“Edmund Husserl’s Phenomenology”
II Husserl’s Conception of
the Ideality of Language
If one asks oneself what is distinctive of Edmund Husserl’s contribution to the philosophy of language, and particularly if one asks about its relevance for present-day discussions among American philosophers of language, the best place to begin, it seems to me, is with his theory of the ideality of language. Hobbled from its beginnings in logical positivism by narrowly behavioristic and empiricistic presuppositions, and by an almost invincible “methodological nominalism,”1 linguistic philosophy is just now beginning to pose the kinds of questions concerning language with which Husserl began at the turn of this century.2 Though linguistic philosophy has arrived at its new and currently developing status quaestionis by responding to the pressures of scientific linguistics, on the one hand, and the existentialism of the later Wittgenstein, on the other, rather than through any dialogue with phenomenology (which up to now has been avoided like the plague), it nevertheless is beginning to appear that such a dialogue with phenomenology is becoming not only possible but also capable of providing the basis for at least limited progress. In this paper I intend to discuss one of the essentials of Husserl’s point of departure for a philosophy of language and at the same time bring him sufficiently up to date to be understood by contemporary linguistic empiricists and nominalists.
At first sight the first chapter of Formal and Transcendental Logic looks very traditional, very Greek. The study of language, Husserl says, is the study of logos in all its principal interrelated senses: as the act of meaning, and its correlative meant sense; as the process of reasoning, and its correlative rational norm; as stating and judging, and the correlative faculty of reason itself. But when we look more closely we find that the strictly traditional component in Husserl’s approach to language lies exclusively in his refusal to separate the analysis of speaking from thinking, of language from thought. The question “What is speaking?” is but one specific way of posing the question “What is thinking?” And to ask “What is the structure of language?” is but another way of asking “What is the structure of thought?” In Husserl’s sense the analysis of speaking and thinking is an analysis of what contemporaries call speech-acts, or use (la parole), whereas the analysis of “thought” is a grammatical and logical analysis of the structures of language, la langue—and the two are as strictly correlative and mutually implicating as the application of a rule in a given, factual situation is to the ideal rule which is here momentarily applied. But since acts of thinking can only be specified in terms of their objects, Husserl’s primary focus is the “meaning” or “objects of thought” which are given by means of acts of thinking.
Husserl defines “thinking” very strictly. Though he calls himself a “neo-Cartesian,” he has left Descartes’s definition of thinking far behind. When Descartes asks what it means for us to experience ourselves as cogito, as an ego which thinks, “a thinking thing,” he answers that a res cogitans is a thing “that doubts, affirms, denies, that knows a few things, that is ignorant of many (that loves, that hates), that wills, that desires, that also imagines and perceives.”3 This is altogether too much; it is clear that for Descartes terms like pensée and cogitatio are taken to designate consciousness as such, in all its dimensions. Husserl, on the contrary, gives a much more restrictive and specific definition of thinking. Thinking (as distinguished from perceiving or imagining) is “done in language” and is “entirely bound up with speech.”4 Thinking, as distinct from the other modalities of consciousness, is thus always linguistic, always some use of language. Any definition of thought broader than this would lead us into confusing thinking with other phenomenologically distinguishable conscious and intentional processes. Thinking is only one of the modalities of intentionality, the most important perhaps, but it is not the whole of intentionality itself.
If we define intentionality as the ability of (human) consciousness to entertain and hold before itself “objects,” noemata, we will see that there are many different ways of “having objects” which are eidetically distinguishable. There is perceiving with its correctively meant perceptual world; there are imagining and supposing with their correlatively intended worlds; there is remembering; and there are all the various imperfectly distinguished affective ways of having objects (mood, emotion, feeling, evaluating). For Husserl the realm of “the meant,” i.e., the totality of interrelated objects in the world which can be distinguished correlatively to the conscious acts in which they are given, is much broader than the world of thought in the strict sense. The distinction between perceiving and thinking must, therefore, be particularly stressed because the very “ideal of truth” requires that we be able to determine the truth or falsity of a thought (a linguistic statement) by turning to things as they really are in our experience prior to any thought about them. Knowledge or true cognition always involves, over and above an analysis of the meaning of a linguistic statement, the movement of verification which turns zu den Sachen selbst to ask: But is it true? In simple, pre-reflexive perceptual experience the world is simply given, as a plenum, unquestioned and passively accepted. What thinking introduces into experience is the ability to turn away from the experienced world of real facts and events to their meanings, to entertain these meanings just as such, and to ask of some thing the properly philosophical questions: What does it mean? Is it true?
This is not the place to go into the fascinating problems of the interrelationships between perception and thought or between thought and the various other modalities of experience.5 Since the same consciousness which thinks the world also perceives it, the least perception includes ideal categorial features, and, conversely, the most elemental thought, as for example “the determination of a determinable substrate” in the assertion of a quality or property of something (S is p), though subject to specifically linguistic rules, must conform itself—if its truth is to be determined—to a relationship passively experienced in the brute perceiving of objects which precedes all thought. It is well to recall that phenomenology is the “science” of all the various realms of “objects” which can be given to a consciousness (all of which are subordinated to “formal ontology” or the science of “object-in-general”), distinguishing among them the correlatively given transcendental acts of consciousness which both found the distinctions among these various “material” regions and reveal the transcendental conditions of any objectivity whatsoever. In short, the consciousness which thinks the world (in the narrow and specific sense of “thinking” we are using here) also, correlatively and at the same time, perceives, imagines, remembers, feels, values, chooses, and so on. Descartes was correct in stating that any complete act of consciousness is an extremely complex synthesis of elements which we can distinguish in eidetic reflection but which, in actual experience, are always given inseparably together.
What distinguishes Husserl from his contemporaries like Meinong and Frege, with whom he otherwise has numerous affinities in both field of interest and method, is the extremely comprehensive and systematic character of his philosophical mind. He became a philosopher through an initial disillusionment with mathematics based on the fact that mathematics as it is studied by the mathematician (and even logic, when it is studied as a “positive science”) is unaware of and unable to account for its foundations and presuppositions. But, as we know, Husserl’s interest was never limited just to the foundations of mathematics and logic but developed into an investigation of the very “idea of science” itself. Taking the various, already elaborated but always incomplete and unsatisfactory, sciences of the several regions of experience as examples of the exercise of theoretical reason, he attempted to elaborate a theory which could account for the laws of objectivity as these are found throughout the whole unified field of life-world experience. It was because he also laid down the foundations of a phenomenology of perception, of imagination, of memory, of temporality, that he was able to distinguish the realm of thinking and “thought” from these other interrelated ways of “having objects” more rigorously than Descartes. It is characteristic, he found, of the objectivities of pre-verbal experience to be “accepted passively,”6 as “functioning associations” ruled by the laws of “immanent temporality”7 whereas linguistic acts always “bestow a sense”8 and generate “objects of thought.”9
In his later writings, from Ideas onward, Husserl developed his concept of “the noematic” in experience and showed that the noema or “object” of consciousness as it appears in the various modes of experience is always an ideal correlate of an act of the mind; he found, therefore, that ideality is not something restricted to the realm of thought but extends throughout the whole of our mental life and was, indeed, constitutive of the world as experienced by men. However, we are interested here primarily in language and the manner in which language, as a “notational system,”10 introduces ideality into experience and enables us to “live” in the ideal realms of numbers, concepts, theories, myths, cultural institutions, etc., just as effortlessly as we “live” in the real perceptual world of spatial location and irreversible temporal sequence. For Husserl, an “object of thought” in the strict sense is distinguished from other kinds of “objects” in that it is always, even if it consists of but one word, “syntactically formed,” i.e., possesses an articulated structure which can ultimately be accounted for by the various interrelated and purely formal laws of morphology and syntax. Husserl focused his own phenomenology of language on the study of the “pure apriori grammar” which gives the laws by which we are able to detach ourselves from immediate, intuitive experience of the world in order to generate objects of thought, and thus bring our experience to full reflexive clarity by laying it out in syntactically well-formed sentences which express and reflect its own gegenständlich articulations.11
THE LEVELS AND KINDS OF IDEALITY
But before we continue this analysis of the specific ideality of linguistic objects (i.e., “thought” objects), a short digression is in order. It is a commonplace even for empiricistically inclined logicians to admit the distinction between, let us say, sentences and words on the one hand and “propositions” and “terms” on the other. Sentences and words are actual occurrences (spoken or written) in the real world which have all the empirical properties of any other actual existing things and events, even though, as understood, they have, over and above their various acoustic or graphic qualities, the property of being signs which carry meanings. Sentences and words as uttered or written in the course of daily living have all the characteristics of other unique, unrepeatable, temporally and spatially determined physical, perceptual things. No occurrence of a given sentence or word is ever, strictly speaking, physically identical with any other, and their physical properties do not, in themselves, guarantee that this particular employment of these particular sounds will or will not carry meaning either for the one who actually here and now utters the linguistic string or for the hearer to whom it is addressed. It is essential to linguistic sounds and marks that they carry meaning; it is not essential to them that this meaning be actually and in fact understood either by the speaker or the hearer in any particular historical utterance. There is, therefore, a sound motive for distinguishing the meaning of sentences and words from the physical occurrences themselves and thus designating the meaning of a sentence by the locution “proposition” and the meaning of a word by the locution “term.” As logicians like to say, they are related as token to type. Terms and propositions, unlike words and sentences, are indifferent to temporal and spatial locations, to tones of voice, to idiosyncrasies of accent, to whether they are spoken in one natural language or another, etc. They are in short ideal types of “meaning-contents” which remain ideally the same each time they are “cashed in” by producing their tokens in actual speech. They have, moreover, intensional and extensional properties which are wholly “ideal” and “logical” as opposed to the “real” properties of their tokens.12
To this generally accepted (and, indeed, inescapable) distinction Husserl added nothing spectacularly new; what he did was to provide the phenomenological evidence for this kind of ideality and examine its meaning; in this way he was able to justify the place of ideal laws, such as the laws of logic, within the concrete texture of life-world experience and not just “add them on” as an inescapable but theoretically incomprehensible feature of our experience in the manner of Hume, Carnap, and the Logical Positivists who place “experience” on the one side and the “laws of logic” on the other, accepting both but finding no organic interrelationships between the purely empirical and the purely conceptual. Husserl is concerned not only with the independence of these two realms but with their interrelationships; like James he is concerned with why “the world plays into the hands of logic”13 and of how logic, on its side, enables us not just to think emptily in the abstract, but “to think the world,” and ultimately to produce its “science.”
In fact one might say that the “foundation of phenomenology” in the work of Husserl lay precisely in the development of the strictly phenomenological, i.e., experiential, evidence for the ideality of meanings. Empiricists and nominalists have always based their refutations of conceptualism on the fact that the only real entities are the particular, singular, individually time-bound and space-bound physical things available to sense intuition. To speak independently of ideas or thoughts or concepts seems equivalent to postulating the existence of “queer entities,” “quasi-beings,” “meinongian ghosts,” and what not, and empiricists have generally felt it sufficient to refute both Meinong and Husserl by accusing them of “Platonism.” But the fact of the matter is that Husserl, at least, never denied the principal empiricist contention: Ideal entities are not real either as acts of the mind or as things in the world; they are wholly correlative to experience, a phenomenological and not a physical kind of reality. They do not exist anywhere in the “real” world as a plenum of temporally evolving things and processes, of realities “in themselves” independent of and indifferent to consciousness.14 The ideal (and all that concerns the realm of the meant as such, the apriori, etc.) is not “of the world” at all but only “of our experience of the world.” The ideal, therefore, emerges only on the level of experience and its only evidence must be phenomenological. But once this has been understood evidence abounds, and Husserl gives a surfeit of arguments in each of the Logical Investigations, but most particularly in the First.
It is unnecessary and would be uninstructive to repeat here Husserl’s arguments or examples in any detail. He begins with the Faktum of the existence of some natural language, taken as a specimen or example of what it means for there to be a natural language at all (whether one were to take German, or French, or Latin, or Hebrew, or Bantu would be a matter of complete indifference). And he sees that languages, as opposed to other categories of “signs” (Anzeige), which serve only to motivate us and to give us grounds for thinking of something else, enable us to express meanings or thoughts (taking “thought” in its objective sense and not as the real psychological act of thinking).
Such linguistic meanings (whether incomplete words or complete sentences) are what is essential to any language or notational system and are precisely that which (Bedeutungen) language enables us to entertain. The concept of meaning in general (to which Husserl reserves the more vague term Sinn and, later on, noema) extends far beyond language, and investigating it takes us into the phenomenology of perception and other modes of experience, but this latter is a generalized and in some sense a limit-concept of meaning. Here we are concerned only with linguistic as distinguishable from non-linguistic meanings. Language, then, as a system of linguistic signs, gives us our first and surest route of access to the experience of meanings and it is doubtful whether a creature which could not use language could experience even the perceptual world as fully meaningful.
But the important thing here is that what we mean by a language, i.e., a system of linguistic signs proper (Ausdrucke), is that it enables us to entertain and express meanings which are experienced as ideally independent of the physical sounds or marks which are nevertheless their necessary embodiment. What is expressed by a word (term) or a sentence (proposition) is not just our present mental experience or our personal dispositions (these are only “indicated” or “conveyed,” not “meant” by the expression). What is expressed is a meaning which, ideally, can be repeated in any other possible natural language, which can be understood in the same sense by different persons at different temporal and spatial locations, etc. When I (and my students) go through the demonstration of the Pythagorean theorem, let us say, here now, in this classroom, we are thinking the same objective concatenation of thoughts which Pythagoras and the early Greek geometricians also thought and which has been available at any time since the sixth century B.C. to anyone who is capable of understanding what the signs mean. We are thinking (at least in ideal intention) something which remains invariant in its meaning no matter where, no matter when it is thought, and in fact would be identical in its sense even if no mind had ever de facto thought it through or not. The first characteristic of the ideality which language enables us to achieve is thus the sense of sameness which is the phenomenological foundation for the concept of identity. This keel of the mind, which makes it ideally possible that any “thought” can be thought again, repeated, translated into another idiom, this experience of the objective identity of meanings through the various mental acts in which they can be presented, is what Husserl primarily refers to when he attributes the institution of idealities to language.
SPEECH ACTS AND LINGUISTIC STRUCTURALISM
But if this were Husserl’s only major contribution to the phenomenology of language, even though it is still something which linguistic philosophers of today are very loath to confront, much less accept, we would have to say that he had not brought us very far. Contemporary philosophy of language is centered on the analysis of speech acts, of usage, of the phenomenon of speaking (la parole). Scientific linguistics, on the contrary, is centered on formal linguistic structures as an ideal system of phonological, morphological, and syntactical laws which are logically presupposed by speech acts and underlie them (la langue). Does Husserl have anything to say which would help us bring together these two sides of linguistic investigation and help us on the way toward a unified philosophy of language? I think that he does indeed, and shall attempt in the second part of this chapter to indicate schematically how his insights could best be brought to bear on contemporary concerns.
First of all, it is not enough to recognize the importance of the discovery of “the ideal” within language; we must also distinguish the several kinds and levels of ideality, how they function, and what they mean. Primarily we must distinguish the ideality of the “intended sense” from the ideality of the linguistic structures which enable us to intend such an ideal sense. Second, we must relate “the ideal” to “the real” and, in Husserl’s words, attempt to “grasp clearly what the ideal is, both intrinsically and in its relation to the real, how this ideal stands to the real, how it can be immanent in it (wie es ihm einwohnen kann) and so come to knowledge.”15
Here we are confronted with the essential paradox of any phenomenological investigation, namely, the discovery of ideal objectivities which owe their status in some sense to psychic processes (since they are not real empirical things but exist only for some experiencer) but yet nevertheless impose themselves as inescapable objectivities for any mind which would think the world. This is the paradox of logicism and psychologism, of the ultimate relations between the noematic and the noetic, which Husserl ultimately solves by means of his theory of transcendental consciousness. In this study we must limit ourselves to the philosophy of language and therefore to describing rather than solving this paradox.
Ideality is a correlate of experience, it has no independent empirical status in the real world independent of experience and would thus seem to be something which psychic subjects “add” to the real-in-itself or to “nature”; yet this coating of ideality, which consciousness introduces into being and spreads over its phenomenal surface, is not something subjectively created by individual acts of thought or by the subjective dispositions of individual experiencers. On the contrary, its laws are more strict, more coercive, more general, and in their sense more unalterably “objective” than any of the generalizations of empirical science or everyday common sense. The importance of the phenomenology of language, as a special field of investigation within phenomenology, derives its primacy from its strategic location as the focal point and illustration of this mysterious relation of the ideal to the real, of logic to psychology, of conceptualism to empiricism, of noema to noesis.
We have been speaking of the logician’s distinction between words and terms vis-à-vis sentences and propositions, and the manner in which this distinction reveals the ideality of meanings (“intended senses”), and we have discovered that the two characteristics of ideal entities (such as terms and propositions) are (1) identity of meaning in different empirical expressions and (2) repeatability. Nothing in the real world is, strictly speaking, repeatable; only when one is dealing with an ideality of some kind does the possibility of its being repeated make sense. No event in the real world can ever recur as exactly the same event because real time is irreversible, no thing is ever the same as itself through two successive instants of time. Only the mind can identify sameness, using criteria of a conceptual and intentional nature. In itself, every empirically real thing or event is ineffably unique and therefore unrepeatable.
If we now turn to language once again, we will find the logician’s analysis of the ideality of linguistic expressions to be incomplete and superficial. Words cannot really be related to their meanings as (“real”) tokens to their types for the simple reason that words (as well as their component sounds) are themselves highly abstract and ideal entities. Language presents us with a whole hierarchy of ideal laws and their corresponding ideal individuals. Husserl had a clearer awareness of this characteristic of languages than most contemporary linguistic philosophers.16 Words, he says, carry meanings and must necessarily do so for this is what we mean by words. But what is the “word” which carries this specific meaning? It is certainly not merely my present utterance of it. The same word, now uttered, now imagined, now mispronounced, now misspelled, now repeated in a different key or in a different context, has an ideal unity as just this word, which is unaffected by any particular usage of it. It may be used frequently or rarely, but if it is to signify the meaning which a given lexicon of a given natural language assigns to it, it must be the same in every act of usage; in this sense a given word occurs only once in a given language—it maintains its place and its function for as long as it can be used in its sense.17 Even if the word is used in a metaphorical, ironical, deformed, or changed sense, its own “original” sense must always also be “intended” in order for it to take on a new and added signification. Its place in the language leaves it available for repetition; this possibility of repetition, whether realized or not in actual acts of repeating the word, is the “ideal” being of the word, and it is important to note that this ideality is utterly independent of the meaning(s) which this particular acoustic image or mark carries. The word-sound itself is ideal: There is the ideality of meaning; there is also the ideality of verbal images.18
But we can go beyond Husserl. What he says of words as bearers of sense is equally true of the phonemes and morphemes of a given language, whether or not such phonemes or morphemes carry any distinctive sense or not. Phonemes are sometimes defined as the sounds which a given linguistic community has selected out of all the myriad noises the human speech apparatus is capable of making for the purposes of this particular phonological system. But this is very misleading. A phoneme is not a sound at all. Sounds are the phonetic material produced by actual speakers in the real world; phonemes are highly abstract entities. The phoneme /p/ occurs only once in the English language though it is customarily aspirated in initial position (e.g., pin) but sounded without aspiration when following initial /s/ in a consonant cluster (e.g., spin), even though this distinction is normally unnoticed by native speakers. Aspirated and unaspirated /p/ are two distinct phonemes in some languages; in English they are one. This is because phonemes are abstract, ideal, “intended” constituents of an ideal and formal phonological system, constituents which can be defined only in terms of their contrast with the other elements accepted in that particular phonological system. We do not pronounce /p/ or any phoneme in our language in exactly the same way each time we use it, and it is easy to demonstrate that the raw phonetic material which comes forth from the mouths of various native speakers of a given language will show forth rich variations in tonal quality, distinctness, intensity, pitch, etc. (to say nothing of the accents in which foreigners or children may be recognized to be speaking the same language). In short, it would be physically impossible for us to always pronounce the phonemes of our language in exactly the same way, nor do we need to do so. What is needed is only that what we actually pronounce sound sufficiently like the phoneme intended, and sufficiently unlike any of the other phonemic elements of our language which could occur in the same context, for our hearers to be able to interpret what they hear. Great systematic variations and deformations in actual pronounced sound can be introduced into a given string of words without any alteration in the phonemes heard.19 What is essential then is not that I produce the exact same sounds on different occasions but that what I produce on different occasions be taken by itself and my interlocutors to be the selfsame phonemes and phonemic patterns. Thus even the least elements out of which languages are built up are shown to be a system of ideal entities related to one another according to ideal, formal laws of contrasts and oppositions, entities which must be “taken as” the same in their various occurrences in actual speech even though, in fact, exactly the same sound may never in history occur in the real physical world twice.
It is important at this juncture to attempt to make a distinction which has only been hinted at in the foregoing. When we are speaking of general ideas or abstract concepts and the particular instances in which they are realized or which fall under them, it is useful to use locutions such as the type-token distinction or the essence-instantiation distinction. But in the particular linguistic invariants expressed by phonemes, morphemes, or words (and perhaps even by “texts”), this distinction is not useful. The reason for this is that phonemes, morphemes, and words are not universals at all but “individuals.” There is only one phoneme /p/ in the English language, and, though this one phoneme has the characteristics of “sameness” and “repeatability,” and is therefore an “ideal” entity rather than an empirically real sound, it is not a general concept in the way a common name for objects exhibiting certain defined characteristics is. The same is true, mutatis mutandis, of morphemes and words. We must, therefore, following Husserl, admit ideal individuals (of the kind the elements of language uniquely give us) as well as ideal universals (in which alone the essential laws of typification and the defining of instances in terms of essences properly come into play). There are, of course, in this latter case—corresponding to ideal universals—real individuals as well, namely, the examples, instances, occurrences of such universal ideas. (Husserl remains innocent of Platonism for the simple fact that there is no room in his analysis for “real” universals.) As for ideal individuals like phonemes and words, what is characteristic of them is that, though ideal, they are subject to historical contingency, temporal change and development in a way that concepts (as for example, the concepts of number in mathematics or the concepts of proof-forms in logic) are not. This does not at all mean that they are not fully “ideal,” but only that there are other forms and functions of ideality than purely formal concepts.20
This characteristic form of ideality pervades the whole range of linguistic phenomena from the most basic elements (phonemes and the laws of phonology), through words and the laws of the syntactical “formation” of words into sentences, to the ultimate end-products of language, namely, the literary text, the scientific demonstration, and the philosophical (or theological) argument.
In a treatise . . . every word, every sentence, is a one-time affair, which does not become multiplied by a reiterated vocal or silent reading. Nor does it matter who does the reading, though each reader has his own voice, his own timbre, and so forth. The treatise itself (taken now only in its lingual aspect, as composed of words or language) is something that we distinguish, not only from the multiplicities of vocal reproduction, but also . . . from the multiplicities of its permanent documentations by paper and print, parchment and handwriting. . . . The unique language-composition is reproduced a thousand times . . . we speak simply of the same book with the same story, the same treatise. And this selfsameness obtains even with respect to the purely lingual composition . . .21
Thus “a system of signs by means of which, in contrast to signs of other sorts, an expressing of thoughts comes to pass,” namely, language, presents us with specific forms of the ideality, sameness, and repeatability of meanings which are specifically distinct from the other operations of intentionality. As an objective product of thinking by means of some notational system, language has the same properties as other mental and cultural products, like the Kreutzer Sonata, the Constitution of the United States, or Hamlet, namely, a specific form of ideal individuality susceptible of indefinite repetition and re-actualization in the very same real world from which it first historically originated. The word-sounds or musical notations which constitute such scores or texts are “obviously not the sounds dealt with in physics,” nor are they “the sounds . . . pertaining to sensuous acoustic perception.” The Kreutzer Sonata and Hamlet are ideal unities, not only of sense, but also of the “constituent sounds” of which they are composed—“sounds” which are every bit as “ideal” as the significational contents of these meaningful cultural objects, thought exhibiting an ideality of a distinctive “lingual” kind.
Just as the one sonata is reproduced many times in the real reproductions, each single sound belonging to the sonata is reproduced many times in the corresponding sounds belonging to the reproductions. Like the whole, its part is something ideal, which becomes real, hie et nunc, only after the fashion of real singularization.22
In his most recent work, Languages of Art, Nelson Goodman has suggested making a distinction, in the realm of aesthetic theory, between autographic works of art (such as pieces of sculpture or paintings) and allographic works of art (like plays and symphonies). The latter depend on a “notational system,” and they can, and even must, be enacted or performed according to an ideal linguistic model in the hie et nunc of our presently real perceptual time and space.23 Clearly the allographic work of art, in Goodman’s sense, is not exhausted in any particular (perceptually real) presentation or performance of it. It is not contained in any particular published version of the original text nor in any actual performance. Though Goodman does not use such language, it seems clear that an allographic work of art (of literature or music) possesses an ideality specific to its linguistic or notational structure such that its existence, though perfectly individuated, is always “ideal.” The ideal is the system of ideas or norms which in some sense is represented in every enactment or performance but yet transcends any particular enactment as the ideal “telos” in terms of which we can and must judge the present, real reproductions as to their authenticity.24
In conclusion, it is necessary to say that this discussion has not yet arrived at any definitive conclusions. Our purpose has been limited to showing the relevance of Husserl’s phenomenological approach to language for some of the tasks which presently face all philosophers of language, particularly the question of the ideality of language on all its levels, ranging from phonology, morphology, and syntax to the levels of completed texts and works of art—and the correlativity of such idealities to the structures of consciousness which they necessarily presuppose. Our purpose has been to bring into focus, from a Husserlian perspective, the problem of the interrelations and interpenetrations of “the ideal” structures of thought with “the real” instances of actual thinking in speech acts which actualize (and thus “use”) these forms and functions of ideality.
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