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subject cannot be defended philosophically, neither can the idea of democracy 80 ) andadhered to the age-old cosmopolitan ideal of humanitas -- an ideal that, in contrast withHeidegger also, Gadamer was to take up and defend in his philosophical hermeneutics(despite Heidegger’s criticizing him for so doing). To the end, Merleau-Ponty’s goal wasto overcome modern metaphysics by reconceptualizing or reconstructing in a resolutelypostmetaphysical and non-foundationalist fashion the modern notion of subjectivity.Merleau-Ponty’s work was, in fact, a life-long attempt to explore subjectivity to itsdeepest depths, in search of what, in his late work, he referred to as the foundational (“lefondemental,” a “transcendence within immanence”). Unlike the later Heidegger, he didnot think that modern subjectivism (“anthropocentrism”) could be overcome simply bydissolving subjectivity and returning to a pre-Socratic age of ontological innocence beforethe advent of self-consciousness, and in this Merleau-Ponty anticipated both Gadamer’sguiding notion of effective-history and Paul Ricoeur’s conscientious attempt at effectinga hermeneutic decentering and non-idealist retrieval of the notion of the subject.Throughout his work Merleau-Ponty anticipated the interpretive turn in phenomenologyin a number of ways, not the least of which had to do with the emphasis he placed on theissues of linguality and intersubjectivity. In his on-going battle with the philosophy ofconsciousness, Merleau-Ponty argued that both language and intersubjectivity are not, asmodern philosophy had generally assumed, secondary phenomena but are, instead, absolutelycentral to what it means to be a thinking, personal subject. Against Husserl who,like Frege and others at the time, was fixated on the logic of signification (Bedeutungslehre)and who maintained in a very traditional manner that language (speaking) is amerely secondary phenomenon in relation to thought (the “stratum of expression—and thisconstitutes its peculiarity—…is not productive”), 81 Merleau-Ponty insisted in the Phenomenologyon what Gadamer would later refer to as “the indissoluble connection betweenthinking and speaking.” (RPJ, 25) Rejecting Husserl’s “mentalism” (or “logicism”) andHusserl’s modernist way of separating off thought from expression (redolent of the metaphysicalopposition between mind and body), Merleau-Ponty maintained that expressionis productive of meaning. 82 The thinking subject, he insisted, is none other than the speakingsubject (there is no thought, properly speaking, without speech; “inner experience…ismeaningless.” [PP, 276]), and, in his later work, he went so far as to maintain that languageis coextensive with our very being (“Language is a life, is our life and the life ofthings…. [W]hat is lived is lived-spoken…. [V]ision itself, thought itself, are, as has beensaid, ‘structured as a language.’”). The later Merleau-Ponty would have had no objectionsto Gadamer’s famous dictum: “Being that can be understood is language.”80Given Heidegger’s one-sided view of modernity as the rise to prominence of instrumentalcalculativereason (the Will to Power or Will to Will) and nothing more, he rejected both Western liberaldemocracy and Eastern communism in favor of an idealized Nazism, since in his eyes both liberalism andtotalitarianism were part and parcel of the modernist metaphysics of unbridled subjectivity and its projectaiming at the technological domination of the earth.81Husserl, Ideas, sec. 124, 321; as Jacques Derrida observed in his translation of Husserl’s L'originede la géométrie [Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1962], 61): “Aux yeux de Husserl, il seraitabsurde que le sens ne précède pas…l'acte de langage dont la valeur propre sera toujours celle del'expression.”82Nothing could be further from Husserl’s logicist approach to language -- according to which wordsor “verbal expressions” are “signs” whose referential function or “signification” is bestowed on them bymental acts of “intending” -- than Merleau-Ponty’s maintaining that speaking (signifying) is in the natureof a bodily gesture. (PP, 183-84) Both Merleau-Ponty and Gadamer insisted, against both Husserl and thelogicians (logikous), that words are not mere “signs”; for a discussion of the phenomenologicalhermeneuticview of language, see my “Being and Speaking,” in John Stewart, ed., Beyond the SymbolModel: Reflections on the Representational Nature of Language (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1996).25