All style is giving form to the elements of the world which permits the orientation of the world to one of its essential parts." (Ch.3, p.60, citing Blanchot on Malraux)

"The Museum kills the vehemence of painting just as the library, as Sartre says, transforms writings which were once a man's gestures into messages. It is the historicity of death." (Ch.3, p.73)

"It is the expressive operation of the body, begun in the least perception, which amplifies into painting and art. The field of pictorial significations was opened the moment a man appeared in the world. The first sketch on the walls of a cave founded a tradition only because it gleaned from another — the tradition of perception." (Ch.3, p.82)

"The algorithmic expression is therefore secondary. It is a special case of language." (Ch.4, p.129)

"Truth is not an adequation but anticipation, repetition, and slippage of meaning." (Ch.4, p.130)

"It is the same thing to speak to and to be spoken to." (Ch.5, p.141)

"Everyone, in a sense, is the whole of the world to himself, and, by that grace, once he is convinced of this it becomes true. For then he speaks, others understand him — and the private totality fraternizes with the social whole." (Ch.5, p.145)

What's Not Obvious

  1. The painting-language parallel is designed to fail. The book seems to develop painting and language as parallel forms of expression, but the argument's trajectory is toward showing their asymmetry. "The first painting opens up a world, but the first word opens up a universe" (ch.3, p.99). Language has a self-recovering power — it can criticize itself, contain its own past — that painting cannot match. The parallel is not an equivalence but a contrast that reveals what is distinctive about language. This asymmetry is masked in the later Signs essay, which condenses the argument. See the full development at ch.3, pp.87-99, where MP systematically works through how language "speaks" while "the voices of painting are the 'voices of silence.'"

  2. Hegel is both the model and the warning. MP writes: "the Hegelian dialectic is what we call the phenomenon of expression, which gathers itself step by step and launches itself again through the mystery of rationality" (ch.3, p.85). But he also writes: "Hegel is the museum" — the synthesis that "embalms" other philosophies by containing them "only in what they affirm" (ch.3, p.109). The tension is that expression requires Hegelian accumulation (each present gathers its past) but must resist Hegelian totalization (which would close the open horizon). This dual use of Hegel — as both structural model and cautionary tale — is the deep architecture of ch.3's historical argument, and connects to retrograde-movement-of-the-true (the structure by which a new truth retroactively appears to have been already there, though it was not).

  3. Descartes as an "institution" rather than a system. In a remarkable extended passage (ch.3, pp.91-97), MP treats Descartes not as the author of doctrines but as a cultural institution — "singular like a tone, a style, or a language, that is, he can be shared by others and is more than just singular." The cogito in the Rules means something different from the cogito in the Meditations, not because Descartes changed his mind but because "each thought that is at all profound sets in motion all the others." This passage, which has no equivalent in any other MP text, demonstrates the application of the expression thesis to philosophy itself: philosophical thought is no less "indirect" than painting or literature.

Critique / Limitations

  • The book is unfinished: the second half (literary studies of Stendhal, Proust, Valéry, Breton, Artaud) and the third part (politics and religion) were never written. The argument about the "prose of the world" as a sociological category — announced in the Preface — is never developed.
  • The painting-language parallel dominates Ch.3 to the point of repetition. Lefort acknowledges "negligence, especially repetitions which Merleau-Ponty would never have let pass in a final version" (Editor's Preface).
  • The argument that the body's bridging capacity explains artistic convergences (ch.3, pp.78-81) is asserted more than demonstrated. MP says the body "does everything" that a Spirit of Painting would explain, but does not work out the mechanism.
  • The treatment of the algorithm (ch.4) is philosophically rich but may underestimate the autonomy of formal systems — the argument that the algorithm is "secondary" to lived speech is compelling for the origin of mathematical concepts but less so for their subsequent development.
  • The book's relation to its own later avatar (Signs's "Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence") is complex: Signs is more compressed and polished, but PW preserves argumentative steps that Signs elides, particularly the extended Malraux engagement, the Museum critique's full detail, and the Descartes-as-institution passage.

Connections