Philosophical aspects of "non-relativity" of the word in the adult – young child relationship

Abstract

This article is an attempt of showing the presence of the word – the living word – as a linguistic/speech means in human being’s relation with the Other – with somebody closer than somebody else, who testifies with his/her presence to the presence of the person speaking to him/her. The presence of the word can be perceived as “non-relative” presence – in line with thinking about language/speech through the prism of their conventionally understood functions. Accepting after H.-G. Gadamer that our experience is linguistic in nature, I write about immersion in language in which, by assimilating its meanings, we can think and communicate our thoughts to others and communicate with them – we are able to talk. The presence of words as the foundation, opportunity and quality of relations with the Other is also relative in its nature. I present, following the ideas of E. Lévinas, the pre-linguistic way of being with the Other and I discuss silence as seemingly non-verbal contact with oneself and the Other. Since I focus on the relation with the Other, I also develop the theme of who is talking to whom, pointing out, at the same time, that talking to somebody fits in the “existential project” of the speaker. The considerations concentrated on the above problems became also a pretext to reflect on the selected aspects of verbal and non-verbal relation between an adult and a young child. The reflections undertaken in the article are mostly placed within the phenomenological perspective.