The Aesthetic Dimension of Language on Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty: sense, culture and familiarity

Abstract

Despite coming from different traditions of thought, the philosophies of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Maurice Merleau-Ponty are close to each other in understanding the meaning of language as something fundamentally rooted in its use in everyday experience. By virtue of this concordance, this research will analyze the aesthetic dimension of language from the notions of ‘secondary use of language’ in Wittgenstein and the ‘speaking word’ in Merleau-Ponty, with the aim of determining how its communicability is possible in terms of experience of sense. The hypothesis to be demonstrated is that the communicability of the aesthetic use of language depends on the experience the common, and therefore, on the experience of others, both which has culture as their ultimate support. To this end, the article will be divided into three moments: first, the affinity between Wittgenstein's and Merleau-Ponty's proposals on language and its literary or aesthetic use will be addressed, with aa view to justifying the complementary use of both philosophical proposals; Secondly, the Wittgensteinian notion of ‘secondary use of language’ will be related to literary use, thus exploring its aesthetic dimension; and finally, the aesthetic use of language in culture, understood from the dimension of otherness in expression, will be grounded on the basis of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological aesthetics.