Language And Its Expression:a Study On Merleau-Ponty’s Middle Thinking Of Language

In order to tackle with the dualism inmodern philosophy, Merleau-Ponty applied to his phenomenology of perception. He quoted the "perceptive body"which exists in the "pre-objective world"to try eliminating the epistemological gap. Nevertheless, how to put together the "perception world" which contains the "body" and the "cultural world" which derived from "language" turned out to be a complicated problem left by his early thoughts.We believe that Merleau-Ponty’s concern about language in his medium-term thinking----especially his thinking about language and expression----had provided possible solutions to the question mentioned above. At that moment, Merleau-Ponty creativelyintegrated bothSaussure’s linguistics and Husserlian phenomenology. He divided the language in its broadest sense into two narrow senses:"objective language" and "phenomenal language"(parole). He started his philosophical journey withthe phenomenon of language. And then he turned his focus from objective language to phenomenal language. Finally, he ended his destination in the "silence voice"----the experience of perception. From then on, he opened an approach to get access to the phenomenology of language.Further, we insist that Merleau-Ponty’s exploration was between the structurism and phenomenology. He created a unique investigation of phenomenal language. This investigation presented Merleau-Ponty’s concern about the relationship between existence and perception in the dimension of language. And what’s more, it furnished solutions to the dualism in modern philosophy and the existence of "Other" in Husserlian phenomenology.As a result, this thesis focuses its study on Merleau-Ponty’s middle thinking of language based on both language and its expression. Our key effort is to try making clear Merleau-Ponty’s thoughts of the phenomena of language through the two respects mentioned above.Our difficulties are:firstly, find out the unique characteristics of Merleau-Ponty’s thinking of language in his medium-term philosophy compared with his other theories on language and give it a proper evaluation; secondly, how did his investigation pave the way to solve certain philosophical difficulties.This thesis mainly includes the following themes in respective chapters:firstly, Merleau-Ponty’s acknowledgement and criticismof linguistic structurism and his approaches to the phenomenology of language; secondly, Merleau-Ponty’s discussion about the essential characteristic of language and the relationship between language, history and truth; thirdly, Merleau-Ponty’s investigation on the relationship between language and "the creation of senses"as well as "the construction of the world as a whole", etc.