Dasein - Monoskop

HUSSERL'S PHENOMENOIjOGY AND LANGU AGE AS CALCULUS 65
somewhat. He acknowledges the fact that for members of a given
language community there exists a close link between the word-sign
and the object perceived or meant. To be sure, he again adds immediately
that the relation between word-sign and thing is purely
contingent, the reason now being that already the relation between
word-sign and meaning is of a contingent nature. This can be seen,
for example, from the fact that different languages use different signs
(combinations of phonemes and graphemes) to designate different
meanings. 218 But despite the contingence in principle Husserl allows
for an inner link in practice: natural language speakers experience
something of an apparent picture relation between word and thing,
their thinking being so intertwined with language that they cannot
but project this language onto the objects that they encounter. And
Husserl goes on: "This is confirmed if we recall the deep-set tendency
to exaggerate the bond between word and thing, to invest
it with objectivity, perhaps even to insinuate something of mystic
unity into it." 219 What merits attention here is that Husserl regards
speaking of a "mystic unity" of word and thing as "exaggerated".
However, three proponents of the language as the universal medium
conception, Heidegger, Gadamer, and Wittgenstein, all speak literally
of a "mystical" relation between language and the world. 220
Albeit only a detail, this fact throws an interesting (confirming) light
upon our claim that Husserl stands on the opposite side of the universal
medium vs. calculus distinction as compared with these mentioned
philosophers. This assessment can be further strengthened as
we turn to a closer examination of Husserl's views on truth.
As mentioned in the Introduction of this study, the conceptions
of language as the universal medium and of language as calculus
can be distinguished vis-a-vis their respective stand on the correspondence
theory of truth. Since language as calculus allows for the
possibility of metalanguage, it also allows for a metalanguage expression,
i.e., the word "true", that denotes a specific relation between a
sentence of the objectlanguage and some state of affairs or event in
some real or ideal world. The opposite view of language as the universal
medium, since it does not regard any form of metalanguage as
possible, must deny that truth as correspondence is ever expressible.
As an example of this last view we can turn to Frege, whose