Thought, Language and Philosophy

Abstract

Hearing, as Heidegger remarks,¹ is a possibility belonging to discursive speech; what I am now embarking on is therefore not just my own discursive speech but an exercise of our common faculty for it. There is of course a vector in the situation; the syntagma as which I appear before you is part of my output but part of your input. Still we share it: that is the first point to remember. In the universe of discourse each of us exists as a double syntagma, composed of two parallel, intermittent, usually alternating syntagmata, one of speaking (or writing), the other of hearing (or reading): parallel because they bear as it were a constant relation to one another, accompanying the same body (or the same mind) wherever it goes; intermittent because we cannot be engaged in discursive activity all the time, and also because keeping silent, as Heidegger says in the same place, is another possibility belonging to discursive speech; usually alternating, because what we say is usually intended for other ears, what we hear usually the product of other voices. (We also hear what we ourselves say, but I leave that complication aside.) If it were possible, in the case of a single individual, to reproduce this double syntagma in all its detail, this would be not a recounting but a reliving of his life as a discursive being, the limit of “totalization” as Sartre uses the term.²

This paper was written for and read at a meeting of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy in New Orleans, Oct. 30, 1971. As a self-referential meditation embodied in an actual episode of discourse it bears the marks of its context and of its spoken character, but for obvious reasons I have wished to have these intact.