Page 83 - Contribution To Phenomenology

76 OSBORNE WIGGINS

Future phenomenological research will have first to complete
Husserl's work in exhaustively setting forth the protological
structures and then to account for the acts and operations of
consciousness which are involved in the transition to the logical
level in the wider sense (Gurwitsch, 1974, p. 30).

From Preconceptual to Conceptual Experience

Lakoff contends that the basic level of the bodily structuration of things
is "the level at which things are first named'' (Lakoff, 1987, p. 32).
Language, in other words, draws on the preconceptual structure of the
world already constituted through bodily action. Phenomenology concurs.
Husserl has shown that any philosophy of language cannot understand
linguistic structure without first carrying out a "retrogression" to the
lifeworld where objects are prepredicatively experienced as types (Husserl,
1973, pp. 11-68). And, according to Gurwitsch, conceptualization first
arises through detaching and disengaging a typical sense from an
individual object in which it is perceptually embedded (Gurwitsch, 1966,
p. 395). General concepts are first constituted through this thematic
disengagment of preconceptual generic types. This entails that at the first
level of language the meanings of concepts will embody the preconceptual
senses of perceived things; and, as we have seen, this preconceptual sense
is correlated with bodily action. Lakoffs view, which he calls "experiential
realism," is precisely the same. Lakoff writes,

Experientiaiism claims that conceptual structure is meaningful because
it is embodied, that is, it arises from, and is tied to, our preconceptual
bodily experiences. In short, conceptual structure exists and is understood
because preconceptual structures exist and are understood. Conceptual
structure takes its form in part from the nature of preconceptual
structures." (1987, p. 267)

The Embodied Subject and the Perceived Worid

If, as both the phenomenologists and Lakoff claim, the perceptual
sense of objects is constituted through bodily action, then at the level of
basic categories or typifications the sense of objects will depend on what
the human body does and can do. Certain senses cannot be constituted
because there is or can be no corresponding bodily action to constitute
them (Lakoff, 1987, pp. 50-52). Objects are perceived, for example, as