When expression helps a thought take shape

By the end of this lesson, you should be able to:

• Reconstruct Merleau-Ponty’s argument that expression can accomplish a thought.
• Distinguish using a settled formulation from finding an articulation whose meaning is still emerging.
• Assess the reach of this account without treating vocal fluency as a test of thought or expressive success as a guarantee of truth.

Imagine someone revising an explanation of a meeting that went badly. The first version says, “We failed because we disagreed.” That seems too sweeping. The next version says, “We agreed on the aim but never decided who would do what.” The revision draws a distinction between sharing an aim and assigning responsibility. Suppose, too, that the writer had not clearly made that distinction before trying to explain what happened.

The second sentence has done more than replace awkward words. It has helped give the writer something more definite to think about. Yet the new explanation could still be wrong; perhaps responsibilities were assigned and then ignored. Finding a thought and finding a true account are different achievements.

Merleau-Ponty asks us to take seriously the possibility that expression takes part in thinking. In the chapter “The Body as Expression, and Speech,” he argues that a thought need not be complete before words arrive to carry it. The difficulty is deciding how much that observation can support. Does expression sometimes develop a thought, or does thought depend on expression in a stronger sense?[1]

The appeal of a ready-made meaning

There is an attractive account of what happens when we speak or write. First we know what we mean; then we choose signs that will let someone else understand it. Call this the transmission model: the thought is already formed, and expression conveys it.

The model has real uses. Someone who knows that a key is in the blue drawer may look for a way to explain which drawer that is, and an awkward sentence can fail to convey a perfectly definite intention. Rejecting one attempted formulation need not mean discovering a new thought each time. Indeed, knowing that a sentence is wrong for the purpose seems to require some prior grasp of the purpose.

Merleau-Ponty does not overlook settled meaning. He distinguishes expression that formulates something for the first time from expression that uses meanings already available, and his notes explicitly restrict the identity of speech and thought to the first kind. Near the end of the chapter he calls this the distinction between speaking speech and spoken speech: expression in which a sense is coming into being, and expression that draws on an acquired stock.[2]

These are not two kinds of person, nor do they divide valuable sentences from worthless ones; a familiar expression can accomplish something important. The question is what happens when the available formulations no longer say what the situation seems to require.

Return to the meeting. The writer begins with an unease: “We disagreed” misses something. That unease gives the revision a direction, but it need not contain the finished distinction in miniature. One can know that an account is inadequate before knowing exactly how to improve it. Merleau-Ponty’s challenge is to explain this emerging sense rather than assume that every effort to express something must begin with a fully specified message.

The thought takes place in the expression

Merleau-Ponty’s primary claim is a strong one. Speech, he says on page 183, accomplishes thought instead of translating something ready-made. A person can remain in a kind of ignorance of what they think until they formulate it, including in writing or in inner speech. He later describes thought and expression as coming into being together. The words do not merely preserve a thought against forgetting; they give it an existence it did not already have.[2]

Here the difference from transmission matters. “We agreed on the aim” does more than make “we disagreed” easier to read. It introduces a contrast: agreement about an end can coexist with a failure to assign responsibility for reaching it. The writer can now ask whether that was the failure in this meeting. If the contrast emerged through the revision, the words have helped organize what there is to think about. They have not simply improved the delivery of an unchanged account.

For Merleau-Ponty, the prior intention is therefore a directed incompleteness. Something calls for expression, but its completed sense cannot yet be detached from the attempt to express it. Once the attempt succeeds, we can look back and recognize what it was seeking, though that recognition after the fact need not establish that the whole thought existed beforehand.

He extends the argument to understanding what another person expresses. Knowing the words in a difficult passage is not the same as already possessing what their combination will say. The passage can reorganize familiar meanings and let the reader understand something they could not have supplied in advance. Merleau-Ponty therefore rejects an account on which understanding merely retrieves a thought the reader already had. An opponent could appeal instead to inference from familiar meanings. The question would then be whether that inference occurs independently of the expressive activity or describes part of what the activity accomplishes.[3]

None of this makes words magical objects. A mark or a sound does not contain a meaning as one of its physical properties. Merleau-Ponty describes expression as an activity in which a person takes up a position within a world of meanings, and a sentence becomes an explanation through its use, its relations and the way it is understood. His account concerns that activity, not a packet of meaning hidden inside the ink.[4]

Nor does he merely say that a vocal noise causes an idea. In the clinical discussion he explicitly refuses to treat thought and meaningful language as straightforward cause and effect; he treats them as manifestations of an underlying way of relating to a world. His claim that thought is accomplished in expression is meant to change the terms of the explanation, not to add a sound-producing stage to an otherwise complete thought.[5]

An acquired language, a new use

Expression draws on possibilities that are bodily and shared. Merleau-Ponty compares knowing a word to possessing a way of acting: the word can be available in use without first being inspected as an inner image. He calls speech a gesture because it makes sense within an activity directed toward something, not because every word resembles a visible movement or its object.[4]

The comparison has a limit. A pointing gesture might concern an object already present to both participants, whereas a sentence can introduce a relation that has not yet been understood. Merleau-Ponty’s answer is that earlier expressions have established a shared linguistic field. Familiar words and ways of combining them provide resources for a new use. They make the attempt possible without determining in advance everything it will accomplish.

The writer explaining the meeting uses ordinary words about agreement, aims and responsibility, none of them invented for the occasion. Yet their combination can change what the writer is trying to say. A settled formulation supplies a possibility for use without requiring the next use to repeat exactly the same thought, and what is achieved can in turn become available for later expression. This cycle is the relationship between speaking speech and spoken speech, not a once-only escape from convention.[2][4]

Merleau-Ponty also challenges a simple division between natural gestures and conventional words. Agreeing on a sign would already require some way of communicating; naming a convention does not explain everything that makes expression possible. Equally, bodily movement alone does not produce a sign that everyone can understand. His own discussion recognizes the history of languages and the hazards of communication.[4]

We can keep that problem without adopting his broad claims about different peoples, the limits of translation or the exclusive powers of speech. Our concern is narrower: how an expressive act uses acquired meanings while putting them into a relation that is not already settled. A theory of every language or medium of communication would require much more than this argument supplies.

What the clinical evidence is supposed to establish

The chapter begins with historical accounts of aphasia, which involve difficulties in using language, and later returns to them. These cases are part of Merleau-Ponty’s argument; they are not contemporary medical evidence established here. He draws on reports and interpretations by Gelb, Goldstein and other authors, and the philosophical question is what those materials are being asked to explain.[5]

An account based on stored verbal images treats a word as something available for retrieval. Merleau-Ponty presents reports in which a word is available in one activity but unavailable in another: a patient can answer “no” in a meaningful exchange yet cannot produce it in an exercise. If the report is accepted, a simple inventory of retained and lost words seems insufficient. What matters is how the word belongs to the situation.

He then examines an explanation that appeals to an independent intellectual power. Reports of difficulty in naming colors are set beside difficulty in grouping samples by a specified category. Perhaps a lost power to classify explains the trouble with names. The chapter presents that position before criticizing it; it is not Merleau-Ponty’s final account.

His objection is that appealing to a category leaves unexplained how the category becomes available. How does a rule become an organization of what the person encounters? Returning to the descriptions, he revises the suggestion that the patient moves unsuccessfully between principles of classification. On his interpretation, no such principle is adopted in the first place, and naming and classifying would express a more basic organization of experience. That is his philosophical reading of the reports, not a further observation of an inner condition. It lets him consider speech and thought together without making either an independent cause of the other.

The inference is substantial. Differences among performances are being used to support an account of how experience is organized, and that interpretation needs more than the assertion that a patient performed differently from an expected norm. It must also answer alternative explanations. A difficulty for one model of retrieval does not refute every causal account, and an invented example of revising prose cannot validate the historical reports.

Schneider, the patient discussed in the previous lesson, appears again near the end of the chapter. Merleau-Ponty describes meaningful, prepared sentences alongside a reported restriction in the spontaneous and possible uses of language, and he says expressly that the case shows no decline of general intelligence. Yet he quotes and emphasizes an account that makes linguistic productivity part of the deepest character of human existence. The reported contrast does not by itself justify that valuation. We need to keep apart the reports, Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation of them and the further judgment about what makes a human life fully expressive.[5]

Merleau-Ponty’s argument need not make expression effortless; the chapter itself recognizes the effort of bringing something new into speech. A defender can therefore say that a slowly prepared sentence may be an instance of speaking speech. That reply is important. Against a theory concerned only with whether sense develops, however laboriously, the preceding lesson’s slow but successful drawing would be a poor objection. It becomes a serious objection when spontaneous performance is made the preferred measure of meaningful agency. Deliberate checking can belong to expression. Effort, fatigue and enjoyment do not, on their own, establish the presence or absence of thought, and preparation does not make another person’s agency lesser.

How far should the conclusion go?

Merleau-Ponty’s distinction between new and settled expression qualifies his claim, but it does not reduce it to a harmless observation. He says that apparently silent thought can draw on earlier language, and that a purely self-contained thought apart from expression would not even exist for itself. These propositions are stronger than the claim that revising a sentence sometimes helps someone understand an issue.[2]

A reasonable objection accepts the opening example and disputes this wider necessity. The case of someone who knows where the key is but struggles to find a word for it already makes it plausible that a definite thought can outlast a failure to formulate it. Merleau-Ponty can answer that such settled thinking draws on earlier expression, but that answer does not establish that a newly grasped relation must first arise in words. Reflection might change a thought before the words catch up, or a sentence might make an already definite relation easier to inspect. Nor does a later report that expression helped establish, on its own, exactly when each part of the thought became definite. These possibilities cannot be dismissed merely by defining every meaningful grasp as expression.

The defender’s best reply is that the objection may be assuming the very content it is supposed to explain. If the writer’s earlier grasp contained a definite distinction, an account should say what made it that distinction. Calling it “the same thought, still unexpressed” does not show that it is the same. The expressive account brings out how trying a formulation can alter what is understood, and not only how it is communicated.

The reply keeps the question open. It does not prove that everything left unformulated lacks thought. Merleau-Ponty himself considers writing, inner speech, gesture and artistic expression as well as utterance; his argument cannot fairly be reduced to a requirement to speak aloud. But widening the forms of expression does not yet show that thought must always take one of them. Vocal performance gives no warrant for judging whether someone’s thought is present or absent.[6]

In the stipulated example, a narrower conclusion is defensible: expression helps constitute a particular, determinate articulation. “Determinate” means that the thought has a specific content that distinguishes it from alternatives. The revision does not merely make a known answer clearer; it develops a distinction through which a new answer becomes possible. Because the example stipulates that development, it illustrates the narrower claim; it cannot independently prove what happens in every actual revision. The universal claim, that no thought comes before its expression, remains unproved.

Being determinate is also different from being true. The revised account of the meeting might be clearer and more original, and still false. An expression can make an error easier to recognize by stating it well. Likewise, understanding what someone has expressed does not commit us to accepting it. The chapter presents truth as an aim of further expressive work, not a prize earned whenever a sentence comes together.[6]

Application: a caption under revision

Imagine Tess and Ari preparing a museum caption for a reconstructed vessel. The available record identifies the surviving fragments and the modern material that fills the gaps, but it does not establish every part of the vessel’s original outline. Tess types, “A broken vessel restored to its original form.” Ari suggests a diagram that distinguishes the surviving fragments from the modern additions.

Tess asks, “Would the diagram show which parts are modern, or which parts of the original shape we know?” Ari replies, “I meant the first. Those are different questions.” They discuss a possible legend. A modern addition might follow a well-supported outline, while joining two old fragments might leave a choice about how they were originally related. The record does not settle those possibilities for every part of this vessel.

Tess proposes, “The vessel joins surviving fragments with modern material. Its present outline includes choices made during reconstruction.” Ari agrees to keep that as a draft while they check which choices the record documents, and they keep the diagram proposal too. Stipulate that before this exchange neither had clearly distinguished a completed object from complete knowledge of its earlier form. They also began with different intentions: Tess wanted a concise account of the restoration, and Ari wanted to distinguish materials.

Explain what meaning develops through their exchange, and distinguish it from the meanings already available to them. Does the case support Merleau-Ponty’s account? In answering, address misunderstanding, the agency of both participants, truth and a reasoned objection. The case requires no sensory performance or personal disclosure, and you may read the response without writing one.

A possible response

The meaning that develops is a distinction between completion and knowledge. A reconstructed vessel can have a complete present outline without that outline establishing complete knowledge of its earlier form. “Restored to its original form” conceals that difference. The exchange makes a more definite question possible: which features of the outline are well supported, and where did reconstruction require a choice between possibilities that the surviving evidence leaves open?

Several meanings were already available. Tess and Ari understood a fragment, a modern addition and an original shape, and each had a purpose for the caption. The stipulation does not say that they began without thought, only that neither had clearly made the distinction that now emerges. Ari’s proposal and Tess’s question put familiar meanings into a relation that changes the work they are trying to do. This illustrates how expression can accomplish an articulation rather than merely deliver one participant’s finished message.

As for misunderstanding, the exchange contains a possible one. Tess asks whether Ari’s proposed marks classify material or knowledge, and Ari meant material. Had Tess silently taken the diagram as a map of certainty, the two might have seemed to agree while using its divisions differently. Their clarification brings that divergence into the open where they can discuss it. It does not guarantee that every later reader will understand the diagram, or that all their own assumptions now coincide.

Neither participant is a passive instrument. Ari initiates the diagram and clarifies its purpose. Tess questions the proposal and produces a new wording. Ari responds to that wording and agrees to further checking. The fact that Tess types does not make Ari’s contribution merely mechanical, and Ari’s proposal does not make Tess a transcription device. Their purposes meet and change without becoming identical. Husserl’s earlier distinction remains useful here: another person can disclose possibilities to us without their first-person experience becoming ours.[7]

The exchange also has bodily and material conditions. Tess works at a keyboard, and Ari’s proposed diagram would arrange marks to distinguish parts of the vessel. It depends as well on shared words and an agreed use for those marks. A legend could specify that one pattern represents surviving material and another modern additions; it would not thereby represent degrees of certainty. Such conventions give the proposal a possible use without guaranteeing how it will be interpreted. The case tells us what the proposal and the replies mean, but observing their movements or seeing the final caption alone would not reveal the whole course of their thinking, either person’s preferred medium, their fatigue or what either could accomplish alone.

As for truth, the new formulation is not made true by being new or by being welcomed by both. Their agreement supports the decision to investigate it; the records must still support the caption’s particular claims. A material diagram would also need an accurate mapping and a clear legend. Conversely, an accurate caption might remain difficult to understand. Originality, intelligibility, assent and evidential justification can all be told apart here.

Now the objection: ordinary reasoning may explain the result. Tess notices that Ari is classifying materials, compares that purpose with the caption’s claim about an original form and asks whether the available evidence supports the stronger claim. Ari’s reply lets them separate the questions. On this account, an inference develops through collaboration without showing that thought and expression are identical. That is a serious alternative. Merleau-Ponty’s account makes us attend to how the question takes shape in the exchange, but it has not established that an explanation through reasoning must leave that development out. Does the case, then, support Merleau-Ponty’s account? It supports a productive role for their expressive activity while leaving its best philosophical explanation open.

Nothing in that verdict shows that diagrams generally improve thinking, that typing and speech work identically or that someone unable to use either method lacks thought. The novelty belongs to this exchange as described. The caption still needs checking, and the agreement to check it is a decision made by two people whose reasons need not be the same.

Stage II: a body, a habit, an expression

The three lessons of this stage have examined different ways in which a situation becomes available. A workroom’s dimensions do not by themselves say how it can be used. A learned grip can stay familiar after a changed handle has made it ineffective. A familiar vocabulary can support a distinction that neither collaborator had made before.

Embodiment, habit and expression are connected without being interchangeable. Bodily access concerns a person’s relation to a situation. Habit can reorganize that relation, but habitual anticipation does not guarantee present ability under changed material conditions. Expression can develop a sense within that relation rather than merely report a finished inner event.

Each account must leave room for difficulty that remains meaningful. Slow reasoning, careful practice and a jointly organized activity can succeed without becoming effortless. Another person’s assistance brings their judgment and agreement into the work; it cannot be explained merely as the incorporation of another tool. Nothing here shows that every possibility is acquired in the same way.

Nor has this stage made physical explanation an enemy of experience. The question it keeps returning to is what an explanation needs to account for. A room can be accurately measured and still be available in different ways. Reflection can be situated while still seeking justified claims. Husserl’s bodily and intersubjective investigations remain part of the inquiry, and Merleau-Ponty’s criticism does not defeat them merely by recalling that thinkers have bodies.

The caption returns us to a shared world. Tess and Ari can work on one object and develop a meaning together while keeping different perspectives or different reasons for hesitation, and their expressive success has settled neither agreement nor truth. The final stage asks how such shared access can be understood without making one person’s way of encountering the world the measure of everyone else’s, and what a description of it can establish.[8]

Sources and limits

1. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, translated by Donald A. Landes, 2012 edition, 2014 paperback, Part I, chapter 6, “The Body as Expression, and Speech,” pp. 179–205, with notes 1–51 on pp. 529–533, for the chapter this lesson reconstructs. The final discussion of the body and Cartesian analysis, pp. 204–205, belongs to this complete chapter. The meeting and museum cases are original teaching constructions.

2. Landes, pp. 182–189 and 202–203, especially notes 6–7 on p. 530 and note 45 on p. 533, for the claim that speech accomplishes thought and for the distinction between speaking and spoken speech. Notes 6–7 expressly qualify the identity of thought and speech by distinguishing originary expression from secondary use. The chapter nevertheless advances a strong argument against thought wholly independent of expression. “Speaking speech” and “spoken speech” translate parole parlante and parole parlée.

3. Landes, pp. 183–185, with notes 7–8, for understanding through another’s expression. That argument concerns a new organization of available meanings. Husserl’s “Origin of Geometry,” cited in note 8, is encountered through this reference; it is not independently used as a source here.

4. Landes, pp. 185–196 and 199–200, for speech as gesture. The gestural account includes the need for an acquired linguistic world and explicitly raises the problem of how that world is formed. The chapter’s cultural generalizations, its account of translation and its claim that speech has an exclusive power are not adopted as established findings. Neither resemblance between a word and its object nor bodily anatomy alone supplies the account of signification developed here.

5. Landes, pp. 179–182 and 196–202, with the relevant notes, especially 4, 23–37 and 43–44, for the clinical discussion; see also p. 189 on the effort of expression. The reconsideration of classification is on p. 197. Merleau-Ponty’s reported clinical evidence, the explanations he criticizes and his own existential interpretation are kept distinct. Note 43 corrects the attribution of the Schneider article from Benary to Hochheimer. Note 44 identifies Goldstein as the source of the quotation about productivity and records Merleau-Ponty’s emphasis. The underlying clinical works have not been independently examined, and no current diagnosis or medical generalization follows from this lesson.

6. Dermot Moran, Introduction to Phenomenology, Chapter 12, the four subsections from “Phenomenology of Perception (1945)” through “The body as expression,” at print anchors 417–427, with notes 32–35. Moran’s strong language about thought and speech is specialist interpretation, assessed here against the complete primary chapter, and his embedded quotations remain mediated. Note 32’s allegation through Gardner is not an established finding or a basis for a diagnosis. The objection about unspoken thought and the narrower conclusion are this lesson’s assessment; Landes, pp. 194 and 196, supplies the discussion of communicative risk and of truth as an aim.

7. Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, translated by Dorion Cairns, §54, pp. 117–120, including its notes. This section distinguishes another’s first-person life from one’s own and describes reciprocal possibilities of understanding. The museum application uses those distinctions without claiming to establish the entire constitution of another subject or a general theory of communication.

8. The closure brings together “The body through which a world appears,” “Learning a way of moving” and the present lesson. Its assessment preserves their objections and source limits. The requirement to respect each participant’s agency is an evaluative commitment, not a truth deduced from bodily coordination. No account of Merleau-Ponty’s later writings on language or of the ontology of flesh is introduced.