Ontology and Phenomenology of Speech: An Existential Theory of Speech PDF
Preview Ontology and Phenomenology of Speech: An Existential Theory of Speech
Marklen E. Konurbaev ONTOLOGY AND PHENOMENOLOGY OF SPEECH An Existential Theory of Speech Ontology and Phenomenology of Speech Marklen E. Konurbaev Ontology and Phenomenology of Speech An Existential Theory of Speech Marklen E. Konurbaev English Linguistics The Lomonosov Moscow State University Moscow, Russia ISBN 978-3-319-71197-3 ISBN 978-3-319-71198-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71198-0 Library of Congress Control Number: 2017964115 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and trans- mission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: carlos sanchez pereyra / Stockimo / Alamy Stock Photo Printed on acid-free paper This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland For Ustath Preface Man is not what he eats or drinks. Neither is he what he thinks or says. Man is not what he reads or writes. But, surely, he is only what he believes and hides in the secret recesses of his heart and mind and then follows and stands for in a ferocious, stern and adamant manner. This realm of mental vision is a vast vacuity of his parallel life that he is going to fight for during the day and even at night, when he is drowsing comfortably ensconced in an armchair or lying prostrate on a sofa in the arms of Morpheus. Nothing can make him change this stance unless it loses its shape, palpability and flavour under the influence of his thoughts and other people’s words. Tell a young child that stones in the backyard of his or her house are tender living creatures that get hard instantly when being touched. And nothing will dissuade him or her that it is not so. And the child will believe these words until somebody finds a way to prove that it has all been a nice fantasy of his or her grandmother. For a child, these strange words have been proven by his or her experience. At least partially, for stones are indeed hard and cold when being touched. And how on earth can one check if they are soft when we do not touch them?! We live by the miracles worked by our brains and we thoroughly enjoy them—enjoy much more fundamentally than any ‘objective’ data proven by the showings of the most exact measuring devices. The further we go, the more advanced we become in exploring various ways of self-d eception: vii viii Preface interactive solutions, VR, 3D films, intelligent infobots, augmented real- ity and so on and so forth. And now comes the most intricate and advanced of all devices broadly used by the people of the world for the creation of mental deception— language. We hear, read and see and immediately believe. In the twenty- first century, people stopped double-checking, because deception is of a much greater value and significance than objective reality. Measurements are losing ground to senses, analysis—to opinion, research—to experi- ence. The veracity of life is no longer in a great and strong wind that rents the mountains, and breaks in pieces the rocks. Tragedy is not in the earth- quake that comes after the strong wind. Hardships are not in a fire that follows the earthquake. But in a still small voice of our brain whose siren is singing its enticing tune and carries on with its epic narration without any interruption all day long—moulding our world, shaping, cajoling, suggesting a way to proceed or people to meet, inspiring to faith or seduc- ing to follow your devils, provoking, punishing, revealing, hiding—draw- ing the chambers of our lives that are more real and more important to us than the colours of the rainbow so pretty in the sky or the real faces of the people that are going by. We listen and read, bathe in the ocean of the language and we say to ourselves: what a wonderful world! Language has always been our subtle way to reality. Not a bush or a tree opposite our window, or a plane that carries us to another part of the world. And once we have visited and enjoyed the miracles of the rest of the world, our brain will be potent to carry us there at any moment. The vivacity of the picture will depend on our imagination. Think of a young mother who gave birth to a child and was then forced to leave her home and stay in a different country, away from her child and the family. And then one day a caring parent who stayed behind in the care of the child decides to do something nice to the young mother. He takes the child’s undershirt, still retaining its special smell, puts it into an envelope and sends to the child’s mother by post. What do you think she will do on receiving this parcel? Probably crying all night through over a small piece of cloth, retaining her child’s odour. Not over an undershirt of course, but over the scenes that her brain will generate under the influence of the smell and the shirt. And it will not be less real for her than as if she actu- ally had been there, in her child’s room. Prefac e ix Words of our language have the same power. They are capable of switching on the codes of our brain that we perceive as reality—not an abstraction. If it hadn’t been so, why are we so hurt by the words that insult us, why do we cry and suffer while listening to the romantic story of love? Only because our brain translates the spoken or written word into life. Most of the time, our natural human communication is not an abstraction, but a vision, where we ourselves are an integral part. A spoken or a written word is a gateway to the reality of somebody’s life. I remember during one of our first phenomenology classes at univer- sity, I asked one of my students to read a sentence from a famous book by Kate Fox, Watching the English (2004), and then interrupted her at the end of the first line (‘I am sitting in a pub near Paddington station, clutching a small brandy.’). The girl had never been to England before and I was wondering what sort of vision this sentence was evoking in her mind. This student’s reaction was for me the most authentic verification of her understanding. It could be that she had never seen Paddington sta- tion in her life or tasted brandy, it is all right. But is it fair to say that she had no understanding of this simple sentence? I think, no. When I asked her about her mental vision at that moment, she felt shy and blushed scarlet. After a few seconds, she recovered herself and said that while read- ing it aloud, she imagined herself drinking a glass of fresh orange juice together with her boyfriend in a cafeteria in Moscow, off Kazan railway station that she often used when going home for holidays. Is this not understanding? Well, it might be that the mental vision of this student was too remote from what Kate Fox had actually meant. But it could well be that while reading the context further on, this picture will be repeatedly corrected by herself, subconsciously, while accumulating more and more facts and information and getting an expanding vision of the life presented in the book. Our reading or listening is never linear and is rarely immediately fac- tual. The brain starts generating a vision of life from the very first word we hear. The word we hear and read triggers the neural zones that were in action when we habitually used it. Our understanding of words is often situational, rarely purely semantic, because semantic analysis is in fact generalization that comes only after real experience. We read or listen with hindsight—piling up associations until we get the vision of the x Preface whole picture, including ourselves in it. At a moment of such a ‘revela- tion’, we feel the inclination to return to the vision we formed in the beginning and change it in the light of the new facts, impressions and experience. We assume in this book that real understanding of speech in an inter- personal communication is rooted in the mental vision of life not as an abstraction or a set of data, but as the representation of the reality in a very much the same way as when we actually see the world around us with our eyes and hear its sounds with our ears. Many people see, indeed, and many people hear. But seeing they see not and hearing they hear not, for they are unable to transpose the overall perceivable picture into an experience of their own lives. But without this experiential vision, mental objects remain dead and can hardly move an inch. Many people call this inventorial reading and listening—understanding, because they merely recognize certain facts of life (like somebody was born or somebody died, or a war broke out, or peace was made). But as long as this vision remains purely factorial, not experiential, it can hardly improve people’s commu- nication, change their lives and make them better placed in the world in which they live. In this book, I make a proposition that every act of communication should be a phenomenological act in a sense that it causes the experience of life awakening in the minds of readers or listeners. A phenomenon then is nei- ther the sun when it rises, or the moon when it appears, or the stars scat- tered in heaven, or the clouds after the rain—but the dynamic mental representation of the reality caused by the act of speech. It should be dynamic in the first place—moving, changing, developing or deteriorat- ing as life itself is. Well, yes, it could be the sun, and the moon, and the stars, and the clouds, but only as my own experience, fraught with my memories of the past, my encounters with similar phenomena of the objective world, that have little or nothing to do with my phenomeno- logical world seen through the prism of immediate feeling, touch, senti- mental reaction to the words that I see and hear (cf. Henry, 2007). This approach is not a divagation from the traditional phenomenology initiated by Edmund Husserl and further developed by Martin Heidegger and other outstanding philosophers. It is phenomenology in action or, let me call it a practical phenomenology that helps you to improve Prefac e xi understanding and interpersonal communication, making this world a better and a safer place for the people who truly and sincerely understand each other. Moscow, Russia Marklen E. Konurbaev August 1, 2017
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