「沈黙の声」にみる身体的志向性 : わざ研究へのメルロ= ポンティ現象学からの接近

Abstract

This paper proposes that the theory of phenomenology constructed by Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961) represents an effective method to analyze body-knowledge. In recent years, many educational researchers have paid attention to body-knowledge or tacit knowledge because it differs from intellectual knowledge, which modern educational studies have regarded as useful means to improve children's abilities in school. Those researchers who criticize learning by an intellectual method as "representationalism" regard learning through bodies, actions, or tasks as important for comprehensive education. However, to seek to means of sharing tacit knowledge among people, it is necessary to rely on language or the representation itself. To a complex relationship between actions and representations, I take the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty. In response to Saussure's initial insight, Merleau-Ponty claims that meaning of words arises not through concepts that pre-exist in language but through language as a system of differences. For Merleau-Ponty, there is no meaning before the speakers start to speak, just a "silence." The meaning emerges from the paradoxical relation between existing and not-yet-expressed meaning, through the expressive field situated between speakers, signs, and prior language use and current speech; all of these things are anchored by bodily intentionality ("l'intentionalité corporelle"). In light of this view of Merleau-Ponty, we can consider how we could express body-knowledge apart from the representational use of language.