"I don't have the words"

Lanei Rodemeyer

pp. 195-212

in: Filip Mattens (ed), Meaning and language, Berlin, Springer, 2008

Abstract

Husserl spent extensive effort in the areas of language¹, temporality², and corporeality³. While each of these areas have taken up their own volumes in the Husserliana collected works and other series (and their own sets of unpublished manuscripts), Husserl's analyses on these subjects were meant to address different angles of the same phenomenological issue: the relationship of consciousness to meaning. These analyses clearly needed to be carried out in mutual isolation, as the complex nature of each area required a pure and rigorous approach. However, at this point in the development of Husserlian phenomenology, extensive readings and secondary analyses of Husserl's original works bring us to the point where we might once again consider these areas as integrated: How does embodied, temporal consciousness relate to meaning? Further, how does phenomenology answer the issue of meanings for which there are no words, i.e., meanings recognized by an embodied consciousness but which arise without a linguistic sign? Simply put, what can we "say" about those experiences for which there is a gap in the language?

Cited authors

Husserl Edmund