Linguistic Expression. According to Merleau-Ponty (S, 17–18), we underestimate language’s creative power when we reduce it to being nothing more than a means for communicating to others ideas already formed in our head. Language is not only instrumental; and transmitting our ideas to others is not its only function, nor its most interesting characteristic. This is clear from the following experience: It sometimes happens that we can grasp the full range of meaning carried by our own words only once we have spoken them. We are, as it were, surprised about the depths our words subsequently seem to have: “They put responses on our lips we did not know we were capable of, teaching us, Sartre says, our own thought” (S, 17). What this experience illustrates is not so much that an idea can be the result of an accidental assembly of concepts, but rather that an idea can form itself in and through the process of expression. We have the feeling that the idea has arisen from the words and not from ourselves. Merleau-Ponty refers to this speech through which thought develops as “primary speech” or “speaking speech” (parole parlante).7 “Secondary speech” or “spoken speech” (parole parlée) refers to language as it is usually experienced or used, namely, as a means to communicate sedimented ideas. Merleau-Ponty illustrates this with the sobering experience we can have when we tell someone about the eye-opening conversation we had yesterday with someone else. Whereas yesterday the words had a revealing character, today they seem to have lost their magic. Instead of being telling and suggestive, they seem to have become hollow. They are merely the repetition of a thought that has taken place before: they are the sign of thought, and not the “body” through which thought can take place (PP, 181). In spoken speech, the words are merely references to an ideal reality that transcends the expression, whereas in speaking speech, language transcends itself in speech (PP, 392). In other words, in spoken speech the expression is clearly distinguished from what it expresses since it is preceded and conditioned by the latter, which is itself independent of the expression. In speaking speech, on the contrary, the expressed can appear only through the expression, which makes it dependent on the expression. However, since the expression does not come out of nowhere but is itself grounded on our lived existence—which is what is ultimately expressed—the expression also requires the expressed. Thus, in speaking speech, there is a mutual dependency of language and thought, which Merleau-Ponty describes with the Husserlian term Fundierung:
The relation of reason to fact, or eternity to time, like that of reflection to the unreflective, of thought to language or of thought to perception is this two-way relationship that phenomenology has called Fundierung: the founding term, or originator—time, the unreflective, the fact, language, perception—is primary in the sense that the originated is presented as a determinate or explicit form of the originator, which prevents the latter from reabsorbing the former, and yet the originator is not primary in the empiricist sense and the originated is not simply derived, since it is through the originated that the originator is made manifest. (PP, 394)8
Fundierung, this “two-way relationship,” bridges the gap between a classical ground and what it grounds and replaces it with a reciprocal determination: “Thought (pensée) and speech (parole) anticipate one another. [. . .] They are waypoints (relais), stimuli for one another. All thought comes from spoken words and returns to them; every spoken word is born in thoughts and ends up in them” (S, 17–18). Such reciprocal determination deprives the classical ground of its absolute and autonomous character: the ground itself needs the grounded. Hence why Merleau-Ponty drops such notions as “constitution,” “cause,” and “effect,” and replaces them with such terms as “culmination” and “propagation.” The condition or the ground culminates in the conditioned or the grounded. It fixes or completes itself in the conditioned (S, 173).
In this new grounding relation, it can no longer be said that the ground precedes the grounded. On the contrary, as the notion of speaking speech illustrates, the ground and the grounded almost seem to coincide. Merleau-Ponty, however, immediately nuances this relation: “The idea of complete expression is nonsensical, [. . .] all language is indirect or allusive” (S, 43). The moments when speaking and thinking coincide, when expression is complete, so to speak, are not only rare, they are also momentary. Even after speaking thus originally, even after managing to create ideas on the spot as opposed to limiting ourselves to communicating given ideas, we still have the feeling that there is something left untold. There will always be a surplus or excess of the signified over the signifying (PP, 390). The moments when speaking and thinking coincide are only waypoints in a process of expression that never stops being resumed. They are moments in an endless process of trying to bring together thought and speech, and that means that a full coincidence with the latter is impossible (see the discussion of “partial coincidence” in chapter 4 on Bergson). The moment speaking appears to coincide with thinking, thought is already “elsewhere.” In other words, even if Fundierung brings the ground and the grounded closer together in the sense that the ground ceases to be autonomous and ceases to precede the grounded, it does not, for all that, make them coincide. The expressed still has ontological priority. As we will see in the chapter on Proust, the late Merleau-Ponty introduces the notion of institution precisely in the effort to dissolve the asymmetry or hierarchy still present in the notion of Fundierung, though without reducing the ground to the grounded or vice versa.
Before we return to Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of Descartes, there are three points I would like to highlight about the “two-way relation” between the ground and the grounded captured in the notion of Fundierung. Although I have already mentioned this, it is worth repeating that even if the expressed can manifest itself only in the expression, it does not follow that the former can be reduced to the latter. No expression is capable of entirely capturing the expressed. But that does not mean the ground is transcendent, that it belongs to an otherworldly order and is, as such, ultimately ungraspable. We do have the feeling that we understand what the other is saying, that is, that we can grasp the ground of his expression. Merleau-Ponty puts it this way: it is not that the ground is transcendent, but that it transcends itself in the expression.
The second point, related to the immanence of the ground, is Merleau-Ponty’s idea that speaking speech, despite its original character, still makes use of sedimented language. Or, more precisely: the originality of speech in speaking language is always conditioned by sedimented language. When we think as we speak, we always use words and phrasings that already exist. That we modify and reorganize these words and sentences does not change the fact that we do appeal to and use them. The new meaning we try to express is always culled from between the cracks of other expressions. It is also in this sense that the expression can be said to determine the expressed. Combining this idea with the ontological priority of the expressed, we can say that the condition of a new expression is the expressed as it exists through already given expressions.
Finally, we can see Merleau-Ponty’s implicit idea of excess as a suggestion for how we are to understand the immanence of the ground that transcends itself in the expression. I have already mentioned the idea that the expressed is a surplus or excess over the expression, insofar as the expression cannot fully grasp it, as we have seen. In his extremely clear and convincing Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy, Lawrence Hass suggests that the impossibility of the expression to grasp the expressed entails neither a shortcoming of the former nor a transcendence of the latter: “The reason such a reorganizing, crystallizing operation is required for knowledge is not because our experience of the world is impoverished, but rather because it is so full of half-hidden forms and figures, overflowing in meaning and possible perspectives” (2008, 160).