Phenomenology of reading. The quasi-corporeality of the language as the basis of tradition

Abstract

The paper considers a language functioning from the prospective of phenomenological analysis of the reading. It identifies the written text and its reading as the main means for conveying meaning through the peculiar communication within the text space.

The starting point of the research is Husserl’s interpretation of the tradition (as the meaning translation) explained in “Origin of Geometry”. The article mentions the implicit paradoxes of Husserl’s interpretation: 1) how the meaning becomes ‘omnitemporal’ through its expression in the historical and actual language; 2) how the re-activation of meaning, which was not yet intelligible to us in experience, was not actively carried out.

An idea of the corporeality gestural language proposed by M. Merleau-Ponty could be efficient to resolve those paradoxes. That idea grounds the concept of the “cultural empathy” and allows to trace the relationship between the two components of the tradition issue, taken by Husserl separately: the question of the language expression of the meaning, and the issue of intersubjectivity. Involving the measurement of corporeality and related aspects of the Husserl’s concept of intersubjectivity is productive in describing even those cases of communication when there is no living presence as such.