Marie-Cecile Bertau

In this article, main tenets of Bühler’s theory of language are compared with Plessner’s view on the position of language. Language crystallizes into an in- termediary position highlighting its crucial importance for both philosophy of culture and philosophical anthropology. On the assumption that a sensuously and commonly experienced reality is the basis for speaking and understanding subjects, Plessner and Bühler conceive of language as the crucial medium of »ec- centric beings«. Eccentric positionality and language prove to be co-constitutive.

How do ideas come into being? Our contribution takes its starting point in an observation we made in empirical data from a prior study. The data center around an instant of an academic writer’s thinking during the revision of a scientific paper. Through a detailed discourse-oriented micro-analysis, we zoom in on the writer’s thinking activity and uncover the genesis of a complex idea through a sequence of interrelated moments. These moments feature different degrees of “crystallization” of the idea; from gestures, a sketch, a short written note, oral explanations to a final spelled-out written argument. For this contribution, we re-analyze the material, asking how the idea gets formed during the thinking process and how it reaches a tangible form, which is understandable both for the thinker and for other persons. We root our analysis in a notion of language as social, embodied, and dialogical activity, drawing on concepts from Humboldt, Jakubinskij, and Vygotsky. We focus our analysis on three conceptual nodes. The first node is the ebbing and advancing of language in idea formation – observable as a trajectory through linguistically more condensed or more expanded utterance forms. The second node is the degree of objectification that the idea reaches when it is performed differently in a variety of addressivity constellations, i.e., whether and how it becomes understandable to the thinker and to others in the social sphere. Finally, the third node is the saturation of the idea through what we call intrapersonal intertextuality, i.e., its complex and dialogically related re-articulations in a sequence of formative moments. With these considerations, we articulate a clear consequence for theorizing thinking. We hold that thinking is social, embodied, and dialogically organized because it is entangled with language. Ideas come into being and become understandable and communicable to other persons only by and within their different, yet, intertextually related formations.

Based on a medial concept of language, as proposed in particular by Humboldt, Buhler and Bakhtin, this article examines the relation between rhetoric, philosophy, and mediality. Their emphasis on the mediality and the activity character of language allows those authors to think the relation between rhetoric and philosophy beyond a mutual exclusion. Our analysis focuses on Bakhtinʼs approach, who understands language as a movement of addressing and responding. Following Bakhtin in taking dialogue as a starting point, the article discusses the relationship between language and thought as well as the question to what extend the performative dimension of “speech thought” can be characterized as a public activity. The public space turns out to be the space of performing and realizing language. This insight requests rhetoric and philosophy to shift away from a self-mighty subject and a timeless, speech external point to recognize the affecting function of language.

Dialogical Self Theory brings together traditions about the self and about dialogue within an inspiring framework that highlights processes and insists on human beings' relatedness to Others. From this general dynamization of the self several challenging topics result, such as stability within dynamics, the self's uniqueness within polyphonic collectivities, and its plurality and recognizability within developmental movements. Recently, one can observe the formulation of a desideratum that could precisely resolve some of these challenges. Several scholars are looking for a kind of thirdness that reaches beyond the inter-subjects and introduces a mid-level located before the social. Interestingly, this is linked to issues of form, more easy to acknowledge e.g. on an institutional level. This discussion is important for it promises a dialogical articulation of polyphonic sociality with dialogic individuality, of stability and dynamics, of recognizability within change. I view this articulation realized through an aspect that gives the self performances the quality of the social by simultaneously keeping their subjective quality, thus differentiating the self's dialogicality: form – “wandering” language forms. I will address language as the third aspect, the formative medium of the dialogical selves per-formations, leading to a decidedly public notion of the DS, which includes Plessner's notion of “excentric positionality”.