Expression and Silence: Music and Language in Merleau-Ponty’s Existential Phenomenology

Despite increasing application of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the body in areas like music education, there remains little philosophical scholarship on music’s role in his philosophy. This is partly because Merleau-Ponty does not write about music in an explicit manner. However, he does open the possibility for such an account via his unconventional yet highly suggestive claim that language and music are both equally “creative” forms of expression. This paper draws out that link between musical and linguistic expression by expounding what Merleau-Ponty views as their shared basis – the corporeal, affective, and transformative dimension of all expression. It locates the core of this expressivity in his rich conception of “silence.” More generally, the analysis reveals how, despite the lack of explicit discussion of music in Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy, when viewed in light of his insights into language and expression, music does feature implicitly in his early and more mature works, being intertwined with his notions of “style,” “gesture” and “flesh” as well as his general critiques of intellectualism and empiricism.