The Sound of Silence: Merleau‐Ponty on Conscious Thought

The nature of thinking and its relation to language is a perennial topic for philosophy. We take ourselves to have an inner life of thought, and we take ourselves to be capable of linguistically expressing our thoughts to others. But what is the nature of this ‘inner life’ of thought? Do we always think in language, or can we think non-linguistically? If we can think non-linguistically, is this a form of conscious thought? More precisely, if we sometimes think consciously prior to or independently of any perceptible, linguistic expression, what kind of conscious experience is this? This paper takes up these questions by examining Merleau-Ponty’s theory of expression in Phenomenology of Perception (PoP), along with some reference to his later work. For Merleau-Ponty, language expresses thought. This suggests that thought must be, in some sense, prior to the speech that expresses it. He also claims, however, that thinking just is linguistic expression, and thus that language constitutes thought. The primary aim of this paper is to make sense of this constitutive claim while maintaining that, for Merleau-Ponty, there is an inner life of thought that is not identical to its linguistic expression; thought and expression are tightly related, but there is a form of experience that lies prior to or beneath expression that we may rightly understand as ‘thought-experience’. The upshot of this account is twofold. First, it explains why the mainstream view of MerleauPonty’s theory of expression seems plausible, but is ultimately inadequate. Second, it functions as a corrective to contemporary debates about the nature and scope of phenomenal consciousness and the sense in which conscious experience has content. The first section of the paper gives a more precise articulation of the problem and the mainstream view of Merleau-Ponty’s theory of expression. Several leading interpreters of Merleau-Ponty’s work argue that he subscribes to what I will refer to as the ‘inner speech theory’ (IST). The inner speech theorist is not committed to the position that all conscious thought requires inner speech. ISTallows that conscious thought occurs when we express our thoughts aloud. But the question at hand is whether conscious thought is possible in the absence of outward verbal expression. It seems that we often think thoughts without expressing them aloud. According to IST, this ‘inner life’ of thought, or ‘thought-experience’ still requires a ‘sensory vehicle’—namely inner speech—in order to count as conscious thought. Though IST seems like a plausible reading of Merleau-Ponty based on select DOI: 10.1111/ejop.12207