Expression & Metaphor

James M. Edie

Inhoud
De fenomenologie van taal rondom het fenomeen van expressie De appresentationele structuur van taal De fenomenologische definitie van betekenis Metaforische expressies

Het fenomeen van expressie

Language appears as one aspect of a total, contextual , human activity of expressing which cannot be studied in isolation from mans existential insertion in his life-world. (p. 538)

Het fenomeen van expressie

Man is expressive by his very existence Man is expressive even before he speaks Speech is but one form, doubtless a late and derived form, of expression, and persons who have lost the ability to speak have not for all lost the ability to express themselves (539).

Expression is thus a more basic and a much wider category of lived experience than linguistic communication. Expression precedes and pervades all efforts at communication with others, and communication itself greatly exceeds the area of linguistically expressed meanings, feelings, desires, purposes, judgements, etc.

De appresentationele structuur van taal

Thought and meaning are fully incarnate in language; the thematization of meaning does not precede language but rather languages makes such thematization possible. For the speaking subject, expression is a coming to awareness; man does not express himself to others; he expresses himself in order to discover what he means himself.

De appresentationele structuur van taal

4 dimensies van appresentationele referentie in taal

1.) a.) to designate to experienced things, happenings, events, processes. b.) to signify or carry meanings. By means of words man can live in the past or the future, in short, by means of words man can manipulate the absent. It is by use of language that man takes his distance from the world of lived existence, distinguishes elements in the chaotic flux of experience and thus experiences himself as transcending the objects of his experience.

2.) language is intrinsically referential in that is bears an intrinsic reference to its source, the intentional act of consciousness which is its correlate, man as expressive Words are historical not only in the sense that each word has its own history, its own diachronic development in the linguistic evolution of a given culture.

3.) Language as a means of intersubjective communication

The words of a given culture become its store of sedimented meanings which can be taught to others. Such sedimented meanings are the very basis of human culture and, taken together as a collective expression of experience, they constitute the world-view of a given linguistic community. Thanks to the sedimentation of meaning in words man can live in language.

4.) Given words carry the mark of the historical (sedimented) circumstances of their origin and use in ever new ways across history. The philosopher or thinker who first defined (or re-defined) a word in an original and systematic manner

Betekenis en Expressie
Meaning can be (phenomenologically) defined as the noematic correlate of experience. Meaning is what is experienced and consequently what we attempt to express in behavior, in gesture, in language. Meaning arises only in the noetic-noematic contact with reality which we call experiece of.

In using language we attend not to the word we are using but to the meaning which they appresent; we see through expressions to what they express, we live naturally on multiple levels of meaning.

Metaforische expressies
Through the invention and use of language (expression) man is enabled to orient himself in the confused world of lived experience. He is enabled to put order into his experience of the world, to become gradually human. Thanks to the intersubjective constitution of meanig operated through language, man is enabled to become aware of himself, of others and of the world as the transcend horizon of experience. All of this is to say that man as a whole is intentional of the world.

Metaphors are the storehouse of the previous thought of mankind. THey reflect the partial, finite, limited, perspectival, intentional nature of human consciousness. The metaphorical use of words appears as the primary instrument of the discovery of new meaning Metaphorical language is a necessity of human expression and thought because man is naturally constrained to proceed from a few expressions that directly signify his most essential sensory life to the extension of this limited vocabulary to cover ever wider purposes of thought and communication

The metaphorical use of words brings about a re-organization, a re-focusing of experience, which continues to grow in complexity with each further use of the word in a distinctively new sense, with each new purpose. Metaphors are the storehouse of the previous thought of mankind. They reflect the partial, finite, limited, perspectival, intentional nature of human consciousness.

So a word becomes a metaphor when it is used to refer with a new purpose, with a new intention, to a previously disclosed aspect of experience in order to reveal a hitherto unnamed and indistinct experience of a different kind.