The previous two posts traced a language turn within the analytical tradition. First Wittgenstein turned from language as a tool to accurately describe an outside reality to language games, language as a form of life. And then Rorty went further: there is no mirror of reality, no privileged vocabulary for its description, just conversation. Language was freed from representation. But the conversation stayed focussed on what language shares — assuming it had already been absorbed by language users, ready for use. But how does it get into language in the first place? What is shared first needs to be experienced.
This takes us into different territory — the continental tradition. Where the analytical tradition looked from the outside in — language structure, logic, social practice, the continental tradition looked from the inside out — lived experience, perception, the body. There is also a third tradition, pragmatism, which cut across both — its motto: what works, goes. These three traditions coexisted with clear borders in between. Three angles on the same thing. Not arguing with each other so much as standing in different places.
Merleau-Ponty stood firmly in the continental tradition. He came from phenomenology — Husserl's project of examining experience directly. But where Husserl still kept consciousness separated from reality by what he called an abyss, Merleau-Ponty closed the gap. He put it in the body. Not the body as an object studied by science — but the lived body, the one that reaches, gestures, speaks. "The body is our general medium for having a world."
And it is this that feeds language. Speech is not a report of something already thought. It is a gesture — like pointing, like reaching. "It contains its meaning in the same way as the gesture contains its." Thought comes into being through the act of expressing, not before it. The body experiences before the words arrive.
And the body doesn't just transmit — it participates. Perception is not passive intake waiting to be processed into words. The body actively engages the world, and that engagement is structured and meaningful. When we speak, we don't translate an inner thought into outer sound alone. The body shapes the expression — through rhythm, through gesture, through the physical act of voicing. The hands that move while we talk are not for decoration. They participate in the thinking. Merleau-Ponty called it motor intentionality: the body's directedness toward the world is what makes meaning possible in the first place. Not mind first, body second. Body and meaning together, from the start.
He distinguished between living speech and settled speech — language in the act of creating and language already sedimented into habit. The living kind is where new meaning is born, in the gesture of expression. The settled kind is what we build on — the vocabulary already there. Every act of speaking moves between the two: drawing on what is settled, reaching for what is not yet said.
Merleau-Ponty arrived here through phenomenology — through careful description of lived experience — decades before neuroscience had the tools to look. When mirror neurons were discovered in the 1990s, researchers found proof of what he had described: the direct, bodily understanding of another's actions without needing to reason about them. Independent paths, converging.
In 1958, at a conference in Royaumont outside Paris, analytical and continental philosophers met face to face. Merleau-Ponty listened to Ryle — a leading figure of ordinary language philosophy — and responded: "I do not see much that separates us." Two traditions, standing in different places, recognising the same landscape.
Merleau-Ponty died three years later, in 1961. The full impact of the later Wittgenstein hadn't reached the continent yet, and it was another two decades before Rorty would shatter the mirror and declare the borders null and void.
Next up: we step back and look at the turn as a whole — from Kant to the present.
Photo: Chang Duong / Unsplash
