Husserl and the philosophy of language [meaning, image, medium].

Article

Abstract

[In Russian]

Admittedly, Husserl’s phenomenology doesn’t belong to the tradition of linguistic philosophy which considers the language to be both main topic and instrument of the contemporary philosophizing. In the context of the «linguistic turn»  – closely associated with the name of analytic philosophy  – phenomenological theory of meaning and language served as exclusively a negative pattern. But in the past decades the situation has been changed. The semantic pragmatism which epitomizes the current state of ordinary language philosophy is characterized by the idea of «openness to the world» (John McDowell). The language communication should not be encapsulated within itself. On the contrary, from the point of view of semantic pragmatics, the communicative language is always saturated with world-contents. But this kind of openness to the world implicates some problems, namely the tension between two tendencies: the holistic one (tendency towards the whole) and the externalist one (tendency towards the given). This tension reproduces – of course on a higher level – the old ontological separation of world and language, of seeing and understanding. To reach more consistent view of the relation between world and language, the problem is to be formulated in topological terms. At this point, at least one concept by early Husserl – namely «medium of meaning» – becomes actual. Husserl himself interprets «medium» not as a mediator but as a milieu in which we can «live». Indeed we live in the medium of meaning while reaching the communicative (i. e. common) world within dialogical language which undermines the conventional ontological separation of seeing und saying. This integrative potential of communicative speaking is being proved by the structural analogy with perception of two-dimensional images which is distinguished by the interweaving of the material and semantic aspects.