From the Turn to the Present

In the positioning series I talked about the turn in language — from representing an absolute reality to something relational (Wittgenstein, Rorty). Merleau-Ponty anchors the body as the 'frontline' participant in this relational activity. However, these were not isolated events but happened after a long evolution in thinking. In fact, this started at the beginning of modern philosophy and science about 500 years ago.

Although the turn is associated with Kant, it was in fact Descartes that fired the first shot: he shifted the focus from a God who reveals truth to humans who through doubt enquire what can be known of reality. However, his approach ended up using the inevitable existence of God as the main means of justification, not very satisfactory since it implicitly gives the last word back to God. But the transition was made: enquiry into the nature of reality had become 'personal' — even if it was still about holding up a mirror to a reality 'out there.' That mirror would persist for centuries.

There is another side to Descartes: he split the individual into mind and body, a clean separation. The mind is where enquiry takes place. The body forms part of the 'mechanistic' world of life and non-life, no thinking there. At the time this was very liberating — it opened the door to the birth of modern science. Describing a pure mechanistic world poses no threat to theologians and religion.

Triggered by Hume's empiricism in response to Descartes' rationalism, Kant responded with the question that defines the turn: How do objects conform to the mind? instead of How does the mind conform to objects?. It is the mind that structures experience. No God's-eye view. We see from somewhere, not from everywhere. However, the landscape under observation remained static — a reality to be observed and described, with a language that is referential.

And that is where Hegel's historicity makes its biggest contribution. We are in a totality that evolves: thought and reality aren't two separate domains requiring a bridge. Understanding develops historically, through contradiction and resolution. It has become a process.

After Hegel, Western philosophy gradually split into three distinct traditions: pragmatism, the continental tradition, and the analytical tradition. All three were strongly influenced by mathematics at their inception, though that influence only survived long term in the analytical tradition. Pragmatism — Peirce, James, Dewey — is straightforward: what works, goes, no strings attached. The analytical tradition — Frege, Russell, the early Wittgenstein — shifted the structuring from the mind to language, aiming to capture the logical structure of reality through the logical structure of language.

Husserl, in what will become the continental tradition, made a deceptively simple move: stop asking whether your experience matches some independent reality. Instead, examine the structures of experience as they are — a phenomenological treatment of Kant's question, but now described from the inside, through careful attention to what consciousness actually does.

Meanwhile, in linguistics, a development of equal importance was taking place. Saussure broke with the assumption that words are actual names for things. The linguistic sign is arbitrary and differential — neither the sound nor the concept has content in itself. Both are defined entirely by their differences from other elements in the system. Meaning is differential, not referential. Relational all the way down.

Whitehead, a mathematician, belonged to none of these traditions. His complaint: philosophy since Descartes had been mistaking abstractions for concrete realities. What's truly concrete are events, not things. Reality is process. Each occasion takes in other occasions. No substance underneath. Relations are primary — without them, no entities. He dissolves the mind-body split at the root: every occasion is both physical and experiential.

Heidegger, Husserl's student, embedded the observer deeper into reality. We don't begin as detached minds contemplating objects. We're already in a world, practically engaged. The hammer isn't an object you observe — it's something you use. Understanding is activity, not contemplation. Where Husserl had described consciousness with unprecedented precision, Heidegger went well beyond — the observer isn't examining reality from a distance, the observer is part of reality.

By this time the ground was prepared for Wittgenstein, Merleau-Ponty and Rorty — all chipping away at the same thing: the refutation that we can stand outside reality and describe it as it is. The outside view, giving way to the relational.

And philosophy was not alone. Physics was making the same move, independently. Next to be covered in the positioning series.

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The Body as Medium

The previous two posts in the positioning serie 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, a view from outside — decades before neuroscience had the tools to look at it from the inside. 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.

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Philosophy as Conversation

In the positioning series I talked about Wittgenstein's transition from language to form of life. A strong member of the analytical tradition opening the door to points of view considered more at home within the Continental tradition. However this never took the form of a public discussion, that part of his work was only published two years after his death. This allowed his turn to seep into the tradition quietly — colleagues absorbed the method, "meaning is use," while the radical core — language as a form of life — went untouched. The door was unlocked but stayed unopened.

It was Rorty who very publicly opened it and walked through.

Rorty was an analytical philosopher trained at Princeton, one of their best. His target was what he called the mirror — a picture of reality that had shaped Western philosophy since Descartes. The mind as a mirror of nature. Language as a tool to provide a description. Knowledge as accurate representation. The philosopher's job: to polish the mirror, to get the reflection right. But fifty years after the birth of quantum mechanics, this picture was more in the league of relics. Rorty said: there is no mirror, there is no access to outside reality.

No language mirroring reality, but language as a contingent tool — a form of life. In Rorty's words, many vocabularies, each shaped by history and purpose. "Our vocabularies have no more of a representational relation to an intrinsic nature of things than does the anteater's snout." Languages are made, not found. No vocabulary has a privileged relationship to reality, there is no meta-vocabulary ranking them.

What replaces the mirror? Conversation. Not to discover absolute truth but to keep the dialogue about reality going. Different vocabularies meeting obliquely — without shared foundations — just a willingness to listen, to redescribe, to change. And philosophy is not the arbiter standing above the conversation, it is just one voice among many.

Rorty did not arrive at this alone. He drew heavily on Wittgenstein — from the analytical tradition — and tapped equally into continental and pragmatist voices like Heidegger and Dewey. For him there was no border, just traditions with different vocabularies. This was seen as a serious provocation, enough for him to be considered a traitor to the analytical cause. He turned his back and left Princeton, moved on from philosophy to comparative literature at Stanford.

His critics sensed something missing — that conversation between vocabularies requires more than just willingness. Rorty said "no shared foundation", and left it at that. But meaningful conversation requires some sort of sharing, a shared linguistic base. Was that considered to be implicitly there? That question was not put on the table.

But the dam was breached. The relational view of reality gained more and more traction across different disciplines, albeit often still as minority views. And it was not only a discussion in philosophy. Similar discussions happened in physics, as covered in the positioning series.

Next up in the serie: let's go back in time a bit, to Merleau-Ponty who put the body back into the picture.

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From Language to Form of Life

Two posts ago I started unpacking the seed — six lines about language and how we relate to reality. This view on language has not fallen from the sky. This post is the first in a positioning series that explores the evolving thinking in philosophy and science. The focus is first on philosophy, starting with Ludwig Wittgenstein — singling out philosophers whose thinking was key in shifting the focus towards language.

There is a picture of reality that runs deep in Western thinking. Reality is out there, independent, fixed, waiting to be described. And it is the job of language to provide that description. The more precise the language, the closer we get to truth. This is all thought about from an outside viewpoint looking in.

That's where Wittgenstein started. His Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921) is the most rigorous version of that picture ever built. Language works by picturing reality. A meaningful proposition shares its logical form with what it describes. Names stand for objects. What doesn't fit — ethics, aesthetics, the mystical — must be passed over in silence. A logical straitjacket, beautifully tailored. Wittgenstein thought he had done all he could, and left philosophy behind.

Then it tore.

After a few years doubts about the Tractatus started to settle in, and with the help of some catalysts by 1929 he had fully returned to the philosophical fold. What with the language of gesture? It has meaning, but no logical form, no proposition. No room for it in the Tractatus.

Wittgenstein resumed his career in philosophy, remaining within the analytical tradition, while his thoughts and work drifted ever further away from it. What came out changed the landscape. Meaning is not in the word — it is in the use. "For a large class of cases the meaning of a word is its use in the language." Language is not one logical system but an open plurality of language games — giving orders, telling jokes, greeting, praying, building — each with its own grammar, its own way of working. And these games don't float in the abstract. They are woven into activity, into forms of life. The builders calling for slabs — the form of life is building. The shopkeeper counting apples — the form of life is exchanging.

He finished his philosophical career in 1947, and continued to work in solitude. The fact that this part of his work was only published after his death is best explained by his own words: "I tried to force my thoughts into a unified whole but couldn't — the best that I could write would never be more than philosophical remarks."

A language with a strict logical backbone fits well when it is a distant reality that needs to be described from the viewpoint of an outside observer. The turn from language to language game, from language game to form of life creates a reality that has the observer placed within with language the medium that expresses how things relate to each other. No more outside observer, no more representation. And languages with a strict logical backbone cease to be the best fit.

He wasn't alone in making that turn. Physics was moving the same way — from the outside observer of classical mechanics to the participant-observer of quantum mechanics, where properties arise in interaction, not in isolation. Something was in the air.

Wittgenstein embodies the turn, he existed on both sides. He started on the analytical side of philosophy — logic, formal structure, precision — thinking he had nailed it. However, he returned, revisited and made the turn unlocking the door onto an approach more akin to the continental tradition. And that was where he left it, but he made the point.

Next up: Rorty, who walked through that door and kept going.

The reference library has an overview of the positioning series.

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