Break Through The Silence Of History,

The author holds that expression is the main clue in Merleau-Ponty' s philosophy. Based on the point, the paper fully and profoundly explores his idea on expression and its signification in the background of modern and contemporary philosophy. Because of his early theory of phenomenology of perception, Merleau-Ponty paid attention to expression. For overcoming the contradiction between inner and outer world owing to the splitting of subject and object in the aspect of the epistemology and ontology from the beginning of modern philosophy, Merleau-Ponty demands us to go back to phenomenal world, that is to say, the perceptual world, a silent world which is situated in the field of pre-consciousness and pre-language, and where the subject and object isn' t split. However, it causes two questions: if the perceptual experience can be expressed and how the transition proceeds from perceptual world to speaking world, namely cultural world. Reflecting on the two questions impels him to the way of exploring expression, a road of breaking silence.For resolving the two questions, based on criticism to anterior theory of expression in his early stage, Merleau-Ponty creates the theory of gestural expression which considers that act of body has its meaning, and it is original act of expression, and speech as a kind of act of body has its meaning. Based on this, he accounts for language and thinking relying on speech. The author claims that expression of experience can only be understood as expression of experience itself in the framework of the phenomenology of perception. That Merleau-Ponty rebuilds the theory of expression from act of body within perception experience implies the aim of probing the logos of perceptual experience, namely how perceptual experience expresses itself. His theory of expression may explain that language expresses experience is legal because language comes from perceptual experience.For explaining the transition from the perceptual world to the cultural world, Merleau-ponty reinforces the research of language and expression in his middle stage. He explains the basic principle of Saussure' s linguistics in the view of phenomenology and expounds the phenomenology of language by integrating with his early theory of gestural expression. Its obvious characteristic is to research language from expressing language, that is,phenomenal language, and to go against the tendency of alienation of language in the point of Positivism. Its basic clue is turning language to speech, then, probing speech from original silent perceptual experience. To the beginning and prosperity of culture world, Merleau-Ponty expounds that culture world comes into being by speech expression and sedimentation in his early stage. However, it is only an omen and is not fully developed. In his middle stage, Merleau-Ponty thinks on the base of theory of gestural expression that any kind of human actions has expressivity and the ability of inaugurating a new meaning and opening a field. At the same time, Merleau-ponty combines speech, which he defined by gestural expression, with language that is researched by structuralism linguistics, then uses the interaction pattern of speech and language to recount the interaction of culture world and expression, hereby explain how the culture world is developed. On the base of early theory, Merleau-Ponty profoundly probes the beginning of idea, reason, truth in speech expression, and their nature and the relation with perceptual world etc. At the same time, He tries to ensure prose as a kind of meaning of sociology, and interprets others and inter-subjectivity by expression, and interprets society and history by our expression of social life.In his late stage, many questions on the phenomenology of perception are reflected again in the perspective of ontology. Merleau-Ponty probes nature of meaning, idea and essence in the relation between the visible and the invisible , and explains the deciding influence of speech experience on them. While meaning, idea and essence retrace and refer to the original experience according to the reversibility relation of expression, it provides more justified strategy to resolving the question of expression of perceptual experience. To the question of transition between the mute world and the speaking world, he mainly discusses it from the perspective of their dialectical relation and dimensionality and depth. For the aim of proving that Being can be expressed, Merleau-Ponty discusses expression and experience and transcendence of Being, and explains that expression means distance, and that language is our medium reaching to being, and that expression of Being by language is legal. Last, on the foundation of more analysis of Merleau-Ponty' s concept of reversibility, the author points out that, when Merleau-Ponty described our expression on Being as Being expressing itself within us, he, on the one hand, overcomes the perspective of human experience as centre, and on the other hand, confirms that our experience includes speech experience. Theoretically, from the ontological...