Any theory of philosophie discourse based on the naive opposition between language and speech, language and discourse, seems to encounter the classic question: is philosophic discourse governed —to what extent and in what ways—by the constraints of language? In other words, if we consider the history of philosophy as one great discourse, a powerful discursive chain, isn’t it immersed in a reservoir of language, the systematic fund of a lexicology, a grammar, a group of signs and values? From then on, isn’t it limited by the devices and organization of that reservoir?

Phenomenology in the United States is in a state of ferment and change. Not all the changes are happy ones, however, for some of the most prominent philosophers of the first generation of phenomenologists have died: in 1959 Alfred Schutz, and within the past two years John Wild, Dorion Cairns, and Aron Gurwitsch. These thinkers, though often confronting a hostile intellectual climate, were nevertheless persistent and profoundly influential—through their own works, and through their students. The two sources associated with their names, The Graduate Faculty of The New School for Social Research, and the circle around John Wild first at Harvard and later at Northwestern and Yale, produced a sizable portion of the now second generation American phenomenological philosophers.

Hearing, as Heidegger remarks, is a possibility belonging to discursive speech; what I am now embarking on is therefore not just my own discursive speech but an exercise of our common faculty for it. There is of course a vector in the situation; the syntagma as which I appear before you is part of my output but part of your input. Still we share it: that is the first point to remember. In the universe of discourse each of us exists as a double syntagma, composed of two parallel, intermittent, usually alternating syntagmata, one of speaking (or writing), the other of hearing (or reading): parallel because they bear as it were a constant relation to one another, accompanying the same body (or the same mind) wherever it goes; intermittent because we cannot be engaged in discursive activity all the time, and also because keeping silent, as Heidegger says in the same place, is another possibility belonging to discursive speech; usually alternating, because what we say is usually intended for other ears, what we hear usually the product of other voices. (We also hear what we ourselves say, but I leave that complication aside.) If it were possible, in the case of a single individual, to reproduce this double syntagma in all its detail, this would be not a recounting but a reliving of his life as a discursive being, the limit of “totalization” as Sartre uses the term.

How is metaphysics possible? This question can be perspicuously approached by asking, as Derrida has done, how it is possible for metaphysical remarks to be expressed, in what sort of language or medium metaphysics makes sense. To approach the question this way raises the problem about the relation of philosophy to language, whether there is a language of metaphysics, and whether what linguists have done or may do might conceivably throw light on the status of metaphysics.