The Phenomenology of Speaking

Abstract

Firstly, I would like to approach my topic in a negative way. I would like to point out that what is not being done in a phenomenology of speaking is the phenomenology of language, even though it is not an irrelevant project and has both philosophical significance and a considerable bibliography showing the endeavor that has already gone into it. Language has been discussed from the point of view of structure, of content, of function, and so on. It has been analyzed by linguists, semanticists, grammarians, etymologists, as well as philosophers with a variety of biases. Our task will leave the nature of language unexplored, save that it is necessary to point out that speaking has language as one of its conditions. What I mean by “condition” however, is somewhere between the conventional meaning of that word and the technical meaning of “intentionality” in the phenomenological tradition. Perhaps the best way to clarify my meaning is to propose an analogy, which may serve to illuminate not only the relation of language to speaking, but also of thought to its object, and to the extent that each of the pairs of terms in the analogy can be grasped intuitively as inter-related one with another, light can be shed on several problems with respect to the relationships.