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Consciousness and the Acquisition of Language: 1st (First) Edition
The lecture notes taken down by students were periodically gathered together and submitted to Merleau-Ponty for his approval. Then every two or three weeks these notes were published in the Bulletin du Groupe d'etudes de psychologie de l'Universite de Paris. By the end of the year, one would have the full set of lectures as transcribed by students and as reviewed by Merleau-Ponty.
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First published November 1, 1973
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July 6, 2024
I just realized I am the first person to review this on Goodreads so I’ll start by explaining why I decided to read this!
Merleau-Ponty landed a place on my TBR after I read Sarah Bakewell’s “At the Existentialist Cafe” where she highlighted how he was able to combine philosophy and psychology. I initially intended to read his “Phenomenology of Perception,” but this book—sitting on the same shelf—stole my attention. I know next to nothing about linguistics and philosophy of language, but they’ve recently piqued my curiosity, especially since as a kid my number one question about the world was: “HOW DO BABIES SUDDENLY KNOW HOW TO TALK?” So I am eager to dive into psycholinguistics at some point, and these transcribed lectures seemed up that alley. It also helps that this is way shorter than Phenomenology of Perception HAHAHA, and that this was written in its foreword: “We are immediately struck by how clearly written, easy to understand, and analytically organized his courses were in contrast to his published books. Merleau-Ponty's lectures are lucidity itself. Would that the arguments in the Phenomenology of Perception were as easy to follow!” And they weren’t wrong—this was significantly easier to digest than, say, Levinas’s Humanism of the Other (which I left unfinished in exasperation, questioning whether I had any reading comprehension skills at all). To be honest though, I still need to get used to the academic philosophical writing style of “this scholar claimed that ___, *insert long explanation of the argument and its evidence* BUT ACTUALLY HE WAS COMPLETELY WRONG, HERE'S WHY!”
Nothing in this book made me gasp and jump around my room, but there were still some interesting takeaways, like:
1. The egocentrism of children. According to Piaget: “for the child there is no difference between self and others (this is precisely the nature of the child's egocentrism). He believes that his thoughts and his sentiments are universal.” It’s interesting because I learned about Piaget’s theories on child egocentrism in IB Psych, but didn’t know how it was tied to language (it was instead Vygotsky’s stages of language that we learned about).
2. The nature of imitation, in general and in language, and how it can combat the un-differentiation between self and other. “To imitate is not to act like others, but to obtain the same result as others. One makes use of his own body not as a mass of sensations, but as a way of systematically going toward objects. In imitation, other people are first considered not as body but as behavior.”
3. The infinitude of language. “Certain words arise in us only when we need them, in the same way that the spark is not contained in the stone but is formed by the contact with the metal that strikes it. Language, as an instrument, is not comparable to a hammer which has a finite number of uses. It is rather like a piano out of which one can draw an indefinite number of melodies.”
Merleau-Ponty landed a place on my TBR after I read Sarah Bakewell’s “At the Existentialist Cafe” where she highlighted how he was able to combine philosophy and psychology. I initially intended to read his “Phenomenology of Perception,” but this book—sitting on the same shelf—stole my attention. I know next to nothing about linguistics and philosophy of language, but they’ve recently piqued my curiosity, especially since as a kid my number one question about the world was: “HOW DO BABIES SUDDENLY KNOW HOW TO TALK?” So I am eager to dive into psycholinguistics at some point, and these transcribed lectures seemed up that alley. It also helps that this is way shorter than Phenomenology of Perception HAHAHA, and that this was written in its foreword: “We are immediately struck by how clearly written, easy to understand, and analytically organized his courses were in contrast to his published books. Merleau-Ponty's lectures are lucidity itself. Would that the arguments in the Phenomenology of Perception were as easy to follow!” And they weren’t wrong—this was significantly easier to digest than, say, Levinas’s Humanism of the Other (which I left unfinished in exasperation, questioning whether I had any reading comprehension skills at all). To be honest though, I still need to get used to the academic philosophical writing style of “this scholar claimed that ___, *insert long explanation of the argument and its evidence* BUT ACTUALLY HE WAS COMPLETELY WRONG, HERE'S WHY!”
Nothing in this book made me gasp and jump around my room, but there were still some interesting takeaways, like:
1. The egocentrism of children. According to Piaget: “for the child there is no difference between self and others (this is precisely the nature of the child's egocentrism). He believes that his thoughts and his sentiments are universal.” It’s interesting because I learned about Piaget’s theories on child egocentrism in IB Psych, but didn’t know how it was tied to language (it was instead Vygotsky’s stages of language that we learned about).
2. The nature of imitation, in general and in language, and how it can combat the un-differentiation between self and other. “To imitate is not to act like others, but to obtain the same result as others. One makes use of his own body not as a mass of sensations, but as a way of systematically going toward objects. In imitation, other people are first considered not as body but as behavior.”
3. The infinitude of language. “Certain words arise in us only when we need them, in the same way that the spark is not contained in the stone but is formed by the contact with the metal that strikes it. Language, as an instrument, is not comparable to a hammer which has a finite number of uses. It is rather like a piano out of which one can draw an indefinite number of melodies.”
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