Others, Language, Art: Speech as Gesture

Most writers know the experience of discovering what they think only by writing it. You start a paragraph with a vague sense of a point, and the point takes shape as the sentences come. Midway through a conversation, you find the right word, and the idea it names becomes clear at the same moment. It's as if the thought wasn't fully there until it was said.

This common experience sits awkwardly with an influential picture of language. On the translation model, thought comes first, in some inner medium, and speech encodes it into words for others. Versions of this picture run from early modern philosophy to the idea, in cognitive science, of a language of thought: an inner code in which thinking happens, which spoken language translates. On this model, finding the right word is retrieval. The thought was complete. You just had to locate its label.

Research on gesture offers a different picture. The psychologist David McNeill studied the spontaneous hand movements people make while speaking (McNeill 1992). He argued that gesture and speech aren't separate channels, one adding decoration to the other. They form a single system, and they emerge together from a unit of thinking that's partly imagistic and partly verbal. Gestures often express aspects of a thought that the words haven't yet captured. On this view, speaking is a way in which thinking unfolds, not just a way in which it's reported.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty proposed a philosophical version of this idea decades earlier. In Phenomenology of Perception, he argued that speech doesn't translate ready-made thoughts but accomplishes them, as a gesture does (Merleau-Ponty [1945] 2012, pt. 1, ch. 6). The word, for him, carries its meaning the way a gesture of anger carries the anger. He distinguished the speech that creates new meaning from the language that's already available to us.

The question matters for research on language, cognition, and writing. If meaning is completed in expression, then studying thought apart from its expression may miss something about thought itself. And for any researcher who writes, the account offers a way to understand why drafting is a form of thinking, not just a way of recording it. The account also bears on debates about inner speech, on how second languages reshape what speakers can say, and on how new concepts enter a scientific vocabulary. Each of these is a case where meaning seems to be made, not just transmitted. Merleau-Ponty's account gives you a way to describe that making without separating thought from its expression.

References

• McNeill, David. 1992. Hand and Mind: What Gestures Reveal about Thought. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
  • Free: None.
  • Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. (1945) 2012. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Donald A. Landes. London: Routledge.
  • Free: None. Landes prints the French pagination in the margin; cite by part and chapter so learners using Smith can follow along.
  • Publisher: Routledge
  • Free companion: SEP, "Maurice Merleau-Ponty" (Toadvine), §3 · IEP, "Merleau-Ponty, Maurice" (Reynolds)

Introduction

Merleau-Ponty approaches language by way of an unexpected topic: sexuality. His chapter on "the body in its sexual being" prepares the ground for his account of speech by showing that the body expresses meaning throughout, not only when it speaks.

This reading explains, briefly, his account of sexuality as a dimension of existence, and introduces the body as expression. Citations to Phenomenology of Perception give the part and chapter. Landes's translation prints the French page numbers, so learners using Colin Smith's translation (Merleau-Ponty [1945] 2002) can follow along.

Sexuality as a Dimension of Existence

The traditional views of sexuality that Merleau-Ponty criticizes treat it in one of two ways (Merleau-Ponty [1945] 2012, pt. 1, ch. 5). Either it's a separate physiological drive, a reflex mechanism triggered by stimuli, or it's a set of ideas and representations in a consciousness. He argues that both miss what sexuality is in lived experience.

His alternative is sexual being: in Merleau-Ponty, sexuality understood as a dimension of existence, coextensive with a person's life, not a separate drive or idea. Sexuality isn't located in one function of the body or one region of the mind. It's a way of being directed toward the world and toward others, present throughout a life.

He describes it with an image: sexuality is like an atmosphere, Merleau-Ponty's image for sexuality as diffused through a life, coloring it throughout rather than located in a separate function. An atmosphere is everywhere and nowhere in particular. It isn't an object in the room, but it affects how everything in the room appears.

Erotic Perception

The key concept is erotic perception: in Merleau-Ponty, the perception of another person as sexually significant, which is bodily and pre-reflective, not a thought about an object. When another body appears as desirable, that meaning isn't inferred from its properties, and it isn't projected by a detached mind. It's given in perception, to a body that's already oriented toward others.

Merleau-Ponty returns to the patient Schneider to make the point. Schneider's disturbance reportedly included his sexual life. Other bodies no longer appeared to him with an erotic significance. On Merleau-Ponty's reading, what was lost wasn't a reflex or an idea, but a way of being oriented toward others, of the same kind as the disturbance in his movement.

He also engages with psychoanalysis, and he reads it sympathetically. He takes Freud's deepest insight (Freud [1905] 1953) to be that sexuality has a meaning, and that it's bound up with a person's whole existence, not that everything is reducible to sexual drives.

The Body as Expression

These analyses lead to a general claim. The body isn't an object that sometimes signals inner states. It is expressive throughout. Expression, in Merleau-Ponty's sense, is the embodiment of meaning in bodily conduct, as meaning is embodied in a gesture, rather than the outward sign of an inner meaning. The body expresses existence, Merleau-Ponty says, not as a sign expresses what it stands for, but as the body realizes it.

That claim prepares the next step: speech is one more form of bodily expression.

Conclusion

For Merleau-Ponty, sexuality is neither a physiological drive nor a set of ideas, but a dimension of existence, an atmosphere coextensive with a life. Erotic perception is bodily and pre-reflective. The analysis shows the body as expressive throughout, embodying meaning as a gesture does. Speech, on his account, is a further case of this expression.

Key Terms

• Sexual being: In Merleau-Ponty, sexuality understood as a dimension of existence, coextensive with a person's life, not a separate drive or idea.
• Atmosphere: Merleau-Ponty's image for sexuality as diffused through a life, coloring it throughout rather than located in a separate function.
• Erotic perception: In Merleau-Ponty, the perception of another person as sexually significant, which is bodily and pre-reflective, not a thought about an object.
• Expression: In Merleau-Ponty, the embodiment of meaning in bodily conduct, as meaning is embodied in a gesture, rather than the outward sign of an inner meaning.

References

• Freud, Sigmund. (1905) 1953. "Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality." In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 7, translated and edited by James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press.
• Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. (1945) 2002. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Colin Smith. Routledge Classics. London: Routledge. First published in English 1962.
  • Free: None.
  • Publisher: Taylor & Francis ebook, doi:10.4324/9780203994610
• Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. (1945) 2012. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Donald A. Landes. London: Routledge.
  • Free: None. Landes prints the French pagination in the margin; cite by part and chapter so learners using Smith can follow along.
  • Publisher: Routledge
  • Free companion: SEP, "Maurice Merleau-Ponty" (Toadvine), §3 · IEP, "Merleau-Ponty, Maurice" (Reynolds)

Introduction

"The word has a meaning." That sounds like a platitude. Merleau-Ponty argues that the classical theories of language can't account for it, and that taking it seriously changes how we understand both speech and thought.

This reading explains his critique of the classical accounts of language, his claim that speech accomplishes thought, the word as gesture, and his first statement of the distinction between speaking speech and spoken speech. Citations give the part and chapter.

Two Classical Accounts

As with perception, Merleau-Ponty rejects two classical accounts of language (Merleau-Ponty [1945] 2012, pt. 1, ch. 6).

• Empiricist or mechanistic accounts treat words as reflexes or associations: sound patterns triggered by stimuli and linked by habit. On this view, there's no one who speaks. Words just occur.
• Intellectualist accounts treat words as outward signs of thoughts that are complete in themselves. On this view, there's a thinker, but the word adds nothing. It's an envelope for a finished meaning.

Both, he argues, deny that the word itself has a meaning. For the first, it has none. For the second, its meaning belongs to the thought behind it.

The Translation Model and Its Failure

The intellectualist account is a version of the translation model of speech: the view that thought is complete before speech, and speech encodes it into words. Merleau-Ponty argues that this model gets the relation backward.

His evidence is the experience of speaking itself. A speaker doesn't first think the thought and then look for words. The orator doesn't think before speaking, or even while speaking. The speech is the thinking. We often don't know what we think until we've said it. Speech, Merleau-Ponty concludes, doesn't translate a ready-made thought. It accomplishes it. Thought tends toward expression as toward its completion.

The Word as Gesture

If the word isn't the sign of a thought behind it, how does it carry meaning? Merleau-Ponty's answer is that it carries meaning the way a gesture does.

When someone makes an angry gesture, I don't see a movement and infer an anger hidden behind it. The anger is in the gesture. I read it there, as I read a face. Gestural meaning, in Merleau-Ponty's account, is meaning that exists in the expressive act itself, as anger is in an angry gesture, rather than behind it as a separate thought. The word, too, has a gestural meaning. Its sense isn't attached to it from outside. It's realized in the speaking.

Speaking Speech and Spoken Speech

At the end of the chapter, Merleau-Ponty draws a distinction he'll develop in later work.

• Speaking speech (parole parlante) is the originating act of expression that brings a new meaning into being, as in a new thought, a new metaphor, or a child's first sentence.
• Spoken speech (parole parlée) is the sedimented, available language that can be used without effort, as a shared stock of words and meanings.

Speaking speech draws on spoken speech. It uses available words. But it makes them say something they didn't say before. And what it says can itself become available, part of the spoken speech of the next speaker.

Conclusion

Merleau-Ponty rejects mechanistic accounts, in which words have no meaning, and intellectualist accounts, in which words only signal finished thoughts. Speech doesn't translate thought but accomplishes it. The word carries a gestural meaning, as an angry gesture carries anger. Speaking speech creates new meaning. Spoken speech is available, sedimented language.

Key Terms

• Translation model: The view that thought is complete before speech, and speech encodes it into words.
• Gestural meaning: In Merleau-Ponty, meaning that exists in the expressive act itself, as anger is in an angry gesture, rather than behind it as a separate thought.
• Speaking speech (parole parlante): In Merleau-Ponty, the originating act of expression that brings a new meaning into being.
• Spoken speech (parole parlée): In Merleau-Ponty, the sedimented, available language that can be used without effort, as a shared stock of words and meanings.

References

• Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. (1945) 2012. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Donald A. Landes. London: Routledge.
  • Free: None. Landes prints the French pagination in the margin; cite by part and chapter so learners using Smith can follow along.
  • Publisher: Routledge
  • Free companion: SEP, "Maurice Merleau-Ponty" (Toadvine), §3 · IEP, "Merleau-Ponty, Maurice" (Reynolds)

Introduction

Every language is full of expressions that were once new. Someone first said that an argument "doesn't hold water," or that a moment was a "watershed." Merleau-Ponty's distinction between speaking speech and spoken speech explains how new meaning arises and how it becomes common property.

This reading develops the distinction, explains sedimentation and gestural meaning, and considers the reach of Merleau-Ponty's view. Citations give the part and chapter or section.

The Distinction

Speaking speech (parole parlante), in Merleau-Ponty, is the originating act of expression that brings a new meaning into being (Merleau-Ponty [1945] 2012, pt. 1, ch. 6). It happens whenever a speaker or writer makes available words say something they didn't say before: a poet's metaphor, a scientist's new concept, or a person finding words for an experience for the first time.

Spoken speech (parole parlée) is the sedimented, available language that can be used without effort, as a shared stock of words and meanings. It's the language we inherit and use every day, which lets us talk without having to invent meaning afresh.

The two aren't separate languages. They're two moments of the same process. Every act of speaking speech draws on spoken speech, and its results can become spoken speech in turn.

Sedimentation

The process connecting them is sedimentation: the process by which acts of expression settle into shared, available meanings that later speakers can use without re-creating them. The geological image is apt. A new expression, once used and taken up by others, settles like sediment. It forms a layer of available meaning, on which later expression builds.

Sedimentation explains two things. It explains why language is shared: we inherit meanings that others created. And it explains why new expression is always possible: each new act builds on what's sedimented, and reaches beyond it.

It also explains a loss. A metaphor that was once striking can become a cliché. "Watershed" no longer makes most people picture a ridge dividing river systems. The meaning has sedimented so thoroughly that it no longer seems expressed at all. It just seems to be the word's meaning.

Gestural Meaning

Merleau-Ponty's account rests on gestural meaning: meaning that exists in the expressive act itself, as anger is in an angry gesture, rather than behind it as a separate thought. Toadvine's summary of this part of Merleau-Ponty's work emphasizes the point (Toadvine 2023, §4). Language, like the body, is expressive through and through. The meaning isn't a separate thing that the word stands for. It's what the word does in its context.

The Reach of the View

Merleau-Ponty developed these ideas further in later essays, and in an extended engagement with the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. That engagement is beyond the scope here. The core claims can be stated without it.

• Meaning is realized in expression, not merely conveyed by it.
• New meaning arises in speaking speech and settles into spoken speech.
• Language is a living, bodily practice, not a code.

These claims place Merleau-Ponty among the sources of later embodied and enactive approaches to language, which treat meaning as grounded in bodily activity and interaction.

Conclusion

Speaking speech creates new meaning. Spoken speech is sedimented, available language. Sedimentation connects them: acts of expression settle into shared meanings that later speakers build on. Gestural meaning, meaning realized in the expressive act, underlies the whole account.

Key Terms

• Speaking speech (parole parlante): In Merleau-Ponty, the originating act of expression that brings a new meaning into being.
• Spoken speech (parole parlée): In Merleau-Ponty, the sedimented, available language that can be used without effort, as a shared stock of words and meanings.
• Sedimentation: In Merleau-Ponty, the process by which acts of expression settle into shared, available meanings that later speakers can use without re-creating them.
• Gestural meaning: In Merleau-Ponty, meaning that exists in the expressive act itself, as anger is in an angry gesture, rather than behind it as a separate thought.

References

• Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. (1945) 2012. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Donald A. Landes. London: Routledge.
  • Free: None. Landes prints the French pagination in the margin; cite by part and chapter so learners using Smith can follow along.
  • Publisher: Routledge
  • Free companion: SEP, "Maurice Merleau-Ponty" (Toadvine), §3 · IEP, "Merleau-Ponty, Maurice" (Reynolds)
• Toadvine, Ted. 2023. "Maurice Merleau-Ponty." In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta and Uri Nodelman. https\://plato.stanford.edu/entries/merleau-ponty/.

Introduction

Merleau-Ponty's account of language is easiest to see against the view it opposes: the translation model, the view that thought is complete before speech, and speech encodes it into words. Setting that model beside the gestural account shows exactly where they differ, and what each takes a word to be.

This reading compares the two accounts and gathers the lesson's core terms.

Two Models of Language Compared

The table contrasts a translation model (thought → word) with a gestural model (thought completed in expression) (Merleau-Ponty [1945] 2012, pt. 1, ch. 6).

Two rows deserve comment. The row on "finding the right word" captures the experience that motivates the whole account: the sense that a thought clarifies only when it's said. And the row on new meaning shows a problem for the translation model. If words only label finished thoughts, it's hard to see how genuinely new meanings could arise in language. On the gestural account, they arise all the time, in speaking speech.

What the Gestural Account Doesn't Claim

The gestural account is sometimes read as denying that we ever think silently. It doesn't. Merleau-Ponty grants that we can think without speaking aloud. His claim is that such thinking is itself carried by language, by an inner speech or by words held in readiness, and that thought isn't a finished, wordless content waiting to be translated. The claim concerns the relation between thought and expression, not whether expression is always audible.

Core Terms at a Glance

Conclusion

The translation model puts thought first and treats words as labels. The gestural account treats speech as completing thought, with meaning in the expressive act and new meaning created in speaking speech. The gestural account doesn't deny silent thought. It denies that thought is complete before expression.

Key Terms

• Translation model: The view that thought is complete before speech, and speech encodes it into words.
• Expression: In Merleau-Ponty, the embodiment of meaning in bodily conduct, as meaning is embodied in a gesture, rather than the outward sign of an inner meaning.
• Gestural meaning: In Merleau-Ponty, meaning that exists in the expressive act itself, as anger is in an angry gesture, rather than behind it as a separate thought.
• Speaking speech (parole parlante): In Merleau-Ponty, the originating act of expression that brings a new meaning into being.
• Spoken speech (parole parlée): In Merleau-Ponty, the sedimented, available language that can be used without effort, as a shared stock of words and meanings.
• Sedimentation: In Merleau-Ponty, the process by which acts of expression settle into shared, available meanings that later speakers can use without re-creating them.

References

• Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. (1945) 2012. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Donald A. Landes. London: Routledge.
  • Free: None. Landes prints the French pagination in the margin; cite by part and chapter so learners using Smith can follow along.
  • Publisher: Routledge
  • Free companion: SEP, "Maurice Merleau-Ponty" (Toadvine), §3 · IEP, "Merleau-Ponty, Maurice" (Reynolds)

Introduction

In Part One, chapter 6, Merleau-Ponty makes one of his boldest claims: that speech doesn't translate a ready-made thought but accomplishes it. The passage is short and rhetorically forceful, and it's easy to overstate. This reading works through it in three moves, notes his example of an unfamiliar word, flags a common misreading, and ends with a model paraphrase of the argument.

Locating the Passage

The passage is in Part One, chapter 6, "The Body as Expression, and Speech" (Merleau-Ponty [1945] 2012, pt. 1, ch. 6). Landes's translation prints the French page numbers in the margin, so learners using Colin Smith's translation (Merleau-Ponty [1945] 2002) can follow along. Key phrases below are given in French, with typical English renderings under Key Considerations.

No free English translation is available. The free Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Merleau-Ponty (Toadvine 2023, §4) summarizes his account of language and expression.

Before you start, note the setting. Merleau-Ponty has rejected the mechanistic account of language, in which words are reflexes, and the intellectualist account, in which words are signs of finished thoughts. He now argues positively for how speech and thought relate.

Note, too, how the chapter is built. It opens with the body's expressive life in general and only then turns to speech. That order matters for reading the passage. Merleau-Ponty isn't offering a theory of language that he later extends to the body. He treats speech as one case of bodily expression, so the claims about words borrow their force from what he's already said about gesture. Keep the angry gesture in mind as you read. It's the model the argument keeps returning to.

Walking Through the Argument

Step 1: The orator doesn't think before speaking

Merleau-Ponty begins with speakers. An orator, he says, doesn't think before speaking, or even while speaking. The speech is the thought. The same is true of the listener, who doesn't think about the words but follows the speech, and whose thought is carried along by it.

Notice the move. He isn't reporting a psychological survey of orators. He's describing a familiar experience: in fluent speech, there's no gap between a thought and its words, no moment of translation. We find out what we're saying as we say it.

Step 2: Thought tends toward expression as its completion

The second move generalizes. If there's no translation, what's the relation between thought and speech? Merleau-Ponty's answer is that thought tends toward expression as toward its completion (achèvement). A thought that hasn't been expressed isn't yet fully a thought. It's a kind of tension, reaching for a form.

This is why expressing a thought can clarify it. Writing a paragraph doesn't only record what you think. It finishes it. And it's why a thought we fail to express can seem to slip away, as if it hadn't fully existed.

Read achèvement carefully. Completion isn't creation from nothing. Before it's expressed, the thought has a direction: you know roughly what you're reaching for, and you can reject a word that misses it. What expression adds is determinacy. The shift here is from a picture of two finished things, a thought and its word, to a single process in which the thought becomes determinate by being said.

Step 3: The word carries its meaning the way a gesture carries its meaning

The third move explains how the word does this. It doesn't point to a meaning located elsewhere, in the mind. It carries its meaning the way a gesture does. When I see an angry gesture, I don't infer an anger behind it. The anger is in the gesture. The word, in the same way, has its meaning in it. To understand a word is to take up its gestural meaning, not to decode a sign.

An Unfamiliar Word

Merleau-Ponty tests the account against an unfamiliar word, and against a foreign language. When I meet a word I don't know, I can often grasp its meaning from its use in a context, before I could define it. I take up its role in the sentence, as I take up a gesture's meaning from its place in a conduct. And when I learn a foreign language, I don't translate each word into a thought I already had. I learn a new way of expressing, and in some cases, of thinking. A language, on this view, isn't a code for thoughts that exist independently of it. It's a way of shaping the world, which a new speaker must learn to inhabit.

Key Considerations

Terms and translations.

A common misreading. The most common misreading takes Merleau-Ponty to deny that we ever think silently. On this reading, he claims that thought is literally the same as talking out loud, which is clearly false.

• He doesn't deny silent thought. He grants that we think without speaking aloud.
• He denies that thought is complete before expression. Silent thinking is itself carried by language, in inner speech or in words held ready.
• His target is the translation model. The claim concerns the order of dependence between thought and expression, not whether expression is audible.

Summary

The passage moves from the orator who doesn't think before speaking, through thought tending toward expression as its completion, to the word carrying its meaning as a gesture does. Here is a model paraphrase of the argument to check your reading against:

Speech doesn't translate a thought that was already complete. The speaker doesn't think first and then find words. The speech is the thinking, and we discover what we mean in saying it. Thought tends toward expression as toward its completion, so that expressing a thought finishes it. The word carries its meaning the way an angry gesture carries anger: the meaning is in the expression, not behind it. This doesn't deny that we think silently. It denies that thought exists as a finished, wordless content waiting to be put into language (Merleau-Ponty [1945] 2012, pt. 1, ch. 6).

References

• Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. (1945) 2002. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Colin Smith. Routledge Classics. London: Routledge. First published in English 1962.
  • Free: None.
  • Publisher: Taylor & Francis ebook, doi:10.4324/9780203994610
• Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. (1945) 2012. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Donald A. Landes. London: Routledge.
  • Free: None. Landes prints the French pagination in the margin; cite by part and chapter so learners using Smith can follow along.
  • Publisher: Routledge
  • Free companion: SEP, "Maurice Merleau-Ponty" (Toadvine), §3 · IEP, "Merleau-Ponty, Maurice" (Reynolds)
• Toadvine, Ted. 2023. "Maurice Merleau-Ponty." In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta and Uri Nodelman. https\://plato.stanford.edu/entries/merleau-ponty/.