Here is a sentence:

Imagine things freeing themselves from the meaningful, becoming, not meaningless, but anarchic and non-identical.

This is from a book called Gadamer and Celan “Who Am I and Who Are You?” and Other Essays. Page 20 if you want to look it up.

Does it make sense?

It’s no good that howl of incomprehension. It bears little weight especially if the ‘plaint is something that comes from the singular,”it means nothing to me therefore it has no meaning.”

More sturdy is the hundred-voice howl. L’élégance du hérisson: what? The mulitudes complaining about  the incomprehensibility of this sequence of letters bears some scrutiny. But if the examination shows that the complainers are all non French speakers then a different kind of examination is required. It’s not that “l’élégance du hérisson” is meaningless, it’s that it is meaningless in this situation. What needs to be studied is not the letter combination and its claim to meaning but, amongst other things, the limitations of the assessors’ assumptions about the nature of meaning.

Still, the fact that most howlers against phenomenology appear to be kin to our non-French judges does not mean phenomenology is in fact sensible in any way other than the one in which Rorschach blots are sensible.

So does the sentence I started with mean anything? Of course it must since the author who wrote it is no dummy, and if nothing else, it means something to M. Bruns. Yet, so what. If it doesn’t mean anything to you (and it didn’t to me either) then what to do about it? Here’s the thing: it might be more profitable to assume that Bruns is speaking a language you only think you recognize. The only other option is to close the book, but then communication cannot occur and I prefer understanding, even if it comes at the cost of learning a new “language” – something at which I do not excel.

I think the key to understanding Phenomenology in some way that goes beyond the individual psychology and cultural orientation of its practitioners is learning to re-encode the words we think we understand. For example, what does “thing” actually mean to Brun? That sort of re-engagement is what I propose to attempt on my own behalf.

The question about whether Phenomenology has a “language” of its own is something I want to answer because the poet in me is attracted to sentences like “Imagine things freeing themselves.” Yet I am sceptical. I mean, really, things “freeing” themselves? How can one understand that in a way that doesn’t provide “mind” to “things” and thereby cast the universe in the image-shadow of all that is human?

So, more on this in these pages as time goes by. I am on a quest.