A virada linguística e os dados imediatos da consciência

Abstract

This essay investigates the status of the immediate data of consciousness after the linguistic turn in contemporary philosophy. The central problem is if exist the possibility of a direct contact of lived beings with their psychological states, or if these are necessarily reduced to the external structure of language. My hypothesis is that even if one admits a strict relation between thought and language, this does not imply necessarily that this relation is a kind of correspondence or that thought is reducible to the structure of language. To develop this suggestion, I will assume Henri Bergson’s conception of language as an exemplary case of what I entitle the “paradigm of intuition”. By means of a commentary guided mostly by Bergson’s first masterpiece, Time and Freewill: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, I will show that Bergson understood that language has more than an instrumental role in the expression of our thoughts; I also show why, according to Bergson, this explains many of the difficulties of metaphysical problems. Through a reading between the lines of the debate between Bergson and psychophysics, I intend to point out how the critique of language does not prevent Bergson from privileging a manner of thought by which the lived being can recognize the immediate data of consciousness. For this counterpoint between intuition and language, I will attempt to cast some doubts on the contemporary linguistic paradigm.