Language and Being: Heidegger’s Linguistics 9781472573155, 9781472594433, 9781472573162

Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgements
Notes on Text and Translation
Abbreviations for Heidegger’s Works
Introduction
Interpreting Heidegger
Heidegger’s approach
Heidegger and language
Structure and scope
1. The Forgetting of Being
1.1 The fundamental question
1.2 Ontotheology
1.3 The Beingness of Being
1.4 The ontological difference
2. The Attunement of Language to Being
2.1 Linguistic considerations
2.2 The whatness of what
2.3 Co-respondence
2.4 A linguistic concern
3. Homelessness and the House of Being
3.1 Language as sign system
3.2 Two theories of language
3.3 The conventional view of language
4. The Use and Abuse of Language
4.1 Language as logical assertion
4.2 Language as idle talk
4.3 Language as interpretive discourse
4.4 Discourse and language
5. Foundations to the House of Being
5.1 Hearkening the logos
5.2 Saying the same as the logos says
5.3 The showing of language as logos
6. In the Beginning was the Word
6.1 Manifestation or creation
6.2 The law of mediacy
6.3 The irruption of occasioning
7. The Flower of the Mouth
7.1 Unconcealment and the clearing
7.2 Speaking petals
7.3 Language as saying
8. The Dif-ference that Tears and Bears
8.1 A division in the middle
8.2 The striving-strife of the rift -design
8.3 The pain of the threshold’s joining
8.4 Language speaks as the peal of stillness
9. Language as It Gives and not It Is
9.1 The nothing noths
9.2 The giver never given
9.3 The guide-word
10. The Way to Language
10.1 Bringing language as language to language
10.2 The way-making movement
10.3 Seeking the prize so rich and frail
11. The Owning-Event Alone Speaks
11.1 Appropriation
11.2 The essence of humanity
11.3 The peculiarity of language
11.4 Language is language
11.5 Etymology
12. The Sayers who more Sayingly Say
12.1 The destitute time
12.2 The closing of the open
12.3 The conversion of consciousness
12.4 More daring by a breath
12.5 Poetically man dwells
Conclusion
Mystical Heidegger
Heidegger and the logos
Final thoughts
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Language and Being

Bloomsbury Studies in Continental Philosophy Presents cutting edge scholarship in the field of modern European thought. The wholly original arguments, perspectives and research findings in titles in this series make it an important and stimulating resource for students and academics from across the discipline. Breathing with Luce Irigaray, edited by Lenart Skof and Emily A. Holmes Deleuze and Art, Anne Sauvagnargues Deleuze and the Diagram: Aesthetic Threads in Visual Organization, Jakub Zdebik Derrida, Badiou and the Formal Imperative, Christopher Norris Desire in Ashes: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, Philosophy, edited by Simon Morgan Wortham and Chiara Alfano Early Phenomenology, edited by Brian Harding and Michael R. Kelly Egalitarian Moments, Devin Zane Shaw Ernst Bloch and His Contemporaries, Ivan Boldyrev Why there is no Post-Structuralism in France, Johannes Angermuller Gadamer’s Poetics: A Critique of Modern Aesthetics, John Arthos Heidegger, History and the Holocaust, Mahon O’Brien Heidegger and the Emergence of the Question of Being, Jesús Adrián Escudero Husserl’s Ethics and Practical Intentionality, Susi Ferrarello Immanent Transcendence: Reconfiguring Materialism in Continental Philosophy, Patrice Haynes Merleau-Ponty’s Existential Phenomenology and the Realization of Philosophy, Bryan A. Smyth Mortal Thought: Hölderlin and Philosophy, James Luchte Nietzsche and Political Thought, edited by Keith Ansell-Pearson Nietzsche as a Scholar of Antiquity, Helmut Heit Philosophy, Sophistry, Antiphilosophy: Badiou’s Dispute with Lyotard, Matthew R. McLennan The Poetic Imagination in Heidegger and Schelling, Christopher Yates Post-Rationalism: Psychoanalysis, Epistemology, and Marxism in Post-War France, Tom Eyers Revisiting Normativity with Deleuze, edited by Rosi Braidotti and Patricia Pisters Towards the Critique of Violence: Walter Benjamin and Giorgio Agamben, Brendan Moran and Carlo Salzani

Language and Being Heidegger’s Linguistics Duane Williams

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2017 Paperback edition first published 2019 © Duane Williams, 2017 Duane Williams has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. x constitute an extension of this copyright page. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-4725-7315-5 PB: 978-1-3501-0571-3 ePDF: 978-1-4725-7316-2 ePub: 978-1-4725-7317-9 Series: Bloomsbury Studies in Continental Philosophy Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

For Louise

Contents Acknowledgements Notes on Text and Translation Abbreviations for Heidegger’s Works

x xi xii

Introduction Interpreting Heidegger Heidegger’s approach Heidegger and language Structure and scope

11

1

13

2

3

4

The Forgetting of Being 1.1 The fundamental question 1.2 Ontotheology 1.3 The Beingness of Being 1.4 The ontological difference The Attunement of Language to Being 2.1 Linguistic considerations 2.2 The whatness of what 2.3 Co-respondence 2.4 A linguistic concern

1 1 5 8

13 14 17 22 25 25 28 30 32

Homelessness and the House of Being 3.1 Language as sign system 3.2 Two theories of language 3.3 The conventional view of language

37

The Use and Abuse of Language 4.1 Language as logical assertion 4.2 Language as idle talk 4.3 Language as interpretive discourse 4.4 Discourse and language

47

37 39 42

47 52 55 59

viii

Contents

5 Foundations to the House of Being 5.1 Hearkening the logos 5.2 Saying the same as the logos says 5.3 The showing of language as logos 6 In the Beginning was the Word 6.1 Manifestation or creation 6.2 The law of mediacy 6.3 The irruption of occasioning 7 The Flower of the Mouth 7.1 Unconcealment and the clearing 7.2 Speaking petals 7.3 Language as saying

63 63 67 73 77 77 83 86 91 91 94 99

8 The Dif-ference that Tears and Bears 8.1 A division in the middle 8.2 The striving-strife of the rift-design 8.3 The pain of the threshold’s joining 8.4 Language speaks as the peal of stillness

105

9 Language as It Gives and not It Is 9.1 The nothing noths 9.2 The giver never given 9.3 The guide-word

119

10 The Way to Language 10.1 Bringing language as language to language 10.2 The way-making movement 10.3 Seeking the prize so rich and frail 11 The Owning-Event Alone Speaks 11.1 Appropriation 11.2 The essence of humanity 11.3 The peculiarity of language 11.4 Language is language 11.5 Etymology 12 The Sayers who more Sayingly Say 12.1 The destitute time 12.2 The closing of the open

105 106 109 114

119 121 123 125 125 130 133 137 137 139 141 145 148 153 153 155

Contents

12.3 The conversion of consciousness 12.4 More daring by a breath 12.5 Poetically man dwells Conclusion Mystical Heidegger Heidegger and the logos Final thoughts Notes Bibliography Index

ix 159 161 165 171 171 176 180 183 208 215

Acknowledgements From the outset, nobody has anticipated or encouraged this book more than Håkon Fyhn. And resonating in deep crevices between the lines of this work are many of our forest and mountain conversations over the course of two decades. I cannot thank him enough for maintaining so much belief in this book and for providing such profound inspiration. I count myself as one of a few lucky people honoured to be within a circle the pivot of which is a Socrates of our times, Joseph Milne. He is a lighthouse and a rock and I cannot overestimate his guidance and support. For their part in helping me to hammer and shape thoughts in the heat of many discussions, I must also thank the band of brothers within that now widely spread circle: Alexandre Christoyannopoulos, Brian Edwards, Valentin Gerlier, David Lewin and Todd Mei. Gratitude goes to the many talented scholars I work with, especially Patrice Haynes, Simon Podmore and Steven Shakespeare, and the administrators Ursula Boote, Ann Houghton, Karen Quinn and Lauren Whiston who always look out for me. I would also like to show my warm appreciation to George Pattison for the generous advice, encouragement and support he provided when reviewing a proposal for this book. Although they are far away, it gives me strength to know that my family, especially mum, dad, Emma, Derek and Claire, are always there. Finally, I would like to thank Louise Emberson. You are beauty, truth and goodness personified, and this book is dedicated to you for making it possible in so many ways.

Notes on Text and Translation When referring to Being and Time I tend to draw from the 1962 translation by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, alongside the 1996 translation by Joan Stambaugh. However, any direct quotations are from the Stambaugh translation. I have decided not to use the Stambaugh translation revised by Dennis J. Schmidt in 2010 for the simple reason that this uses Greek characters in the text for Greek words, and for this book I felt Stambaugh’s transliteration would be more helpful for the reader. All references to works by Heidegger contain page numbers, except Being and Time where, following convention, references are to margin numbers. For Heidegger’s essay ‘The Way to Language’, I use the translation by Peter D. Hertz in On the Way to Language, except for one occasion when I use the translation by David Farrell Krell in Basic Writings because it suits my purpose better. Finally, I should explain that I tend to use the word ‘man’ when referring to humanity as a whole. This is simply to tie in with Heidegger’s own use of the word Mensch, which like the Latin homo and Greek anthrōpos means ‘human being’ and so includes women. This contrasts with Mann, which like the Latin vir and Greek anēr means a male man as distinct from a female woman.

Abbreviations for Heidegger’s Works AWH

‘As When On Holiday ...’ Wie Wenn Am Feiertage ... 1939, lecture in GA 4, tr. K. Hoeller in EHP.

BDT

‘Building, Dwelling, Thinking’ Bauen Wohnen Denken 1951, lecture in GA 7, tr. A. Hofstadter in PLT; also in BW.

BT

Being and Time Sein und Zeit 1927, book, GA 2, tr. J. Stambaugh, Albany: SUNY Press, 1996; also, tr. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson, New York: Harper & Row, 1962.

BW

Basic Writings Heidegger, Martin, Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (London: Routledge, 1978).

CP

Contributions to Philosophy (From Ereignis) Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis) 1936-38, book draft, GA 65, tr. as Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning) by P. Emad and K. Maly, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1999.

DL

‘A Dialogue on Language’ Aus einum Gespräch von der Sprache 1953-54, dialogue in GA 12, tr. P. Hertz in OWL.

DS

Der Spiegel Interview Spiegel-Gespräch mit Martin Heidegger 1966, interview; in GA 16, tr. J. Veith in The Heidegger Reader, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2007.

EHP

Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung 1944 and after, essay collection, GA 4, tr. K. Hoeller, New York: Humanity Books, 2000.

EP

‘The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking’ Das Ende der Philosophie und die Aufgabe des Denkens 1964, lecture in GA 14, tr. J. Stambaugh in BW.

HE

‘Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry’ Hölderlin und das Wesen der Dictung 1936, lecture in GA 4, tr. K. Hoeller, in EHP.

Abbreviations for Heidegger’s Works

xiii

HR

The Heidegger Reader Heidegger Lesebuch 2007, essay collection, ed. Günter Figal, tr. J. Veith, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2009.

ID

Identity and Difference Identitat und Differenz 1957, lectures; GA 11, tr. J. Stambaugh, New York: Harper & Row, 1969.

IM

Introduction to Metaphysics Einführung in die Metaphysik 1935, lecture-course, GA 40, tr. G. Fried & R. Polt, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000.

L

‘Language’ Die Sprache 1959, lecture, in Unterwegs zur Sprache, GA 40, tr. A. Hofstadter, in PLT.

LH

‘Letter on Humanism’ Brief über den Humanismus 1946, in GA 9, tr. F. Capuzzi in BW; also in P.

LL

‘Logos and Language’ From Logic: Heraclitus’ Teaching on Logos Logik: Heraklits Lehre vom Logos 1944, in GA 55, tr. J. Veith, in HR.

NL

‘The Nature of Language’ Das Wesen der Sprache 1957, three lectures, in GA 12, tr. P. Hertz in OWL.

OWA

‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes 1935-6, lectures, in GA 5, tr. A. Hofstadter, in PLT; also in BW.

OWL

On the Way to Language Unterwegs zur Sprache 1959, essay collection, GA 12 (omitting one essay), tr. P. Hertz, New York: Harper & row, 1971.

P

Pathmarks Wegmarken 1967, essay collection, in GA 9, ed. W. McNeill, Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Par

Parmenides Parmenides 1942–43, lecture-course, GA 54, tr. A. Schuwer and R. Rojcewicz, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1998.

PG

The Principle of Ground Der Satz vom Grund 1955–56, lecture-course, GA 10, tr. as The Principle of Reason, by R. Lily, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991.

xiv

Abbreviations for Heidegger’s Works

PLT

Poetry, Language, Thought Selected essays, tr. A. Hofstadter, New York: Harper & Row, 1971.

PMD

‘Poetically Man Dwells’ ... dichterisch wohnet der Mensch 1951, lecture, in GA 7, tr. A. Hofstadter in PLT.

QCT

‘The Question Concerning Technology’ Die Frage nach der Technik 1949, lecture, in GA 7, tr. W. Lovitt, in QTE; also in BW.

QTE

The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, essay collection, tr. W. Lovitt, New York: Harper & Row, 1977.

R

‘Remembrance’ Andenken 1943, essay, in GA 4, tr. K. Hoeller, in EHP.

TP

‘The Thinker as Poet’ Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens 1947, in GA 13, tr. A. Hofstadter, in PLT.

W

Woodpaths Holzwege 1950, essay collection, GA 5, tr. as Off the Beaten Track by J. Young and K. Haynes, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

WCT

What is Called Thinking? Was Heisst Denken? 1951–52, lecture-course, GA 8, tr. J. Gray, New York: Harper & Row, 1968.

WIP

What is Philosophy? Was ist das – die Philosophie? 1955, in GA 11, tr. J. Wilde, and W. Kluback, New York: NCUP Inc, 1956.

WL

‘The Way to Language’ Der Weg zur Sprache 1959, lecture, in GA 12, tr. P. Hertz in OWL; also tr. D. Krell in BW.

WM

‘What is Metaphysics?’ Was ist Metaphysik? 1929, lecture, in GA 9, tr. D. Krell in BW; also in P.

Wo

‘The Word’ Das Wort 1958, lecture, in GA 12, originally titled Dichten und Denken. Zu Stefan Georges Gedicht Das Wort, tr. as ‘Words’ in P. Hertz, in OWL.

WP

‘What Are Poets For?’ Wozu Dichter? 1946, lecture, in GA 5, tr. as ‘What Are Poets For?’ by A. Hofstadter in PLT.

Introduction

Interpreting Heidegger This book explores Martin Heidegger’s reflections on language, often referred to as Heideggerian linguistics. But while Heidegger’s thinking in this context is certainly linguistic in that it relates to language, it does not constitute ‘linguistics’ in the more normal sense of the word as the scientific study of language. In fact, it might be more accurate to refer apophatically to ‘Heideggerian unlinguistics’. Heidegger challenges established approaches in linguistics, and the same goes for philosophy of language. In one work he says: ‘Do we intend … to shake the foundations of all philology and philosophy of language, and to expose them as a sham? Indeed we do.’1 He questions, for example, the entrenched notion in linguistics that language can be studied objectively, and seeks instead a transformation (Verwandlung) of our relation to language. He even disputes the dominant and seemingly unquestionable assertion in linguistics that language is a human phenomenon. Not in the sense that language is argued to belong to other creatures besides humankind, but in that language is not first and foremost the result of humanity’s self-expression. Hence Heidegger’s radical and provocative claim that ‘language speaks’ (die Sprache spricht). The argument that language speaks man, rather than simply being spoken by him, is understood to have been a huge influence on the modern antihumanistic movement. But I think Heidegger is misinterpreted if the term ‘language speaks’ is understood to be anti-humanistic. Heidegger’s claim that ‘language speaks’ serves foremost in questioning the sovereignty of man’s subjectivity, a subjectivity that in turn separates him from the world through representation. Jeffrey Powell notes: ‘If language is reducible to the subject, then all language can possibly achieve is a representation of that to which it would presumably refer, a collection of objects over against a representing subject.’2 But Heidegger’s focus on language over man and his objectifying, representational concepts is designed to bring man back to a more genuine, less circumscribed understanding of himself as a human – and back to the world also. We might

2

Language and Being

therefore see Heidegger as anti-humanistic, but only if we align ‘humanism’ with ‘an anthropocentric doctrine of human control’.3 Charles Taylor notes that while Heidegger’s take on language is not centred on humanity, it is nevertheless related to humanity, adding that: ‘Heidegger’s understanding of language, its telos, and the relevance for this to the human essence opens up new avenues of understanding the human condition with potentially wide ramifications.’4 The term ‘anti-subjectivist’ would perhaps be more accurate, and has also been used by scholars in relation to Heidegger. For example, the opening line of Taylor’s essay quoted above reads: ‘The late Heidegger’s doctrine of language is strongly anti-subjectivist.’5 While there are indeed grounds for making this claim, it nevertheless demands qualification. Heidegger, it would seem, is seeking to redefine the nature and role of subjectivity, or much better un-define it, so as to reopen what has become its self-enclosure. This reopening of subjectivity’s selfenclosure sounds like a contradiction in terms, because the subjectum, whereby man projects his own ‘objectivized image upon the scene of representation … as a central and self-grounding entity’,6 is surely by definition self-enclosed. But as we will come to explore when drawing on Rainer Maria Rilke in Chapter 12, Heidegger is remarkably akin to St Augustine in that the more interior we are the more that interiority seems to open out to that which is above and beyond it.7 Similarly, Michel Haar writes: ‘Man as Dasein is always already “outside,” in the world, but he has not had to exit from himself, because he is outside himself by his essence. Being is more interior to him than any subjective interiority, and more exterior than any entity in the world.’8 Through an authentic saying that results in a conversion of consciousness, subjectivity for Heidegger opens out to the widest orbit that surrounds everything, namely, the Being of beings taking us beyond ourselves. This widest orbit that surrounds everything that is, as the unifying one of Being, lies outside of the self-enclosed anthropocentricity of subjectivism. This is because, for Heidegger, Being (and more radically language) cannot be something that the human subject posits. While, drawing on Heraclitus, it is more apt to say that man is in the logos, rather than the logos is in man, likewise, for Heidegger, man’s subjectivity is first and foremost within language (essentially as logos), which is not therefore in man. Hence Heidegger’s study of language in relation to human essence opens up our understanding of the human condition. As well as being seen to be anti-humanistic and anti-subjectivist, the phrase ‘language speaks’ is also argued by some to represent a linguistic idealism. Or, as Richard Rorty puts it with similar implications, Heidegger speaks of

Introduction

3

language as a ‘quasi-divinity’.9 In turn, Rorty refers to Heidegger’s ‘reification’ and ‘hypostasizing’ of language. But it is to my mind an overly simplistic reading of Heidegger’s reflections on language that reduces it to linguistic idealism, reification or hypostasis. While Heidegger claims that language speaks as a monologue, and that man can only speak in the form of a dialogue as he responds to language, nevertheless, language’s Saying (die Sage) is in need of being voiced in the word. That is, language has a ‘needed usage’ in man. We might add that it is not language without this usage. Language does not simply stand alone, despite Heidegger saying that language alone speaks. Heidegger’s very subtle take on causality (drawing from Aristotle’s four causes) as mutually indebted co-respondence (again, human-related and not human-centred), shows, I believe, that his reflections on language cannot be sufficiently reduced to idealism, reification or hypostasis. It is, however, not surprising that such charges are made when Heidegger, for example, distinguishes between Being and beings, and between Saying and speaking.10 As a result he is seen to denaturalize both Being and Saying in a way similar to that of Plato’s Forms, Kant’s Categories and Russell’s logical objects. These are all what Rorty, for example, calls type A entities. These type A entities are all said to make type B entities, namely, Platonic material particulars, Kantian intuitions and Russellian empirical objects, knowable or describable. Rorty asserts: ‘The latter objects need to be related by the former objects before they become available – before they may be experienced or described.’11 He continues: ‘All type A entities, all unexplained explainers, are in the same situation as a transcendent Deity. If we are entitled to believe in them without relating them to something which conditions their existence or knowability or describability, then we have falsified our initial claim that availability requires being related by something other than the relata themselves.’12 So when Heidegger is seen to place what we might call ‘essential Being’ and ‘language’s Saying’ on one side as type A entities, and ‘existential being’ and ‘human speaking’ on the other as type B entities, he is seen to reify or hypostasize the former as conditionless conditions. But this is not to my mind what Heidegger does at all, and furthermore he is, as we will see, careful to avoid this problem. In fact in one essay he explicitly draws attention to this danger: In our attempt to think of the being of language in terms of Saying, do we not run the risk of elevating language into a fantastic, self-sustained being which cannot be encountered anywhere so long as our reflection on language remains sober? For language, after all, remains unmistakably bound up with human speaking. Certainly. But what kind of bond is it? On what grounds and in what

4

Language and Being way is it binding? Language needs human speaking, and yet it is not merely of the making or at the command of our speech activity.13

The ontological difference between Being and beings, I will argue, is brought about by language or logos as a mutually occasioning ‘divide in the middle’, which is not therefore the ‘middle in a divide’. No side of the difference is completely self-subsistent. We only come to know one through the other owing to their being occasioned by language as logos. Likewise, we might say of the linguistic difference between language speaking and human speaking, that these too are occasioned by the one river that forms the banks, this being understood variously as the logos (gathering-preserving), poiēsis (making-happening), Sagen (showing-saying) and Ereignis (owning-event). Heidegger’s thinking in areas such as these is extremely subtle, and thus easily misinterpreted. And yet this is not helped by Heidegger, who I would add cannot help it, because he is often required to speak of Being and beings (literally so to speak) as if they each are on their own terms before the linguistic event of the dividing middle. The river (logos as language) forming the two banks is referred to as the ‘two-fold’ by Heidegger, in which Being and beings, Saying and speaking, are ‘gathered’ and ‘preserved’ so as to be given at once. In the text published as, ‘A Dialogue on Language’ (Aus einum Gespräch von der Sprache), Heidegger and Professor Tezuka of the Imperial University in Tokyo, discuss the danger of the significance of this being missed.14 First, Heidegger says: ‘We still run the risk that we understand the gathering as a subsequent union’, to which Tezuka replies: ‘Instead of experiencing that all bearing, in giving and encounter, springs first and only from the gathering.’15 A little further in the same dialogue the significance of the two-fold is also discussed. Here Being is referred to as ‘presence’ and beings as ‘present beings’. In the following quotation, Heidegger is referred to as Inquirer and Tezuka as Japanese. As if responding to Rorty’s concern above, Heidegger speaks of the misinterpretation of the word ‘relation’ when we say ‘that language is the fundamental trait in human nature’s hermeneutic relation to the two-fold of presence and present beings’.16 In response, Tezuka says that as far as he can see the two-fold cannot Japanese: … be explained in terms of presence, nor in terms of present beings, nor in terms of the relation between the two. Inquirer: Because it is only the two-fold itself which unfolds the clarity, that is, the clearing in which present beings as such, and presence, can be discerned by man … Japanese: … by man who by nature stands in relation to, that is, is being used by, the two-fold.

Introduction

5

Inquirer: That is also why we may no longer say: relation to the two-fold, for the two-fold is not an object of mental representation, but is the sway of usage. Japanese: Which we never experience directly, however, as long as we think of the two-fold only as the difference which becomes apparent in a comparison that tries to contrast present beings and presence.17

Through the significance then of the two-fold divide in the middle, I will endeavour to show that Heidegger does not denaturalize language as a quasidivinity, forming in the process a linguistic idealism, reification or hypostasis.

Heidegger’s approach The qualification made above about using the term ‘linguistics’ in relation to Heidegger should also be born in mind when considering his approach to philosophy of language. In truth, Heidegger’s approach is so radical that he is doing neither linguistics nor philosophy of language, and yet it is the concerns and convictions of these disciplines that he challenges. Again and again, from different directions, Heidegger questions what are taken as ‘givens’ in their central areas of concern. He constantly pulls the rug from under ‘known facts’ forming conventional wisdom or established tradition, and in so doing exposes what he sees to be the false floor on which they stand, before removing this in search of a more genuine ground.18 But it is because of this deeper ground that Heidegger’s approach to linguistics or philosophy of language, and indeed all of his thinking, becomes ever difficult to grasp. This is in part due to Heidegger’s seemingly cryptic style that can, as is well-known, leave many readers feeling exasperated. He often appears to say something in a knotty sentence that is hard to unpick, before moving on without elaboration in Zen fashion to another equally knotty sentence. Reading Heidegger can often feel like being lost in a maze. A difficulty emerges from reading Heidegger’s philosophy of language in particular owing to his argument that language cannot be seized and understood as an object among objects. The ground of language that Heidegger seeks demands therefore a different approach altogether, and so he is constantly working to prevent any form of propositional sure-footedness or conceptual seizing from the reader. It is tough to ‘get’ Heidegger because again in a Zen manner he wants you to get him by precisely not getting him. He wants you to grasp it by letting go so as to move towards (if not reach), what Robert Mugerauer calls, a ‘nonconceptualizing thoughtfulness’.19 An arguable influence here is

6

Language and Being

Meister Eckhart’s term Gelassenheit, which refers to letting go, detachment or releasement.20 For me the following Zen koan indicates the kind of intentions in Heidegger’s thinking: ‘If you have a staff I will give you a staff; if you have no staff, I will take your staff away.’21 Heidegger is not therefore hankering after the certainty of analytical philosophers who look for truth in logical propositions or conceptual assertions, and he does his best to expose the limits of this way of thinking while endeavouring to form a new approach. Crucially, we are, it seems, called to participate in this approach when reading him – a point that some commentators appear to overlook. Reading Heidegger with a neutral detachment is arguably to misread him. The way he presents his works and how we are involved in this thinking is integral to how we are to understand the content. This is shown by Mugerauer, for example, who discusses how in Heidegger’s essay, ‘A Dialogue on Language’, the patterned structure of the dialogue and the nature of thinking are fused. Accordingly ‘it is an image of the truth it intends’.22 He tells us that more is hinted at than systematically developed. Thus the reader is beckoned by Heidegger, drawn in and then forced to puzzle out the thought as a participant. This also explains why Heidegger does not formulate a philosophy of language in a definite and systematic way. This has to be acknowledged by anyone attempting to write a book of this kind, and likewise by any reader. It is not a simple case then of elaborating Heidegger’s thought, which is already reduced to order and determined by an overriding rationale. For a start his studies of language are contained in scattered essays that span his career, and these reflect a constant state of development. They also focus on different areas of concern. In this respect Heidegger’s approach to linguistics and philosophy of language (drawing from his own metaphors) is like being in a forest with a choice of paths that we cannot rise above. These paths overgrown and so only faintly seen often come to abrupt stops, which force us to rethink and double back, or to venture onwards where it is untrodden. Nevertheless, Heidegger talks of being on a ‘single pathway bound’,23 which is why there is, I believe, a consistent and sure thread of thought in his approach to linguistics or philosophy of language. Without wishing to sound deliberately obscure, the labyrinthine way in the maze of paths is the inexorable goal. The way is the destination, and occasionally on this way we come upon light-filled clearings. I agree with Michael Inwood who says the following of Heidegger’s allure and difficulty: He is not, we feel, presenting us with truths that he has already worked out in advance, not leading us across terrain that he has already explored. He is working out problems as he goes along; the terrain is as new and unfamiliar to

Introduction

7

him as it is to us. He often needs to retrace his steps and cover the same ground in a different way. He does not know our destination any more than we do; he is on the way – but to where?24

As a result of the above points concerning his approach, Heidegger experiments creatively with compounds, neologisms, etymologies, retranslations of Greek texts and reinterpretations of German poets. Attention should also be drawn to the significance of punctuation. The importance of the colon, for example, in Heidegger’s phrase The being of language: The language of being cannot be overestimated. Likewise his use of hyphens to break up words is utterly meaningful.25 Added to punctuation, his use of spelling, grammar, style, prefixes, the right words, etc., are all deliberate and essential. But while these things often come across as bizarre to some and absurd to others, there is method in what might otherwise appear madness. Heidegger does such things in an attempt to free himself from the prevalence of what he deems to be the Western metaphysical tradition, thus deliberately seeking to avoid using the conceptual tools and forms of argument familiar to it.26 All of this forms what is frequently called (and often in a derogatory way) Heideggerese. But despite his neologisms, which are nevertheless linguistically lawful, Heidegger cannot and has no wish to invent his own language. By necessity he uses what Haar calls the ossified language that forms the corpus of the tradition, with a view to hearing these words anew and so differently. This is why etymology is so important to him. As Haar says: ‘The aim of this attention to words is also to awaken an archaic, prelogical meaning in classical concepts, and thereby to turn them away from their unquestioned metaphysical employment that has become selbstverständlich, self-evident, and pseudo-transparent.’27 Heidegger’s neologisms appear similar to a deliberate process that Samuel Taylor Coleridge had called ‘desynonymization’. Coleridge argued that distinctions in language were transformative of thought itself. In her work titled Coleridge’s Philosophy, Mary Anne Perkins notes that for Coleridge language is formative of consciousness, being the process and not only the product of thought.28 Heidegger would almost certainly have been sympathetic to this view. With reference to neologisms, of which Heidegger produced many, Coleridge who likewise produced many writes: ‘Unusual and new coined words are doubtless an evil; but vagueness, confusion and imperfect conveyance of our thoughts, are far greater.’29 Heidegger’s approach to language is to not think or speak about language, but to think or speak from out of language’s reality with the intention that in this way we are led to its reality. Accordingly, as we will explore, Heidegger

8

Language and Being

endeavours to bring language as language to language. Again, it is language that speaks foremost, and this is another one of the reasons why etymology is so important to Heidegger. The modern take on etymology only tends to value the root meaning of a word as the earliest traceable form from which a later word is derived. Here the emphasis is on the history of the word over the meaning. For Heidegger, however, the roots of words, to use a phrase from George Steiner, are ‘primal nodes of truth’.30 This is one of the chief ways in which Heidegger endeavours to let language speak. For example, he writes: ‘This manifold thought requires, however, not a new language but a transformed relationship to the essence[-ing] of the old one.’31 Heidegger gives a clue to his relationship with the ‘old’, when in, ‘A Dialogue on Language’, he notes that the first page of Being and Time speaks of ‘raising again’ a question. He adds: ‘What is meant is not the monotonous trotting out of something that is always the same, but: to fetch, to gather in, to bring together what is concealed within the old.’32 As with neologisms, Heidegger appears to have an unwitting affinity to Coleridge with respect to etymology. Perkins tells us that in Coleridge’s view ‘we have but to find the true definition of a word and to use it accordingly, to release its creative, communicative power’.33 Coleridge, in a way that might have appealed to Heidegger, writes: ‘We have only to master the true origin and original import of any native and abiding word, to find in it, if not the solution of the facts expressed by it, yet a finger-mark pointing to the road on which this solution is to be sought.’34 In his etymological excavations of old and seemingly worn-out words Heidegger favoured the Greek, German and Sanskrit languages. He saw these as philosophical languages, ‘not permeated by philosophical terminology but philosophizing as language and language-forming’.35 Inwood, capturing Heidegger’s purpose, affirms: ‘We learn things from words that are not evident to or consciously intended by the speaker.’36

Heidegger and language It is firmly established that Being is central to Heidegger’s thinking, and so this book duly concerns Being. But in this study I wish to show that language, if not equally important to Heidegger, comes an extremely close second. This does not in my view make language just a subsidiary element of his thinking. The study of language was important to Heidegger from the beginning of his career, and remained integral to the end. Heidegger does not in my view merely toy

Introduction

9

with ideas about language, only to drop them later when turning to something else, but continually develops his reflections in line with an ongoing task to rethink the nature or essence of Being and language that go hand in hand. The word ‘develop’ is important in the last sentence, and should perhaps serve as a reminder to those scholars who tend to ignore Heidegger’s later writings and never see any reason to look beyond his seminal Being and Time.37 It was in the later writings that Heidegger had the confidence to explore more fully his reflections on language. In this respect I disagree with Rorty, who claims that the Turn (die Kehre) in Heidegger was a failure of nerve.38 Whereas I would agree with Pattison, who notes that ‘some commentators would say that the philosophy of the later Heidegger is nothing if not a philosophy of language’.39 Heidegger’s work, however, should be taken as a whole. He himself says this on more than one occasion. For example, in his letter to Father William J. Richardson he says: ‘The distinction you make between Heidegger I and II is justified only on the condition that this is kept constantly in mind: only by way of what [Heidegger] I has thought does one gain access to what is to-be-thought by [Heidegger] II. But the thought of [Heidegger] I becomes possible only if it is contained in [Heidegger] II.’40 The question of language for Heidegger is perhaps as important as the question of Being, precisely because, as we will come to see, it is chiefly in language that Being is shown to exist, that is, ‘stand out’ of Being so as to be. It is the case that beings can only be by virtue of Being, which can also only be by virtue of beings. This is the ‘ontological dif-ference’, which language, I will argue, supremely occasions. For Heidegger, the relation between Being and language is an intimate one, as his Leitsatz or guiding formula, ‘The being of language: the language of being’ shows. Language is the language of Being, said Heidegger, as clouds are the clouds of the sky.41 Furthermore, and a crucial element of this study, it is in language that thoughts are. Hence Steiner writes of Heidegger that he has been ‘immersed in the “language condition” of all human thought and existence to a deeper degree, perhaps, than any other philosopher’.42 We might be tempted to say that, for Heidegger, thought and language are strictly inseparable as ‘speech-thought’ or ‘language-consciousness’. However, he argues that the word ‘knowledge’, from the root gno, is contained within the word ‘name’, nomen. Thus it is that ‘the name makes known’.43 We can thus discern here that the emphasis is given to language, again to overturn the dominant view that language merely expresses thoughts that are seen to self-subsist in the form of subjectivity. For Heidegger, on the

10

Language and Being

contrary, it is language as logos that forms and discloses meaning. Elsewhere he writes: ‘Only when man speaks, does he think – not the other way around, as metaphysics still believes.’44 In his ‘A Dialogue on Language’, which originated in 1953/54, Heidegger tells us that as early as 1915, in his dissertation, ‘Duns Scotus’ Doctrine of Categories and Theory of Meaning’, he was concerned with language. Heidegger says that the ‘doctrine of categories’ is the name usually given to the discussion of the Being of beings, while ‘theory of meaning’ refers to the grammatica speculativa, that is, the metaphysical reflection on language in its relation to Being. But Heidegger concedes that these relationships were still unclear to him. He therefore kept silent about this relation for twelve years. It was in Being and Time, published in 1927, that Heidegger tentatively returned (albeit briefly) to the theme of language’s relation to Being, owing it seems to the fact that phenomenology presented the possibilities of a way. Still, during these twelve years, the fundamental theme of ‘Being and language’ stayed in the background of all his other work.45 In his dialogue with Heidegger, Professor Tezuka suggests that the quest of Being and of language is a gift of that light ray that fell on him. Heidegger replies: Who would have the audacity to claim that such a gift has come to him? I only know one thing: because reflection on language, and on Being, has determined my path of thinking from early on, therefore their discussion has stayed as far as possible in the background. The fundamental flaw of the book Being and Time is perhaps that I ventured forth far too early.46

Tezuka replies that this can hardly be said of his thoughts on language, and that he wishes Heidegger had said more on this theme. Heidegger again replies: True, less so, for it was all of twenty years after my doctoral dissertation that I dared discuss in a class the question of language. … In the summer semester of 1934, I offered a lecture series under the title ‘Logic’. In fact, however, it was a reflection on the logos, in which I was trying to find the nature of language. Yet it took another ten years before I was able to say what I was thinking – the fitting word is still lacking even today. The prospect of the thinking that labors to answer to the nature of language is still veiled, in all its vastness.47

That the fitting word that could say the nature of language was still lacking actually becomes an important position in Heidegger’s thinking, and one that I will draw much attention to because to my mind its full significance is often missed.

Introduction

11

Structure and scope Mention has been made of the relation between Being and language, and it is this that determines the structure of this particular work. On one hand I will explore the language of being, in which language is responsible for the unconcealment of Being to the extent that beings are revealed to exist and be. On the other hand I will explore the Being of language, enquiring into language’s nature or essence in terms of what makes it what it is. Moreover the endeavour will be to show that these two perspectives are each the answer to the other, so that the Being of language is the language of being and vice versa. It is clear that Heidegger’s overriding philosophical concern was the forgetting of Being, but it will be argued that this problem and its solution are chiefly linguistic. Language, for Heidegger, is the ‘house of Being’, which is to say that language is the primary way we dwell in Being. Or put another way, Heidegger says: ‘In language there occurs the revelation of beings … . In the power of language man becomes the witness of Being.’48 But the forgetting of Being brings existential destitution, and this is owing to the homelessness that results when we no longer inhabit the house of Being in which humans dwell as the witness of Being. The reasons for this and the consequences are explored, as is the true role and significance of language in Heidegger’s view. Finally, ways back to Being through language (and thus back to the house of Being) are considered. However, it is important to note that this structure is my own, in terms of creating a loose narrative setting with which to study the theme. This is not an attempt to systematize Heidegger’s reflections on language, but is, if anything, an endeavour to gather and elucidate them. As I have already noted, his reflections on language are generally scattered in an assortment of essays. This book draws from many of those essays with a view to introducing the reader to this important area of Heidegger’s thinking as a whole. But of course it is no substitute for the real thing. And although I have said a fair amount, given the strict dictates of space much has been left frustratingly unexplored. This book seeks to elucidate different areas of Heidegger’s linguistics for the simple reason that I am convinced Heidegger has many important and insightful things to say concerning language. I shy from saying that he is ‘correct’, because it is such a complex and subtle area, and rather than being sealed by Heidegger, I think depths have been opened up by him for perpetual thinking as opposed to conclusive philosophy. Also, by saying that Heidegger is correct, there is the danger of misinterpreting his approach. To repeat from above, he was not after

12

Language and Being

certainty. Still, he is I think right to challenge some of the more conventional views of linguists, scientists, philosophers, theologians, anthropologists, psychologists, etc., many of whom actually devalue language. Oblivious of the irony, they not only presume to use language as a servant for their own ends, but even use the servant to sack the servant. This actually confirms Heidegger’s argument that we cannot step outside of language’s speaking. Heidegger is insightful, I believe, when he listens to poets over those from the aforementioned disciplines. I also find it a necessary and persuasive move that sees him resort to tautological and apophatic strategies akin to particular mystics, and to reinterpret the logos in favour of language over reason.

1

The Forgetting of Being

1.1 The fundamental question Hast thou ever raised thy mind to the consideration of EXISTENCE, in and by itself, as the mere act of existing? Hast thou ever said to thyself, thoughtfully, IT IS! Heedless in that moment, whether it were a man before thee, or a flower, or a grain of sand? Without reference, in short, to this or that particular mode or form of existence? If thou hast indeed attained to this, thou wilt have felt the presence of a mystery, which must have fixed thy spirit in awe and wonder. The very words, There is nothing! Or, There was a time, when there was nothing! Are self-contradictory. There is that within us which repels the proposition with as full and instantaneous a light, as if it bore evidence against the fact in the right of its own eternity.1

These lines from Samuel Taylor Coleridge are referred to as ‘an almost literal anticipation’ of Heidegger’s fundamental question concerning the nature of Being.2 They contain the same vital spark that kindled Heidegger’s entire work, namely an astonishment that all things are. Heidegger appeared to have a poet’s sensibility, a child’s curiosity and perhaps even a fool’s credulity before the intractable presence of Being. Heidegger was overawed by what he saw to be the fundamental yet forgotten question of Being. In his seminal book Being and Time (Sein und Zeit; 1927), he points to the ambiguity of the question’s metaphysical and existential nature by asking rhetorically: ‘Does it remain solely, or is it at all, only a matter of free-floating speculation about the most general generalities – or is it the most basic and at the same time most concrete question?’3 Reference to the most general of generalities seems to ask: What is the Being (das Sein) which renders possible all being (das Seiende)? While the most basic and concrete asks: Why is there something, anything, everything, when there could be nothing? Heidegger opens his later work, Introduction to Metaphysics (Einführung in die Metaphysik) with the question: ‘Why are there beings at all instead of nothing?’4

14

Language and Being

He adds that this is not an arbitrary question, but the first of all questions.5 From this he later says: ‘The question “Why are there beings at all instead of nothing?” forces us to the prior question: “How does it stand with Being?”’6 This expression, say the translators, can be more colloquially rendered as: What is the status of Being? Or even, What about Being?7 For Heidegger, the fundamental question of Being remained the nucleus to a lifelong singleness of intention. Heidegger is ‘literally overcome by the notion of “is” (Greek on), a man inexhaustibly astonished by the fact of existence’.8 The mystery that something is, when it could otherwise ‘not be’, inspires then the astonishment that captivates Heidegger’s mind with awe and wonder. Here Heidegger appears to accord with Plato who has Socrates say: ‘Wonder is the feeling of a philosopher, and philosophy begins in wonder.’9 This was later echoed by Aristotle, who says: ‘For it is owing to their wonder that men both now begin and at first began to philosophize.’10 But this wonder or astonishment, says Heidegger, is not merely the cause of philosophizing. This would reduce wonder to an impetus, which as soon as philosophy is in progress would no longer be necessary. Rather, for Heidegger, astonishment is the ‘beginning’ (archê) of philosophy. This beginning or ‘from where’ should not be left behind in the process of going out, but rather it must carry and pervade every step of philosophy.11 But that this has not been the case explains why, for Heidegger, philosophy came to lose sight of the fundamental question of Being altogether. Heidegger argues that Plato and Aristotle took the first steps into philosophy, yet at the same time away from its governing astonishment (pathos) by posing the question of existence in an analytical-rational guise. In this respect they differed from earlier thinkers like Anaximander, Heraclitus and Parmenides, who remained held by the radical astonishment (Thaumazein) of Being. Steiner writes: ‘They belonged to a primal, therefore “more authentic” dimension or experience of thinking, in which beingness was immediately present to language, to the logos.’ 12 And articulating the significance of this for Heidegger is in a nutshell the overriding concern of this work.

1.2 Ontotheology Elaborating how the fundamental question of Being came to be forgotten, Heidegger notes that for Plato the Being of beings (or Beingness) was called idea. While for Aristotle it is energeia, in terms of actuality conceived as substance. It is from the Platonic understanding of Being that we inherit the whole Western tradition of metaphysics, while it is the Aristotelian concept that serves as the

The Forgetting of Being

15

basis for subsequent science and technology. Heidegger argues that neither the idealist-metaphysical nor the scientific-technological legacies satisfactorily meet the original endeavour of thinking, which is to experience the Beingness of being. Steiner writes: ‘Heidegger will urge relentlessly that these two great currents of idealization and analysis have sprung not from a genuine perception of Being but from a forgetting of Being, from a taking-for-granted of the central existential mystery.’13 It could also be argued that these two schools of thought have pursued, or even created, a division in the way in which we think about Being. The idealistmetaphysical tends to understand being in terms of essentiality (essential), while the scientific-technological typically understands being as actuality (existentia). Heidegger writes that this differentiation ‘completely dominates the destiny of Western history and of all history determined by Europe’.14 This history Heidegger comes to understand as ‘metaphysics’.15 Initially Heidegger approved of the word ‘metaphysics’, as we can see, for example, from his inaugural lecture at the University of Freiburg, ‘What is Metaphysics?’ (Was ist Metaphysik?), which was given in 1929. However, in the mid to late ‘30s, Heidegger begins to find it less favourable, although this, as we will see, remains ambiguous. He understands that Nietzsche represents the end of metaphysics, and that he failed to overcome metaphysics. Now metaphysics refers to traditional philosophy that instead of asking the question governed by wonder or astonishment ‘What is (the truth of) Being?’ rather asks ‘What are beings as such?’. The answers to the latter vary from ‘spirit, matter and force, becoming and life, representation, will, substance, subject, energeia … or eternal recurrence of the same’.16 Furthermore the Western history consisting of the idealist-metaphysical and scientific-technological schools constitute, what Heidegger calls, ontotheology. This approach asks two distinct questions. Firstly, what are beings as such in general? And second, what is the highest being, and what is its nature? Inwood writes: ‘The questions are easily conflated in German, since Was ist das Seiende?, “What are beings?”, is literally “What is the being?” or “What is that which is?”, which might be either question 1 or question 2.’17 What happens here, says Heidegger, is that Being as the ground of all other beings is seen as the greatest being that brings all else into existence. The actus purus, for example, of Thomas Aquinas, that understands God to be existence in itself. Hence Josef Pieper writes: ‘Whenever we encounter anything real, anything existent in any way whatsoever, we encounter something that has “flamed up” directly from God.’18 But confusing the Being of beings (ontology) with a particular being, even the highest Being (theology), is to commit the category mistake that Heidegger calls ontotheo-logic.

16

Language and Being

Heidegger divides the history of being into three epochs. For the ancient Greeks it was physis. In the medieval period beings were created by God. While in the modern period to be is to be an object posited or represented by a subject. Heidegger writes: This foundation happened in the West for the first time in Greece. What was in the future to be called Being was set into work, setting the standard. The realm of beings thus opened up was then transformed into a being in the sense of God’s creation. This happened in the Middle Ages. This kind of being was again transformed at the beginning and during the course of the modern age. Beings became objects that could be controlled and penetrated by calculation.19

The three historical meanings of Being mentioned above by Heidegger (ancient, medieval and modern) are all to his thinking, metaphysical. Yet despite looking beyond individual beings to the common traits that define the Being of these beings, Being itself as Being is in the process forgotten. This is because by asking ‘What are beings as such as a whole?’, we overlook the basic question, which can be asked variously as: What is (the truth of) Being? Or: What is Being itself? Or again: What is Being as Being? Heidegger writes: ‘Metaphysics inquires into being in regard to how it determines beings as beings. Now, in another sense, the question of being is entirely other. It does not inquire into being insofar as it determines beings as beings; it inquires into being as being.’20 It is for this reason that Heidegger frequently refers to ‘overcoming metaphysics’. But there is an issue here for Heidegger in that wanting to overcome metaphysics seems on the surface to express a negative attitude to the history of previous thinking. But in his essay, ‘What is Metaphysics?’, overcoming metaphysics, says Heidegger, is his attempt to bring out the essence of metaphysics and to bring it back within its own limits. Asked in his ‘A Dialogue On Language’ if this is what he means by ‘overcoming metaphysics’, Heidegger replies: ‘This only; neither a destruction nor even a denial of metaphysics. To intend anything else would be childish presumption and a demeaning of history.’21 A little later, Heidegger says that the dialogue ‘speaks out of a thinking respect of the past’.22 While this is ambiguous, it is clear that Heidegger wanted to bring about a new epoch of Being, that is, a new beginning influenced by the unfinished, unthought-out, pre-Socratic first beginning. With regard to the three epochs of Being, Lee Braver adds that every time a new epoch occurs, which lets beings appear in a profoundly new way, ‘we usually pay attention to the beings that are present or, at most, to their essential way of presenting themselves (beingness), ignoring the simple fact that they present themselves to us at all’.23 In this way we forget Being as Being. Heidegger

The Forgetting of Being

17

wants to draw attention to our forgetting of Being and in the process effect a new epochal shift that is more radical than the previous three.

1.3 The Beingness of Being All things are. This phrase appears so obvious and elementary to us that we might argue it is puerile to state it. But for Heidegger’s sensibility, the reality that something is in order for it to be is nothing other than spellbinding. This leads him to reconsider the fundamental question of Being, and in so doing take philosophy back to its roots. But we must be clear about what Heidegger is asking. He is not concerned with any particular thing that is, be that chalk, cheese or any other this or that making up phenomena. He is asking after the foundation (Ursprung, Urgrund) of all things. In his essay, ‘Letter on Humanism’ (Brief über den Humanismus), Heidegger writes: ‘But what “is” above all is Being.’24 This being so, the question that lurks throughout Heidegger’s thinking asks: ‘What is Being that is?’ What is this mysterious ‘Beingness’ that grants things their Being, thus permitting them to be? It is one thing, as we shall see, to ostensibly accept that things are, and another to think through the question: ‘What does it mean to be?’ But why not accept the cold fact that things are, and that we even know what they are? What else is it that Heidegger is seeking? What else does it mean to say something is? To approach such questions, we must here proceed with examples. Heidegger, writes: A distant mountain range under a vast sky – such a thing ‘is’. What does its Being consist in? When and to whom does it reveal itself? To the hiker who enjoys the landscape, or to the peasant who makes his daily living from it and in it, or to the meteorologist who has to give a weather report? Who among them lays hold of Being? All and none. Or do these people only lay hold of particular aspects of the mountain range under the vast sky, not the mountain range itself as it ‘is’, not what its real Being consists in? Who can lay hold of this? Or is it nonsensical, against the sense of Being in the first place, to ask about what is in itself, behind those aspects? Does Being lie in the aspects?25

Heidegger gives further examples, including the portal of an early Romanesque church. Does this reveal itself to the historian who photographs it while on holiday? To the abbot who passes through it with his monks? Or to the children who play in its shadow? Heidegger then turns to a state. What does its Being

18

Language and Being

consist in? Is it the state police who arrest a suspect? Is it the clatter of the typewriters of secretaries recording the dictation of ministers? Is it the discussion between the Führer and the English foreign minister? And with an example that is described as being among Heidegger’s touchstones, he writes: A painting by Van Gogh: a pair of sturdy peasant shoes, nothing else. The picture really represents nothing. Yet you are alone at once with what is there, as if you yourself were heading homeward from the field on a late autumn evening, tired, with your hoe, as the last potato fires smoulder out. What is in being here? The canvas? The brushstrokes? The patches of colour?26

He continues: In everything we have mentioned, what is the Being of beings? Really, how is it that we can run around in the world and stand around with our stupid pretensions and our so-called cleverness? Everything we have mentioned is, after all, and nevertheless – if we want to lay hold of Being it is always as if we were reaching into the void. The Being that we are asking about is almost like Nothing, and yet we are always trying to arm and guard ourselves against the presumption of saying that all beings are not.27

Heidegger also refers to a piece of chalk. The chalk is ‘an extended, relatively stable, definitively formed, grayish-white thing, and furthermore a thing for writing’.28 It belongs to the chalk to be there as does its capacity to be a different size or not be there at all. Likewise the capacity of being used to draw and being used up is not simply added to it by thought. It is in this particular way and can be catalogued as such just like everything else. Such analysis proposes to tell us everything there is to know about the chalk. We list, says Heidegger, ‘material mass, grayish-white, light, formed in such and such a manner, breakable’.29 Yet, however exhausting such scrutiny is, it still fails to satisfy our ontological question concerning the chalk’s Beingness that grants its being at all. It seems that even if we grasp the chalk’s chemical composition, molecular arrangement, practical function, etc., such knowledge does not impart essentially what it is, and what it therefore means for the chalk to be. We refer to the chalk’s being as what at any time is in being. But we do not refer to that being that makes it a being instead of a non-being, that is, the Being of the being. This, says Heidegger, is ‘the-in-being, beingness, to be in being, Being’.30 Put simply, Being is not included in our catalogue of attributes. A response to this might typically argue that there is no essential Beingness to the chalk’s being. As a whole, there is nothing more to the chalk’s being than

The Forgetting of Being

19

its analytically determined aspects. Following the dictates of common sense, bolstered by the quoted breakdown, it would seem fair enough to concede to this exclusive stance. This asserts that there is no other valid viewpoint. Concrete answers lie solely within analytic reach, and any alternative view produces mere mystical vapours. But regarding the mountain range it was stated that the sum of its aspects could not be said to constitute the being of the object. Thus we appear to have two completely opposed views. On the one side that Being itself is not confined to the sum of its aspects or parts, and on the other side that such aspects represent the sole conditions that determine Being. The word ‘is’ predicates being. To be grammatically precise it is recognized as a third person singular, the present indicative of be. This means that when we say, for example, ‘there is a piece of chalk’, the word ‘is’ here becomes a referent that merely affirms as true what we already assume as given, that the chalk it predicates exists. Thus we do not really need to say ‘there is’ a piece of chalk, because for it to be a piece of chalk it must already exist. In this sense, it might be argued that the word ‘is’ really tells us nothing, or at least anything original we do not already take to be so. From another perspective, when we say, for example, ‘the chalk is white’, the word ‘is’ becomes a mere copula, i.e. a word simply used to link the subject (the chalk) with the predicate (that it is white). Furthermore, I can also reduce the referent ‘is’, in ‘there is a piece of chalk’, and the copula ‘is’, in ‘the chalk is white’, to insubstantial contractions by adding in each case an apostrophe that serves to omit letters. Thus I could simply say, ‘there’s a piece of chalk’ and ‘the chalk’s white’. But Heidegger seems to be asking, ‘Is there not more to the word “is” than this?’ Approaching an answer demanded that Heidegger reflect further into the nature of the word ‘is’, which is seen by many to have no meaning beyond such seemingly inane roles as evidenced above. To repeat, Heidegger was not asking, what is ‘this’ or ‘that’ (which could only offer the analytic sifting that failed to disclose the chalk’s Beingness), rather Heidegger appears to be asking: ‘What is “Is”?’ This is because he is looking for that which is above all, namely, Being. To ask what is ‘Is’ is to ask after the Beingness of Being. Thus, in asking, what is ‘Is’ itself, Heidegger was not attempting, in an epistemological sense that hankers after certain specific truth, to define once and for all what it is that ‘Is’ is. Understood in this now commonplace way, the word ‘what’ already anticipates or presupposes our search for definitive information about things.31 However, in a similar way, the word ‘is’ in the question, what is

20

Language and Being

such and such, already anticipates or presupposes the seeking after a being of some kind. Therefore, Heidegger avoids saying that ‘Being is’ and writes: For ‘is’ is commonly said of some thing that is. We call such a thing a being. But Being ‘is’ precisely not ‘a being’. If ‘is’ is spoken without a closer interpretation of Being, then Being is all too easily represented as a ‘being’ after the fashion of the familiar sorts of beings that act as causes and are actualized as effects.32

Still, the question of Being, that can perhaps be interpreted as asking what is ‘Is’, is still for Heidegger the most important question of all. He therefore qualifies the nature of the ‘is’ he asks after. Following the quotation above, he continues: And yet Parmenides, in the early age of thinking, says, esti gar einai, ‘for there is Being’. The primal mystery for all thinking is concealed in this phrase. Perhaps ‘is’ can be said only of Being in an appropriate way, so that no individual being ever properly ‘is’. But because thinking should be directed only toward saying Being in its truth, instead of explaining it as a particular being in terms of beings, whether and how Being is must remain an open question for the careful attention of thinking.33

Accordingly, Heidegger would seek to reflect ever openly on the very Isness of the word ‘is’. So what of the Isness of this word ‘is’ that we have earlier turned into a mere copula? Is this question concerning the Beingness of being or the Isness of is, not simply a pointless one? Steiner writes: ‘Make “is” into a hypostatized mystery, obscure its everyday function as a grammatical copula and you will, most assuredly, be chasing after vapors. Such is the riposte of common sense, of positivism, of the logician and the linguistic philosopher.’34 But this cynicism does not deter Heidegger. On the contrary, it actually discloses the forgetting of Being that has limited our perception of ‘is’ to an ineffective and vaporous piece of language. It also increases the validity of asking once again the most fundamental question of all, that of Being: Empiricists and positivists would say that Heidegger is asking a perfectly vacuous question, and that he has verbally postulated ‘being’ without giving evidence that such a postulate can have any verifiable content. Heidegger would riposte: ‘You do exactly the same thing every time you use the word is, i.e. every time you utter a normal proposition. The difference is that I believe that in doing so I am saying something real, and am trying to find out what it is.’35

We have already stated that the Greek word for ‘is’ is the word on. But, by excavating the history of this word, Heidegger seeks to unearth its long

The Forgetting of Being

21

forgotten roots. His exploration takes him back to a time before the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle – to a time of thinkers. Via the primordial poetry of Homer, Heidegger sought to interpret a visionary sentence from the Greek thinker, Anaximander, found in Homer’s Iliad, lines 68–72. A translation of the passage in question reads: ‘Then there stood up in the assembly Kalchas, Thestor’s son, far the best of augurs, who knew what is, and what will be, and what was before. He had guided the Achaians’ ships into Ilios through his seercraft, which Phoibos Apollo had granted him.’36 Line 70 of Homer’s passage names in this order the ‘present’, the ‘future’ and the ‘past’. This reads as: ta t’eonta ta t’essomena pro t’eonta, which is often translated as: ‘What is, will be, or was.’37 Heidegger argues that this pre-Socratic fragment reveals an awareness and understanding of Being, which we have subsequently lost. David Halliburton explains: The eonta of line 70, Heidegger observes, belongs, with eon, to the archaic vocabulary of Parmenides and Heraclitus, from which the ‘ontic’ and the ‘ontological’ in the later, conceptual vocabulary of Plato and Aristotle are derived. But what is crucial … is that root e-, equivalent to the root es- in estin and the ‘is’ in other languages, such as Latin, German, or English. On and onta, Heidegger notes, are participle endings lacking their main stems. On, for example, means ‘being’, as in the English present participle; but we can immediately see a parallel with the ambiguity disclosed in eon, which means both to be and a being: ‘In the twofold (Zwiefalt) of the participle meaning of on is concealed the difference between “being” (seiend) and “a being” (seiende). That which, thus portrayed, at first looks like grammatical hairsplitting is in truth the riddle of Being.’38

The seercraft phrase, ‘What is, will be, or was’, translated from Homer’s Iliad, suggests that the key to one tense is the key to all. We can here tentatively begin to understand how the e- in eon conveys that being is not just understood as what is existentially present. The root e- in eon imparts not only that a thing is ‘a being’ (das seiende), but also that it is ‘in Being’ (das Sein). This means that in addition to revealing the actual ‘whenness’ of a being, namely, its occurrence, the e- also divulges its ‘nature’, that is, it tells us that being is in Being, or a being is Being. We tentatively begin to see why we use a lower case ‘b’ for ‘being’, referring to the actual extant, and an upper case ‘B’ for ‘Being’, to refer to Being as Being. The ambiguity present in the Greek word eon, and even in the later on ‘could signify either “being” in the infinitive sense of “to be”, or “being” in the nominal sense of “a being”, most notably “a supreme being”’.39

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1.4 The ontological difference The fundamental contrast between ‘Being’ and ‘beings’ is what has come to be known as the ontological difference. Steiner writes: ‘Being itself is not an extant, it is not something that can simply be identified with or deduced from particular beings (“das Sein ist nicht seiend”). To inquire into Being is not to ask: What is this or that? It is to ask: What is “is” (“was ist das ‘ist’”)?’40 Heidegger himself writes: ‘A being is always characterised by a specific constitution of being. Such being is not itself a being.’41 And similarly elsewhere: Being cannot be understood as a being … ‘Being’ cannot be defined by attributing beings to it. Being cannot be derived from higher concepts by way of definition and cannot be represented by lower ones. But does it follow from this that ‘Being’ can no longer constitute a problem? By no means. We can conclude only that ‘Being’ is not something like a being.42

In another essay, Heidegger notes how the ontological difference tends to be confused: Because man cannot avoid having some notion of Being, it is explained merely as what is ‘most general’ and therefore as something that encompasses beings, or as a creation of the infinite being, or as the product of a finite subject. At the same time ‘Being’ has long stood for ‘beings’ and, inversely, the latter for the former, the two of them caught in a curious and still unravelled confusion.43

Regarding this confusion, the ontological difference seems to refer to a ‘twofold’ ambiguity in Being. Heidegger recognizes this ambiguity, but wants to also acknowledge that essentially speaking this is a twofold-oneness. While speaking of the specific nature of hermeneutics in the phenomenological thinking of Being and Time, Heidegger states: What mattered then, and still does, is to bring out the Being of beings – though no longer in the manner of metaphysics, but such that Being itself will shine out, Being itself – that is to say: the presence of present beings, the two-fold of the two in virtue of their simple oneness.44

Heidegger therefore recognizes the essential oneness of Being and beings, but still he does not either confuse the two or deny the two. They are not simply two, and they are not simply one – they are a twofold-oneness. Discussing this in his dialogue with Heidegger, Professor Tezuka says of the twofold that it ‘cannot be

The Forgetting of Being

23

explained in terms of presence, nor in terms of present beings, nor in terms of the relation between the two’.45 It has to therefore be spoken of in terms of the twofold-oneness itself, which allows presence (i.e. Being) and present beings to be discerned. This, as we will see, is in essence what the subject of our study constitutes.

2

The Attunement of Language to Being

2.1 Linguistic considerations The little word ‘is’, which speaks everywhere in our language, and tells of Being even where It does not appear expressly, contains the whole destiny of Being – from the ἔστιν γἀρ είναι of Parmenides to the ‘is’ of Hegel’s speculative sentence, and to the dissolution of the ‘is’ in the positing of the Will to Power with Nietzsche.1

Heidegger is aware throughout his work that the language of thinking (including his own) is recast into the coin of terminology. This being so, what is meant by the word ‘is’ for Parmenides, for Hegel, for Nietzsche and so forth changes with each philosopher. So when we ask the question ‘What is Being?’, what is meant by the word ‘is’ may differ with each questioner and so prescriptively condition the outcome of the search. As this chapter will show, the same is the case with the word ‘what’ when we ask What is Being? and likewise with the word ‘Being’ itself. Heidegger tells us that ‘Being’ is now nothing more than an empty word, and its meaning an evanescent vapour.2 He adds that the same is the case with many words: ‘Indeed, the essential words – are in the same situation, that language is used up and abused, that language is an indispensable but masterless, arbitrarily applicable means of communication, as indifferent as a means of public transportation, such as a streetcar, which everyone gets on and off.’3 The fault is not with language, but due to what Heidegger calls our misrelation and unrelation to language. He then adds with pivotal gravitas: ‘But the emptiness of the word “Being,” the complete withering of its naming force, is not just a particular case of the general abuse of language – instead, the destroyed relation to Being as such is the real ground for our whole misrelation to language.’4 As we will see, this last sentence could just as well be put inversely as: The destroyed relation to language is the real ground for our whole misrelation to Being as such. So close is the relation between Being and language that they are in effect the

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Language and Being

same concern, meaning that the destroyed relation to one effects the misrelation to the other. Thus Heidegger tells us: Because the fate of language is grounded in the particular relation of a people to Being, the question about Being will be most intimately intertwined with the question about language for us. It is more than a superficial accident that now, as we make a start in laying out the above mentioned fact of the vaporization of Being in all its scope, we find ourselves forced to proceed from linguistic considerations.5

This being so, Heidegger looks to the grammar and the etymology of the word ‘Being’ in order to try and grasp the remnant of a connection between the empty word and its evanescent meaning. Beginning with grammar Heidegger turns to the Greek language, which he sees along with the German as ‘the most powerful and the most spiritual of languages’.6 The meaning of Being for the Greeks was ousia or more fully parousia. Heidegger notes that this is usually translated as ‘substance’, but this is a mistake. The German equivalent is An-wesen, which means ‘coming-to-presence’. The Germans use An-wesen as a name for a homestead or self-contained farm, and the Greeks used ousia in this sense too. For the Greeks Being fundamentally means ‘presence’, in that something comes to presence and stands in itself and thus puts itself forth. However, as Steiner writes, ‘post-Socratic Greek, whether in Platonic idealism or Aristotelian substantiality, never returned to this pure and primal “ground of being,” to this illumination of and through the presentness of existing’.7 From here Heidegger turns to the Greek word phusis – the radical of our ‘physics’. This, says Heidegger, means ‘the emergent self-upraising, the selfunfolding that abides in itself ’.8 Ousia by standing in itself and coming forth as presence points to stable, enduring being, whereas phusis points to a more dynamic sense of being. Thus for the Greeks, Heidegger tells us, ‘Being’ says constancy in a twofold sense: 1. Standing-in-itself as arising and standing forth (phusis), 2. But, as such, ‘constantly’, that is, enduringly, abiding (ousia).9 Significantly Heidegger adds that neither ousia nor phusis can be replaced with the word ‘existence’, because this refers to stepping out of such constancy that has stood forth in itself. Thus existence for the Greeks means precisely ‘notto-be’. Heidegger continues: ‘The thoughtlessness and vapidity with which one uses the words “existence” and “to exist” as designations for Being offer fresh evidence of our alienation from Being and from an originally powerful and

The Attunement of Language to Being

27

definite interpretation of it.’10 This emphasizes a line from our Chapter 1, when we have quoted Heidegger as saying: ‘Perhaps “is” can be said only of Being in an appropriate way, so that no individual being ever properly “is”.’11 Heidegger thinks we should avoid the verb substantive ‘to be’ that designates existence, which he takes to be the emptiest of forms. But he also suggests that we avoid entangling ourselves in the abstraction of the infinitive ‘to be’. But the problem is that if we avoid the infinitive and turn to forms like I am’, ‘you are’, ‘he’, ‘she’, ‘it is’, ‘we are’ and so on, we end up with a plurality of differing verbs, and can immediately notice that ‘I am’ differs from ‘it is’. As a result we are no nearer to understanding what ‘to be’ means. But why is there this plurality in the meaning of Being, made up of ‘be’, ‘am’, ‘is’ and ‘was’? For the answer to this, Heidegger turns to etymology. Heidegger identifies three different etymological roots to ‘being’. These are, firstly, the Sanskrit as, which Heidegger translates as ‘life itself ’. This Sanskrit element means: to be, live, exist, be present; to take place, happen; to abide, dwell, stay.12 This is the root of the Greek es-ti, Latin es-t, German ist and the English is. The second root is the Sanskrit bhū, which means: to become, be, arise, come into being, exist, be found, live, stay, abide, happen, occur.13 Heidegger writes: To this belongs the Greek phuō, to emerge, to hold sway, to come to stand from out of itself and to remain standing. Until now, bhū has been interpreted according to the usual superficial conception of phusis and phuein as nature and as ‘growing’. According to the more originary interpretation, which stems from the confrontation with the inception of Greek philosophy, this ‘growing’ proves to be an emerging which in turn is determined by coming to presence and appearing. Recently the radical phu- has been connected with pha-, phainesthai (to show itself). Phusis would then be that which emerges into the light, phuein, to illuminate, to shine forth and therefore appear.14

From phuein derive the Latin fui, the English be, and German bin and bist.15 We will come to see in later chapters just how important to Heidegger the notions of ‘emerging into the light’ and ‘to shine forth and therefore appear’ are. The third etymological root of ‘being’, identified by Heidegger, is shown by inflecting the German verb sein: ‘Sanskrit vasami generates German wesen, an immensely polysemic word that Heidegger takes to mean “to dwell,” “to sojourn,” “to belong to and in.” Hence gewesen (“to have been”), war (“was”), and what will become, especially for the later Heidegger, the key term wesen (“that which is in its active being,” “that whose being is a manifest in-dwelling”).’16

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Language and Being

From these three roots, says Heidegger, stem the three meanings: living, emerging and abiding. Linguistics, he adds, establishes these three stems and that their initial meanings have died out leaving only the abstract meaning of ‘to be’. Being is now just the sound of a used-up word. Heidegger’s grammatical examination has shown that the definite modes of meaning are blurred and the word is a name for something indefinite. Etymologically we see that the word ‘Being’ refers to a blending of three stems, none of which are definitively evident in the meaning of the word anymore. All in all the blurring and blending, or mixture and effacement, says Heidegger, go hand in hand.17 The forgetting of Being then is entrenched in language. When asking the fundamental question of Being, the ‘Being’ we are enquiring after (as we have already noted) is no more than an empty word with an evanescent meaning. Also the ‘is’ in varying forms of the fundamental question of Being, such as What is (the truth of) Being? What is Being itself? What is Being as Being?, diminishes the possibilities of meaningful utterance owing to the metaphysical thinking that conditions the significance of the word. Furthermore there is a similar issue with the word ‘what’ that begins and even identifies the fundamental question of Being as a question. But we will see with the word ‘what’, as with the words ‘being’ and ‘is’, that an enquiry into its beginning might open us up to the possibility of a new beginning.

2.2 The whatness of what We have seen that Heidegger asked the fundamental question: What is Being? In order to do so, he must necessarily begin the question with the word ‘what’. But what is meant by the word ‘what’, even in this very question I am now asking? Why ask the question ‘What is Being?’ at all? What are we after? Heidegger writes: ‘Just this fact that being is gathered together in Being, that in the appearance of Being being appears, that astonished the Greeks and first astonished them and them alone.’18 But when we ask What is Being?, have we already unwittingly missed that which astonished the Greeks? Heidegger was well aware of this problem. He was aware that our asking what is Being? may already frame and anticipate a preconceived determinable answer, owing to that which is already implied in the meaning of the word what in the question. For example, he writes: ‘In the Who? or the What? we are already on the lookout for something like a person or an object.’19

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29

Traditionally, the word ‘what’ concerns quiddity, that is, it enquires into the inherent nature or essence of something. But the sense of what quiddity itself is changes over time. Heidegger argues that we might ask: ‘“What is that over there in the distance?” We receive the answer, “a tree.” … We can, however, ask further, “What is that which we call a tree’?”20 In so doing we approach the Greek ‘What is it?’ (ti estin). This is the form of questioning that Socrates, Plato and Aristotle developed. With these thinkers not only is delimitation sought in terms of the answer to ‘what is it?’, but also a different interpretation of what the ‘what’ means as the nature or essence of something is given by each subsequent philosopher (and all philosophers thereafter). Heidegger is conscious of these differences in asking ‘what is …?’, but by seeking an answer to his own question, ‘What is philosophy?’, he specifically endeavours to uncover what it is to ask what something is. He argues that for Heraclitus the word philosophia did not yet exist, rather Heraclitus coined the adjective philosophos. Heidegger wants to show that the philosophos of Heraclitus is not the same as what will later become philosophia, rather the person doing the former is not a philosophical person (aner philosophos), but he who loves the sophon (hos philei to sophon).21 For Heidegger, the distinctive feature of loving (philein) in the Heraclitean sense is a correspondence in accord with the sophon. This corresponding accordance points to ‘harmony’.22 For Heidegger the individual loves, that is to say, is in harmony with the sophon. Heidegger next explores the word sophon, and writes: ‘The sophon means, Hen Panta, “One (is) all.” “All” means here, all things that exist, the whole, the totality of being. Hen, one, means, the one, the unique, the all-uniting … all being is united in Being. The sophon says – all being is in Being. To put it more pointedly – being is Being.’23 However, over time the loving as a harmony with the sophon was altered to a different kind of loving. The reason for this, Heidegger argues, is that the Greeks ‘had to rescue and protect the astonishingness of this most astonishing thing against the attack of Sophist reasoning which always had ready for everything an answer which was comprehensible to everyone and which they put on the market’.24 This rescue of the most astonishing thing, namely, being in Being, was accomplished by those who now strove for the sophon, and thereby kept alive the yearning of others for the sophon.25 Consequently, the loving of the sophon as ‘harmony’ becomes a ‘yearning’ or ‘striving’ for the sophon. Now the sophon is especially sought, effecting a subtle yet colossal switch of attention from ‘all being is in Being’ to ‘the being in Being’. This is because the loving is no longer an original harmony with the sophon, but a particular striving towards

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it.26 Thus this new way of loving the sophon becomes philosophia. Heidegger explains: ‘This yearning search for the sophon, for the “One (is) all,” for the being in Being, now becomes the question, “What is being, in so far as it is?” Only now does thinking become “philosophy.” Heraclitus and Parmenides were not yet “philosophers”.’27

2.3 Co-respondence As a ‘thing especially sought’, being is now ardently pursued by way of questioning. Philosophy now seeks what being is, in so far as it is. With this move the nature of philosophy, argues Heidegger, was circumscribed. Philosophy, he adds, becomes ‘speculative knowledge’ (episteme theôrêtikê).28 This means it is a kind of competence that is capable of speculating, that is, ‘of being on the lookout for’.29 Here thinking comes to an end and ‘it replaces this loss by procuring a validity for itself as techné, as an instrument of education and therefore as a classroom matter and later a cultural concern. By and by philosophy becomes a technique for explaining from highest causes’.30 Even philosophy itself can be held in its own glance as an object of speculative knowledge. Thus with regard to Heidegger’s question What is philosophy?, Steiner writes: To ask in ‘philosophic’ terms – i.e. in Platonic, Aristotelian, or Kantian terms – ‘What is this thing – philosophy?’ is to guarantee a ‘philosophic’ answer. It is to remain trapped in the circle of the dominant Western tradition, and this circle, in contrast to what Heidegger takes to be inward-circling paths of thinking, is sterile. We must therefore attempt a different sort of discourse, another kind of asking. The crucial motion turns on the meaning of Ent-sprechen. An Ent-sprechen is not ‘an answer to’ … but a ‘response to’, a ‘correspondence with’, a dynamic reciprocity and matching such as occur when gears, both in quick motion, mesh. Thus, our question as to the nature of philosophy calls not for an answer in the sense of a textbook definition or formulation, be it Platonic, Cartesian, or Lockeian, but for an Ent-sprechung, a response, a vital echo, a ‘re-sponsion’ in the liturgical sense of participatory engagement. And this response or correspondence will answer to the being of Being.31

We can see here how Ent-sprechen is more akin to a harmony with ‘all being is in Being’ than a yearning for ‘the being in Being’. Importantly, the English phrase ‘to answer to’ captures what Heidegger is trying to convey

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31

because it contains a sense of both ‘response’ (Antwort) and ‘responsibility’ (Verantwortung). Rather than simply give an answer to, we are moreover, answerable to the question of Being, as the phrase ‘to answer to’ implies. We must become answerable to, that is respond to, the call or ap-peal of Being that astonishes us with the existential mystery that it is, and in this way we will in turn become more genuinely philosophers, or rather, thinkers. The astonishing fact that ‘things are’ is the common centre where philosophical answer corresponds, accords or attunes with philosophical question. Heidegger writes: Philosophia is the expressly accomplished correspondence which speaks in so far as it considers the appeal of the Being of being. The correspondence listens to the voice of the appeal. What appeals to us as the voice of Being evokes our correspondence. ‘Correspondence’ then means: being de-termined, être dispose by that which comes from the Being of being. Dis-posé here means literally setapart, cleared, and thereby placed in relationship with what is.32

For Heidegger, ‘questioning’ is not the interrogation of an inquisitor, but is based on a ‘correspondence’ with the question of Being, or the Beingquestion (Seinsfrage). Mindful of this difference between giving an answer to and being answerable to, Heidegger makes a distinction between the ‘questionable’ (fraglich) and the ‘worthy of being questioned’ (fragw ürdig). The questionable is based on positivistic investigation and gives terminal answers that leave the question settled. As Steiner remarks, we do not need to ask what the mileage to the moon or the formula for hydrochloric acid is. This is because we ‘know the answers, and finality of this knowledge has, according to Heidegger, demonstrated the in-essentiality or, at the last, smallness of the original question’.33 However, that which is ‘worthy of questioning’ is, on the contrary, inexhaustible: ‘There are no terminal answers, no last and formal decidabilities to the question of the meaning of human existence or of a Mozart sonata … . But if there can be no end to genuine questioning, the process is, nonetheless, not aimless.’34 For Heidegger, the most worthy of being questioned is Being, and the question of Being makes us travellers or wanderers who come home to the unanswerable. Throughout his career, Heidegger tried to think and say Being. This is a significant point – he tried to: ‘The imperative is, strictly, one of attempt. Heidegger knows this, and says it over and over again. “Auf einer Stern zugehen, nur dieses” (“to proceed toward a star, only this”). “Alles ist Weg” (“all is way”) or “under-wayness,” as in the word tao.’35

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2.4 A linguistic concern We have seen that according to Heidegger a more genuine way of answering the question of Being is to be answerable to it. We do this by being de-termined and so placed in a responsible relationship with what is. In this way we are in correspondence and so attuned to the Being of being. But the question must be asked: How so? Heidegger writes: ‘Being as such determines speaking in such a way that language is attuned (accorder) to the Being of being. Correspondence is necessary and is always attuned, and not just accidentally and occasionally. It is in an attunement. And only on the basis of the attunement (disposition) does the language of correspondence obtain its precision, its tuning.’36 This is why Heidegger was also quoted above as saying that we must listen and then answer to the voice of Being. As we will come to see, this voice that calls and appeals is more than a metaphor or metonym, for Heidegger is deliberately referring to language’s own saying or speaking. Furthermore, it is Heidegger’s way of showing that essentially the remembering of Being is a linguistic concern, just as the forgetting of Being is a linguistic problem. For Heidegger, this means that Being is no longer called and present to us in language, as it was to the early Greeks; in fact, on the contrary, language is now conventionally seen to distance us from Being. Yet it is, as we will explore, essentially through language that humankind has a privileged access to Being. Heidegger writes: ‘It is proper to think the essence of language from its correspondence to Being and indeed as this correspondence, that is, as the home of man’s essence.’37 Language constitutes our chief relation to existence, it is the way in which man dwells in and belongs to the truth of Being. But in addition to language providing our privileged access to Being is the argument that language depends on Being, which depends on language. In a passage pertinent to the rest of our study, Heidegger writes: Suppose that there were no indeterminate meaning of Being, and that we did not understand what this meaning signifies. Then what? Would there just be one noun and one verb less in our language? No. Then there would be no language at all. Beings as such would no longer open themselves up in words at all; they could no longer be addressed and discussed. For saying beings as such involves understanding beings as beings – that is, their Being – in advance. Presuming that we did not understand Being at all, presuming that the word ‘Being’ did not even have that evanescent meaning, then there would not be any single word at all. We ourselves could never be those who say.38

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33

By way of helpful elaboration, Steiner asserts: ‘If we had no comprehension of being, if the word were “only a word” – as Heidegger’s critics may argue – there could be no meaningful propositions whatsoever, no grammar, no predications. We would remain speechless.’39 But for Heidegger’s critics, the word Being as he means it is ‘only a word’, and thus a form of nominalism. This often refers to the understanding that universals, namely Platonic ideas, such as tree have no reality aside from their names.40 For when Heidegger suggests that there is a foundational Being preceding and underlying all essents or extants, he is likewise dismissed for giving reality to something that has no reality beyond its name. In the following quotation, Heidegger actually highlights the significance he has given to universals like tree, but indicates that Being has even more of a universal nature: The word ‘Being’ is a universal name, it is true, and seemingly one word among others. But this seeming is deceptive. The name and what it names are one of a kind. Therefore, we distort it fundamentally if we try to illustrate it by examples – precisely because every example in this case manifests not too much, as one might say, but always too little. Earlier we stressed that we must already know in advance what ‘tree’ means in order to be able to seek and find what is particular, the species of trees and individual trees as such. This is all the more decisively true of Being. The necessity for us to already understand the word ‘Being’ is the highest and is incomparable. So the ‘universality’ of ‘Being’ in regard to all beings does not imply that we should turn away from this universality as fast as possible and turn to the particular; instead, it implies the opposite, that we should remain there, and raise the uniqueness of this name and its naming to the level of knowledge.41

Heidegger wants to stress that from a universal perspective, Being cannot be a genus as Tree can. Whereas a particular tree like an oak can account for tree in general, this is not the case for an individual being with respect to Being. This being and that being are not species of the genus Being. But what, and we cannot help but start our questioning again, keeping in mind the nature of the word ‘what’, is this Beingness of Being that Heidegger seeks? In his ‘Letter on Humanism’ Heidegger answers, and in so doing points once more to its significant unanswerability: It is It itself. The thinking that is to come must learn to experience that and to say it. ‘Being’ – that is not God and not a cosmic ground. Being is farther than all beings and is yet nearer to man than every being, be it rock, a beast, a work of art, a machine, be it an angel or God. Being is the nearest. Yet the near remains

34

Language and Being farthest from man. Man at first clings always and only to beings. But when thinking represents beings as beings it no doubt relates itself to Being. In truth, however, it always thinks only of beings as such; precisely not, and never, Being as such. The ‘question of Being’ always remains a question about beings. It is still not at all what its elusive name indicates: the question in the direction of Being.42

However, despite this mysterious near-farness, we still somehow know Being. In another work, Heidegger refers to this as what is ‘originarily familiar’, which has before all else been entrusted to our nature, but becomes known only at the last. This, he confirms, is what his thinking pursues.43 In Being and Time, he writes: ‘Being’ is the self-evident concept. ‘Being’ is used in all knowing and predicating, in every relation to beings and in every relation to oneself, and the expression is understandable ‘without further ado.’ Everybody understands, ‘The sky is blue’, ‘I am happy’, and similar statements. But this average comprehensibility only demonstrates the incomprehensibility. It shows that an enigma lies a priori in every relation and being toward being as beings. The fact that we live already in an understanding of Being and that the meaning of Being is at the same time shrouded in darkness proves the fundamental necessity of recovering the question of the meaning of ‘Being’.44

Another important point is that despite sounding at times like an apophatic mystic, Heidegger does not make of Being something transcendent. Being for Heidegger is not located in some abstract beyond like a Platonic idea. For Heidegger, Being is characterized (so to speak) by the very thereness of phenomena, which astonishes and fills him with wonder: ‘He stands soul – and spirit – deep in immanence, in that which is, and in the utter strangeness and wonder of his own “isness” within it.’45 It is only in the phenomenally radiant thereness of all inanimate and animate things that Being, though in itself always absent, is ever revealed as present. Being gives itself in beings, but does not ‘reveal itself outside the being in which it lodges and which it illumines.’46 We might therefore be tempted to abstract and make ‘transcendently absent’, Being as Being, but Heidegger counters this with his emphasis on the concretely immanent presence of Being in all beings as existential phenomena. Thus Being is not so simply in or of itself. It is, moreover, nothing. But this negation is not an absolute denial of Being, so as to say that Being is not at all, rather, it is a relative rejection of Being in terms of saying that it is no particular thing, or the general nature of all things. It is no-thing, but for this, as we shall explore in Chapter 9, it is concealed or hidden as the non-presently-present.

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35

For Heidegger ‘Being’ is not only a word, but the reality of realities behind the saying of everything we say. We speak and are not speechless, precisely because man speaks being. It is in this way, as speakers, that all essents or extants are disclosed to us, and furthermore that we are disclosed to ourselves. For Heidegger, to be human is essentially to speak being. There is an indissoluble connection between being and speech. Heidegger thus says: ‘Simultaneously with man’s departure into being, he finds himself in the word, in language.’47 This is no nominalism. It is, as we will come to see, the ultimate horizon of phenomenology as the science of appearing. However, our conceptualized speaking has now forgotten its essential relation to Being, and Being has been forgotten in the process just as language has been devalued. William J. Richardson writes: ‘If the use of language for modern man has become banal, the reason is not to seek on moral or aesthetic grounds but in the fact that the genuine nature of man and his essential relationship to Being remain in oblivion.’48

3

Homelessness and the House of Being

3.1 Language as sign system In his essay, ‘Letter on Humanism’, Heidegger writes: ‘Language is the house of Being. In its home man dwells.’1 This is a key notion for Heidegger and we will explore it in detail in subsequent chapters. However, what concerns us at this point is that later in the same essay he remarks dramatically: ‘Homelessness … consists in the abandonment of Being by beings. Homelessness is the symptom of oblivion of Being.’2 And again: ‘Homelessness is coming to be the destiny of the world.’3 In one sense then Heidegger is telling us that ‘language’ is the house in which man ontologically dwells. But then he tells us we are effectively homeless. How has man become unhoused? Heidegger speaks of this homelessness in the form of metaphysics as the philosophical history of Being. But related to this we have previously indicated that our reduced awareness of and concern for Being are primarily established within and through language, which we are now calling the house of Being because it is where humans primarily dwell. The gist here is that by not being at home in the house of Being, namely language, we have consequently abandoned Being to oblivion. Heidegger asserts: ‘Language is at once the house of Being and the home of human beings. Only because language is the home of the essence of man can historical mankind and human beings not be at home in their language, so that for them language becomes a mere container for their sundry preoccupations.’4 It would seem that for Heidegger we are no longer in the house of Being precisely because we no longer know what language is. Consequently we have forgotten Being because it is language that fundamentally attunes us to Being, and so it is our relation to language that effects not only our relation to Being, but our ability to dwell in Being and thus feel at home in the world. Heidegger is arguing that we have all but lost that ability to dwell in the house of Being, and have subsequently become homeless. But how has this come to be? A clue lies in

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Heidegger saying above that language has become a mere container for our sundry preoccupations. The issue here is that the history of what Heidegger calls metaphysics assumes language to be merely a tool or instrument to be used by humans in order to express thoughts about things for the sake of communication. Hence Heidegger was quoted at the beginning of Chapter 2 as saying that language is now akin to a streetcar in terms of being a vehicle. Seen as a transport system, language necessarily becomes a system of signs because signs as things standing in conventional syntactic-semantic relationships ‘can be deployed by thinking subjects to put their subjectivity on public display, and thereby to dispose of those entities with which they are surrounded, to manipulate and exploit them’.5 In the process words become nothing more than vessels of meaning, but as we will come to see, meaning that does not even belong to the words. This is because facts and things are understood to exist apart from language, and words therefore merely fit the facts.6 We will also explore how as propositional calculus words exist for no other reason than to store and transport ‘information’ or ‘cognitive data’. This amounts to ‘logistics’, with all it entails for information flow: management, production, packaging, inventory, transportation, warehousing. In sum then a word is understood to be nothing more than a representational device, or what Thomas Kelly refers to as ‘a mere handle on an already existing thing’.7 That already existing thing will be mental or physical, conceptual or perceptual, subjective or objective. Language as sign system does nothing more in this respect than stand for such things. The conventional view of language then sees words as symbols or signs that typically stand for pre-existing thoughts or ideas located in the mind. It is through these thoughts as concepts that we understand the world, and words are merely used to store and transport those thoughts as a means of communication. Seen in this light words are ciphers (empty and with no value of their own) employed to contain and carry the concepts. Supporting this long and widely held interpretation, an early twentieth-century edition of The New Standard Encyclopaedia, for example, says under the heading ‘Language’: ‘Any expression of thought, specifically the verbal utterance developed by mankind from inarticulate gesture into articulate speech for recording and communicating ideas.’8 This is not an isolated definition, but quite a typical one. The more recent Oxford Companion to the English Language states that the link between language and thought is a contentious issue, yet continues to say: ‘Few linguists accept the claim that language determines thought.’9 This is another way of saying that most linguists accept the claim that thought determines language.

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3.2 Two theories of language Heidegger argues that the notion of language as something that merely represents or designates has in many variant forms remained basic and predominant through all the centuries of Western-European thinking. But it reaches its peak, he argues, in Wilhelm von Humboldt’s (1767–1835) reflections on language. Humboldt’s treatise, ‘On the Diversity of the Structure of Human Language and its Influence on the Intellectual Development of Mankind’ has, he says, ‘determined the course of all subsequent philology and philosophy of language’.10 In one passage Humboldt says of language that ‘it is after all the continual intellectual effort to make the articulated sound capable of expressing thought’.11 In another he writes of language: ‘It must be abstracted from all that it effects as a designation of comprehended ideas.’12 Here then Humboldt articulates the conventional view that language is an ‘intellectual effort’, ‘expresses thought’ and ‘designates ideas’. Humboldt also states, If in the soul the feeling truly arises that language is not merely a medium of exchange for mutual understanding, but a true world which the intellect must set between itself and objects by the inner labour of its power, then the soul is on the true way toward discovering constantly more in language, and putting constantly more into it.13

For Humboldt, following the tenets of modern idealism, the soul here is conceived of as ‘subject’, and is accordingly, says Heidegger, represented within the subject-object model. Language is deemed to be a ‘world’ developed by human subjectivity as one means among many with which to express itself. Language is thus ‘enframed’ within subjectivity as a mode of representation. In his paper, ‘Heidegger on Language’, Charles Taylor argues that since the late eighteenth century there have in fact been two views on language. The first, mainline instrumental view of language depends upon an ‘enframing’ theory that pictures language within the framework of humanity’s way of living, behaving, acting, thinking, which is each understood in itself without reference to language: ‘Language can be seen as arising within this framework, and fulfilling some function within it, but the framework itself precedes, or at least can be characterized independently of language.’14 Of the other view, which he argues influences Heidegger’s own thinking on language, he writes: ‘By contrast, a “constitutive” theory gives us a picture of language as making possible new purposes, new levels of behaviour, new meanings, and hence as not explicable within a framework picture of human life conceived without language.’15 Taylor

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gives the following paragraph by Steven Pinker as a contemporary example of the ‘enframing’ view: Language does not call for sequestering the study of humans from the domain of biology, for a magnificent ability unique to a particular living species is far from unique in the animal kingdom. Some kinds of bats home in on flying insects using Doppler sonar. Some kinds of migratory birds navigate thousands of miles by calibrating the positions of the constellations against the time of day and year. In nature’s talent show we are simply a species of primate with our own act, a knack for communicating information about who did what to whom by modulating the sounds we make when we exhale.16

Here then Pinker has reduced language to a less-than-unique act among acts as found in the animal kingdom. Language is to be understood as one of many biological phenomena, hence, The Language Instinct (1994) being the title of Pinker’s book. More particularly, language for Pinker communicates information by modulating sounds. The classical and most influential form of the enframing theory, says Taylor, was developed by Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), John Locke (1632–1704), and Etienne Condillac (1715–80). Understood as the Hobbes-Locke-Condillac (HLC) form of theory, it took language to be within the bounds of the representational epistemology established by Descartes. There are ‘ideas’ in the mind that supposedly represent reality, and when the representation matches the reality the resulting synthesis is knowledge. We can immediately discern how the HLC model is similar to that of Wilhelm von Humboldt’s thinking who also follows the subject-object model of Descartes. Following the HLC model words get their significance by being tied to the things they represent, through the ideas that represent them. In this way language is seen to have a representational, epistemic function, rather than the constitutive, ontological one that Heidegger proposes. Turning to the ‘constitutive’ view of language, Taylor argues that it finds its most energetic early expression in Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803). Taylor shows how Herder questions, in particular, Condillac. For example, Herder refers to a hypothetical fable of Condillac’s that is designed to explain how language might have arisen between two children in a desert. Condillac argues that language is formed as the passage from emitting animal cries to saying words with meaning. He adds that the association between sign and a mental content is already there in the animal cry, and he calls this the ‘natural sign’. There follows from this what Condillac calls the ‘instituted sign’, whereby

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the children take language as a form with which to focus on and manipulate the associated idea. Taylor writes: This is the classic case of an enframing theory. Language is understood in terms of certain elements: ideas, signs, and their association, which precede its arising. … We can surmise that it is precisely this continuity which gives the theory its seeming clarity and explanatory power: language is robbed of its mysterious character, is related to elements that seem unproblematic.17

The problem with this change of direction in Herder’s eyes is that Condillac overlooks that language makes a different kind of consciousness possible. Herder calls this consciousness ‘reflective’ (besonnen) or ‘reflection’ (Besonnenheit). The move of Condillac’s from the ‘natural sign’ (animal cry) to the ‘instituted sign’ (meaningful words) does not address for Herder what this new consciousness consists in and how it arises, because language for Condillac simply combines with associated and pre-existing contents of consciousness. But what does Herder mean by ‘reflection’ or the new form of consciousness that language occasions? If we were without language we could respond to things around us. Language, however, allows us to take hold of something as it is. It seems that for Herder a prelinguistic animal can learn how to react to an object in a way fitting to its aims and needs. Whereas the creature with language can name and so recognize the object as of a specific type that bears particular properties. Taylor writes: ‘An animal, in other terms, can learn to give the right response to an object – fleeing a predator, say, or going after food – where “rightness” means “appropriate to its (non-linguistic) purposes.” But language use involves another kind of rightness. Using the right word involves identifying an object as having the properties which justify using that word.’18 For Herder language signifies a different form of consciousness of the world. In prelinguistic consciousness we react to the world rather like a cat reacts to putting its paw in a goldfish bowl, or a child putting its finger in a flame. But with the linguistic consciousness that constitutes Herder’s sense of ‘reflection’ (or the ‘semantic dimension’ as Taylor calls it), we are able to grasp and identify something as something using the right word. According to the ‘enframing’ theory language emerged when people developed the connection secured by the natural sign (e.g. the cry and the cause of this) in a more conscious way to produce the instituted sign. The instituted sign constitutes a component of language as we now know it. Herder’s issue is that the move from pre-language to language must involve more than simply commanding a pre-existing process. It overlooks the involvement of an entirely

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new set of concerns – chiefly that the individual on account of language now has a different kind of consciousness.19 We have said above that for Humboldt language is deemed to be a ‘world’ developed by human subjectivity, as one means among many with which to express itself. And similarly, for Hobbes, Locke, and Condillac language is understood to fulfil a function within a human framework that is independent of language. For all of these thinkers in varying degrees of sophistication, language is understood to merely express a pre-existing content. In short, the idea always precedes its naming. But how, we might ask, do such thinkers come to these conclusions that thereafter determine the course of philology and philosophy of language? Taylor again writes: ‘The major proponents of the HLC were all rationalists in some sense; one of their central goals was to establish reason on a sound basis, and their scrutiny of language had largely this end in view.’20 Heidegger, however, asserts that it had already been part of the fabric of Western-European thinking for centuries. One important strain of this, I believe, if not the most important, stems from the historical interpretation of the logos principle. Although logos can mean many things, it tends to be translated as ‘Word’. However ‘Word’ came to typically mean ‘reason’ and not language – despite the changes to what reason is thought to mean.

3.3 The conventional view of language The logos principle has a rich history of interpretation. For example, it is seen to begin with Heraclitus (c. 500 BC) who understood it to be an underlying rationality and principle of order in the world, which is otherwise in a constant state of flux. It is a non-human intelligence analogous to the reason in man that gathers the chaotic elements of the universe and organizes them into a coherent whole. Later, the Stoics (c. 300 BC) understood the logos principle in ways akin to Heraclitus. For the Stoics the world is an intelligent, living being brought to life and reason through the seminal germ or logos spermatikos acting in otherwise dead matter. In the work of Philo Judaeus (c. 30–50 BC) the logos is an intermediary standing between the Divine Creator and the human creature, responsible for creating the world modelled on the intelligible ideas found eternally in the Mind of God.21 Perhaps the bestknown formulation of the logos principle is that of John the Apostle, who interprets the logos as the creative and redemptive Word of God made flesh in Jesus and dwelling among men.

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We will see that when Heidegger explores the logos, which is crucial for the development of his thinking on language, he returns to and rethinks the logos as understood by Heraclitus. In almost all interpretations of the logos principle the understanding of logos as intellect or intelligence, reason or rationality, is dominant. Where logos is also understood as language, it is only so as a less important relation to intellect or reason. For example, aside from their understanding of the logos spermatikos, the Stoics distinguished between what they saw as two forms of logos (plural logoi), namely, the logos endiathetos and the logos prophorikos. The former is immanent in man as the Latin ratio (hence rationality), while the latter (upon his lips) is the expression of ratio, known as oratio. The inner logos endiathetos as ratio refers to pure unlettered reason. The Greek endiathetos means: residing in the mind, conception, thought and immanence. The outer logos prophorikos as oratio on the other hand refers to speech upon the lips. The word prophorikos means: pronunciation or utterance. It also refers to procession, as in going forth. Philo Judaeus understood the relation between the inner and outer word in ways similar to the Stoic notions of logos endiathetos and logos prophorikos. For him this was depicted figuratively in the relation between Moses and his brother Aaron. Philo refers to the following lines in the Old Testament: ‘And Moses said unto the LORD, O my Lord, I am not eloquent, neither heretofore, nor since thou hast spoken unto thy servant: but I am slow of speech, and of a slow tongue.’22 Also: ‘And Moses spake before the LORD, saying, behold, the children of Israel have not hearkened unto me; how then shall Pharaoh hear me, who am of uncircumcised lips?’23 Philo explains that the phrase ‘of uncircumcised lips’ refers to Moses being altogether void of words.24 As a result, Moses needs someone to speak on his behalf. This falls to his brother Aaron, who becomes mouthpiece, interpreter and prophet of Moses. In this way, Aaron as logos prophorikos or speech speaks on behalf of Moses as logos endiathetos or thought. In short, Aaron utters the unspoken thought of Moses. Stoic thought emerged around 300 BC, which gives us a sense of just how long the notion that speech merely expresses thought has existed.25 Philo writes the following view of language between 30 BC and AD 50: For these attributes belong to speech, which is the brother of the intellect; for the intellect is the fountain of words, and speech is its mouth-piece, because all the conceptions which are entertained in the mind are poured forth by means of speech, like streams of water which flow out of the earth, and come into sight. And speech is an interpreter of the things which the mind had decided upon its

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Although conceptions come into view and appear on account of speech, the stress is very much with thought or reason in that the conceptions are already entertained in the unlettered mind that has hitherto decided the things in its tribunal. It is difficult to determine what exactly it is that language does in this relationship. The typical interpretation is that it is simply a sign or symbol standing for and representing that which it serves to convey. In Augustine a little later (AD 354–430), there is no such ambiguity for he is quite clear on the role language plays: With thyself, O man, a work in thy heart is a different thing from sound; but the word that is with thee, in order to pass to me, requires sound for a vehicle as it were. It takes to itself sounds, mounts it as a vehicle, runs through the air, comes to me and yet does not leave thee. But the sound, in order to come to me, left thee and yet did not stay with me. Now has the word that was in thy heart also passed away with the passing sound? Thou didst speak thy thought; and, that the thought which was hid with thee might come to me, thou didst sound syllables; the sound of the syllables conveyed thy thought to my ear; through my ear thy thought descended into my heart, the intermediate sound flew away; but that word which took to itself sound was with thee before thou didst sound it, and is with me, because thou didst sound it, without quitting thee. Consider this, thou nice weigher of sounds, whoever thou be. Thou despisest the Word of God, thou who comprehendest not the word of man.27

For Augustine, the outer word is no more than a vehicle employed to convey the inner word. This view of Augustine coincides with the dominant or conventional view of language, and serves to establish that view in future theological and philosophical contexts. For example, Meister Eckhart (c. AD 1260–1328), who was influenced considerably by Augustine says: ‘When the word is first conceived in my intellect, it is so pure and subtle that it is a true word, before taking shape in my thought. In the third place, it is spoken out aloud by my mouth, and then it is nothing but a manifestation of the interior word.’28 Language throughout Western history has tended to be understood as that which merely expresses and thereby represents ‘thought’ that precedes and determines it. But the question that must be put to this view is how does thought identify and appropriate that which is as yet unnamed? And furthermore how is the thought itself known, if not linguistically? The word is said to symbolize the already existing thought, but how exactly does the thought stand in the

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mind that is understood to determine language? For as Benedetto Croce asserts: ‘A thought is not for us thought unless it is formulated into words.’29 In his work Language and Myth, Ernst Cassirer contributes to the debate concerning the ‘enframing’ and ‘constitutive’ theories of language discussed above. Inverting the conventional ‘enframing’ structure and echoing Herder, he writes: The concepts of theoretical knowledge constitute merely an upper stratum of logic which is founded upon a lower stratum, that of the logic of language. Before the intellectual work of conceiving and understanding of phenomena can set in, the work of naming must have preceded it, and have reached a certain point of elaboration. For it is this process which transforms the world of sense impression, which animals also possess, into a mental world, a world of ideas and meanings. All theoretical cognition takes its departure from a world already preformed by language.30

According to the ‘enframing’ theory of language, aside from being understood conventionally as the symbols or signs of a subjective realm of thoughts, words are also seen to stand for pre-existing objects, things, items, etc., located in the world. The following quotation takes this view of language, and in so doing is able to argue that all words therefore fail to really capture what it is they say: ‘This is a tree’, obviously this and tree are not actually the same thing. Tree is a word, a noise. It is not this experienced reality to which I am pointing. To be accurate, I should have said, ‘This (pointing to the tree) is symbolised by the noise tree.’ If then, the real tree is not the word or the idea tree, what is it? If I say that it is an impression on my senses, a vegetable structure, or a complex of electrons, I am merely putting new sets of words and symbols in place of the original noise, tree. I have not said what it is at all.31

We should add that although language is seen to represent both the subjective and the objective, it more typically represents the latter through the former. This is because it is more usually held that man is using language as a tool or an instrument with which to speak his mind about the world. Language then is understood to express internal ideas or external stimuli. Either way what is said already exists in the world or in the mind before it is said. All language is understood to do is subsequently utter the meaning through signs or symbols that are simply conventional. Hence the following view from Simeon Potter: ‘The word, in fact, is the symbol and it has no direct or immediate relation with the referend except through the image in the mind of the speaker.’32 Thus the sign or symbol sun has no connection to the celestial luminary, just as we saw for Watts

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that the noise tree has no connection with the experienced reality. According to this view then: Speech is a sensory motoric phenomenon which in itself contributes nothing to the constitution of meaning. A word taken in itself is empty; it is effective either as a physical stimulus or as a perceptible sign that is added to the meaning from the outside without being essentially related to it. Language is merely a means of communication in and through which man can convey meaning; but it can never be the source of meaning and of light.33

When understood to merely stand for pre-existing and pre-meaningful thoughts or things, language has lost its power to name and as such to first call what subsequently become thoughts and things into existence. We no longer speak the ‘thought’ or ‘thing’ itself into existence, but employ a word-sign that stands for a concept or percept, a subject or object, already existing in their own right. This means that while language merely reflects reality as a sign system, it always falls short and so can never fully measure up and adequately portray the reality it merely imitates. Seen in this light a word is not that which first presents to us what thereafter becomes a conceptual thought or a perceptual thing but is, as we have already noted, a mere handle on that which already exists. Accordingly the true nature of either mind or reality is understood to be forever out of reach to language, which as the mediating word obscures or conceals in that it only serves to designate or represent. As a rational or empirical instrument language is seen to merely symbolize subjective or objective data. Cassirer explains: But what of this it can retain is not the life and individual fullness of existence, but only a dead abbreviation of it. All that ‘denotation’ to which the spoken word lays claim is really nothing more than mere suggestion; a ‘suggestion’ which, in face of the concrete variegation and totality of actual experience, must always appear a poor and empty shell.34

This is why for Heidegger we have become homeless. We continue to use language indifferently as a symbolic tool and vehicle of expression, but rather than connecting us to the world it is understood to obscure or conceal that relation and thus distance us from it. And this is the chief reason why for Heidegger we have forgotten Being, because we no longer dwell in language that is the house of Being.

4

The Use and Abuse of Language

4.1 Language as logical assertion Heidegger has told us that language is used up and abused, it is indispensable yet masterless, and has become an arbitrarily applicable means of communication, employed as indifferently as public transportation that we simply get on and off.1 What can Heidegger possibly mean when he says language is used up and abused? He means that language is worn out. But how can we wear out language? Is this not as daft as saying that shapes or numbers are worn out and used up? The gist of what he means is, I believe, in what follows when he says that it is indispensable but masterless, and an arbitrarily applicable means of communication as indifferent as a means of public transportation. First then with regard to language being indispensable, it simply means that we cannot do without language. It is utterly necessary. But this in itself is a problem, for language’s necessity means that we take it for granted. Walter Biemel captures this issue when he writes: ‘Language has the special characteristic that we live in it, are familiar with it, and deal with it without catching sight of it. We continuously heed what becomes accessible to us through language and thereby overlook language itself.’2 Similarly Richardson writes: ‘Meanings are still there in the language, but we miss them, and miss them more and more as we become inured to our words.’3 However, language, says Heidegger, is also masterless. The word used here is herrenloses, which might also be translated as ‘ownerless’. To say that language is masterless or ownerless does not mean that there is no one controlling or possessing it. On the contrary, that humans are of the view that language is their own to command is one of the reasons why it is abused. We have already heard Heidegger refer to language as the ‘house of Being’. This house is without a master, an owner, which in other words means, an occupier, a dweller. We no longer live and therefore connect to Being in language. It is used arbitrarily, capriciously, in the same way that we heedlessly use a vehicle – for any vehicle will do so long as it is a means to our ends. Essentially then language

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is used up and abused because it has become a usual utensil utilized by users and in the process usurped. The overriding issue here is that words have been reduced to nothing more than vessels of meaning – but meaning, as previously indicated, does not even belong to them. Words are still words in themselves, but they are no longer understood to do what they really do and so fail to genuinely speak. Heidegger writes: ‘There is no such thing as an empty word – only one that is worn out, yet remains full.’4 It would seem that the problem is not really with the words at all. The pervading reason for this apparent abuse is that words are no longer understood to ‘present’ Being itself, but are merely understood to ‘represent’ things that already are in their own right.5 It is this notion of words merely ‘representing’ that chiefly constitutes the abuse of language that Heidegger refers to. As argued previously, that which words merely represent comes in two forms, namely, those things conceived by our thoughts and those things perceived by our senses. This is in many respects due to what Heidegger in his earlier work calls ‘ontotheology’. As discussed in Chapter 1, for Heidegger philosophy is understood to have developed into two traditions stemming from the interpretations of Plato and Aristotle. From Plato there branched the idealist-metaphysical school, and from Aristotle the scientific-technological. According to Heidegger, both traditions moved away from and thus failed to contemplate the question that concerns the true nature of Being, namely, what is the Beingness of Being. Richard Kearney writes: ‘Ontotheology tends towards a polarised dualism of subject and object, expressing itself either as idealism (being as a worldless subject) or realism (being as a subjectless world). And in the process metaphysics becomes oblivious to our primordial being-inthe-world and degenerates into a series of scholastic systems providing us with abstract answers divorced from the originating concrete questions.’6 Whether the world is understood in varying ways as worldless subject or subjectless world, language itself has been reduced to a mode of formal or abstract expression of these subjective or objective realms. Language so understood tends to be used as a method of assertion. To help explain this, Heidegger provides the assertion, ‘the hammer is too heavy’.7 Assertion, says Heidegger, can be understood to have the following three significations: First it designates, pointing to this actual entity here, namely, the hammer that is too heavy. Drawing on phenomenological intentionality, Heidegger notes that designation does not refer to a psychical meaning that represents the hammer, but to the hammer itself even if it is not there. Second it predicates, which serves to give the subject a definite character. Here the subject is determined

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by the predicate. What is stated is still the subject, that is the hammer itself, but what does the stating or determining of the hammer is its predicated definite character of being too heavy. This second signification of assertion serves to narrow the content compared to the first signification. It does this by restricting (Einschränkung) our view so that the hammer already manifest in the first signification is now explicitly manifest in its definite character of being too heavy. This serves as a kind of reduction or dimming down that posits the subject in order to let it be seen in its own determinable definite character.8 Third, assertion communicates by exchanging the designated or predicated information, ‘letting someone see with us what has been pointed out in its definite character.’9 Interpreting this process, Kearney writes: Language thus became a matter of propositional logic concerned with the representation and classification of the world. Words were used impersonally to define or map reality as a collection of objects ‘present-at-hand’ (vorhanden). And in the process language was tailored to the requirements of a one-dimensional objectivisation. Henceforth it was only recognised in terms of its ‘objectively valid character’ – in the sense of words being deployed as a mere propositional calculus valid for regulating and standardising the relationship between word and thing.10

The term ‘present-at-hand’ (vorhanden) refers to those things that become objectified, that is: ‘It characterizes the matter of theoretic speculation, of scientific study. Thus “Nature” is vorhanden to the physicist and rocks are vorhanden to the geologist.’11 The problem here is that words are merely used to talk about objects theoretically or conceptually present-at-hand, and this is to the extent that words themselves are likewise seen to be objects present-at-hand. Heidegger therefore says of words that we can come across them like things.12 Kearney says of this: ‘In assertion, therefore, words are frequently treated as little more than lifeless entities for the abstraction and computation of reality.’13 Similarly Richardson argues: Metaphysics tries to make its words exactly map being, by specifying technical senses for them all; its words become concepts. It thereby makes the word itself arbitrary, with all meaning hanging on the definition, which is crafted quite precisely to suit its idea of being. It breaks the word’s link with all its prior history of senses; it wants meaning to come to the word solely through the definition. The word is to be (as it were) transparent to the definition, and the latter gives its meaning full presence: the word’s meaning is locked up in the formula, and is lastingly immediately available in it.14

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Heidegger distinguishes between the resulting theoretical judgement based on representative assertion and what he deems to be the more primordial interpretation of a ‘circumspective concern’ (Umsicht) – that is, the informal know-how of common sense. He explains: That which logic makes thematic with the categorical statement, for example, ‘the hammer is heavy’, it has always already understood ‘logically’ before any analysis. As the ‘meaning’ of the sentence, it has already presupposed without noticing it the following: this thing, the hammer, has the property of heaviness. ‘Initially’ there are no such statements in heedful circumspection. But it does have its specific ways of interpretation which can read as follows, as compared with the ‘theoretical judgment’ just mentioned, and may take some such form as ‘the hammer is too heavy’ or, even better, ‘too heavy, the other hammer!’ The primordial act of interpretation lies not in a theoretical sentence, but in circumspectly and heedfully putting away or changing the inappropriate tool ‘without wasting words’. From the fact that words are absent, we may not conclude that the interpretation is absent. On the other hand, the circumspectly spoken interpretation is not already necessarily a statement in the sense defined.15

With the term ‘circumspection’ (Umsicht) Heidegger is referring to: ‘use’, ‘performance’, ‘manual action’, by which we actually know things and which possess their own kind of sight. This, in contrast to the theoretically speculative present-at-hand (vorhanden), is the ready-to-hand (zuhanden): ‘Any artist, any craftsman, any sportsman wielding the instruments of his passion will know exactly what Heidegger means and will know how often the trained hand “sees” quicker and more deliberately than eye and brain.’16 A clear example is driving a car. At first you have to think about alternating the clutch and throttle while changing gear. You might listen to an instructor and read manuals. But when you are a full-fledged driver there is no more thinking about it, and prior to this you perhaps sooner learn to drive just by actually driving: ‘Theoretical vision, on the other hand, looks at or upon things noncircumspectively: “It constructs a canon for itself in the form of method.” This is the way of the physicist “looking” at atomic particles. Here methodological abstraction replaces the immediate authority of “readinessto-hand” .’17 Capturing Heidegger’s existential concern, my father told me the story of how he once went for a job as an excavator operator. The man doing the interview asked him if he could explain how to do a certain difficult manoeuvre. My father simply said, ‘no, but I can show you.’ He went out to an

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excavator, did the difficult manoeuvre and got the job. Inwood reflecting on the quotation above from Heidegger interprets it thus: Assertions emerge from talk. Instead of saying ‘Too heavy – the other one!’, I say ‘The hammer is too heavy’, and eventually ‘The hammer is heavy’. Talk becomes increasingly detached from concrete speech situations in the workplace. A hammer is seen no longer as ready-to-hand, as a tool to be used or rejected, and in its place alongside other tools, but as present-at-hand, as a bearer of properties severed from its involvements with other tools. We end up taking such a sentence as ‘Snow is white’, which occurs more commonly in logic textbooks than in down-to-earth talk, as a paradigm of significant discourse. Such assertions are seen as the locus of truth.18

Heidegger tells us that an entity, for example, the hammer, is closely held in our fore-having as equipment ready-to-hand. But once it becomes the object of an assertion, something happens to the fore-having. This is to say that a ready-to-hand with which turns into a present-at-hand about which the assertion is made. A distancing occurs here in that the ready-to-hand fore-having becomes a present-at-hand fore-seeing that covers over the ready-to-hand. In short our: ‘Fore-sight aims at something objectively present in what is at hand.’19 Heidegger continues: Within this discovering of objective presence which covers over handiness, what is encountered as objectively present is determined in its being objectively present in such and such a way. Now the access is first available for something like qualities. That as which the statement determines what is objectively present is drawn from what is objectively present as such. The as-structure of interpretation has undergone a modification. The ‘as’ no longer reaches out into a totality of relevance in its function of appropriating what is understood. It is cut off with regard to its possibilities of the articulation of referential relations of significance which constitute the character of the surrounding world. The ‘as’ is forced back to the uniform level of what is merely objectively present. It dwindles to the structure of just letting what is objectively present be seen by way of determination. This levelling down of the primordial ‘as’ of circumspect interpretation to the as of the determination of objective presence is the specialty of the statement.20

Kearney refers to this uniform plane as the ‘abstract quarantine of the timeless present’,21 which encapsulates the universal propositions that logical assertions tend to hanker after. But, however much we desire such a presuppositionless knowledge free from any form of cultural, existential or historical prejudice, Heidegger

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appears to anticipate what Gadamer later argues, that it is not possible and that the desire for such knowledge is itself a prejudice based on a presupposition.22 René Descartes in his Discourse on Method (1637) argued that by following our reason we would all end up with the same answers from a rationalist critique, leading to an abstract rational consensus of knowledge. Descartes suggests that there is a prelinguistic rational formula, namely, mathematics. But Heidegger, again anticipating or rather influencing Gadamer, wishes to question the validity of this rational consensus. This is because we are not simply detached from our being-in-the-world and living in an abstract quarantine. Rather we live and act in existential situations accompanied by concrete speech that both constitute our environmentality. Most of our thinking is conducted in this concrete language and not abstract propositions, and because of this we cannot help but take on board the language we use with all its presuppositions as we will explore below. This then forms a critique of the notion that language as assertion deals with ‘logical propositions’.

4.2 Language as idle talk Another way, according to Heidegger, in which language can become distanced from existential situations is when discourse or speech (Rede) becomes Gerede, which is usually translated as ‘idle talk’ or ‘chatter’. This includes: ‘The floodtide of trivia and gossip, of novelty and cliché, of jargon and spurious grandiloquence.’23 Consequently, what we will see is the more authentic Rede as interpretive discourse becomes inauthentic, superficial and approximate.24 Rather than respond to the address of one another’s project of meaning in a common life-world, we merely correspond to the faceless gossip of public opinion: ‘Here the existential responsibility of each “I” – qua Dasein – capitulates to the unthinking sway of the “They” (Das Man). Accordingly, my speech ceases to be authentically my own ... it is deformed into a mere commodity in the exchanges of fashionable gossip.’25 Thrown among others we come not to be ourselves, but rather submit ourselves to the average, irresponsible, publicness of the They. We no longer exist on our own terms, but in reference to and in respect of others. Consequently we become alienated from our self – part and parcel of a simultaneous oneness and theyness. No longer ourselves we are each (though no longer each) the anonymous other (though no longer other) but a one they. Heidegger writes: ‘Everyone is the other, and no one is himself. The they, which supplies the answer to the who of everyday Dasein, is the nobody to whom every

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Dasein has always surrendered itself, in its being-among-one-another.’26 To this Steiner adds: ‘The being that is us is eroded into commonality; it subsides to a “oneness” within and among a collective, public, herd-like “theyness”.’27 Despite the apparent Nietzschean undertones to ‘theyness’, Heidegger stresses that Gerede as ‘idle talk’ or ‘chatter’ is not a disparaging term. He explains that Gerede refers to Dasein’s ‘everyday’ way of understanding and interpreting its Being-in-the-world. This sense of everyday interpretation preserves and delivers an average understanding or intelligibility, which can be to a degree understood, even if the hearer does not hear what is said in the more existentially authentic manner of interpretive discourse (Rede). Instead the hearers only hear what is said-in-the-talk as such. That is, the ‘talk’ is heard regardless of genuinely understanding the entities that the talking is primordially about. Thus the talk is only heard and understood in an approximate and superficial manner. Heidegger writes: ‘One means the same thing because it is in the same averageness that we have a common understanding of what is said.’28 Note, as he continues, the underlying reference to abstraction: Hearing and understanding have attached themselves beforehand to what is spoken about as such. Communication does not ‘impart’ the primary relation of being to the being spoken about, but being-with-one-another takes place in talking with one another and in heeding what is spoken about. What is important to it is that one speaks. The being-said, the dictum, the pronouncement provide a guarantee for the genuineness and appropriateness of the discourse and the understanding belonging to it. And since this discoursing has lost the primary relation of being to the being talked about, or else never achieved it, it does not communicate in the mode of a primordial appropriation of this being, but communicates by gossiping and passing the word along. What is spoken about as such spreads in wider circles and takes on an authoritative character. Things are so because one says so.29

This last sentence points to the difference between what each of us know for ourselves, and what is known on our behalf. A person might, for example, pass word along in the form of gossip about such and such, and the person hearing might say: ‘How do you know that?’ To this the talebearer simply refers to the person who told them. Michael Inwood gives the example of one believing that a Rembrandt is estimable without any first-hand experience of one’s own.30 Gerede gives one the illusion of understanding without truly grasping: ‘It obscures or holds back critical inquiry. Dasein-with-others transpires in an echo chamber of incessant, vacant loquacity, of pseudo-communication that knows nothing of its

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cognates which are, or ought to be, “communion” and “community”.’31 Kearney says of Gerede in a way that also elicits its relation to logical assertion: In Idle Talk words become strategies for escaping from ourselves; we cease to communicate decisively on the basis of our own lived experience. The challenging strangeness of the world is thus covered over with a film of convenient familiarity. Our existence is no longer lived by us; it is lived for us by the impersonalised ‘They’ who make decisions on our behalf. And so we fill up the hollow gaps within us by chattering away according to the rules of fashionable averages. Idle Talk or ‘they-speak’ interprets our being-with-the-other inauthentically to the extent that the world is considered to be what it is, not because I say so (in genuine response to the other) but because One says so.32

This leads to an alienated condition of language wherein we struggle to distinguish between authentically lived interpretive discourse and superficial, approximate verbalizing. Heidegger says of this empty and detached condition of language that it is ‘a process by which its initial lack of grounds to stand on increases to complete groundlessness’.33 He continues: And this is not limited to vocal gossip, but spreads to what is written, as ‘scribbling’. In this latter case, gossiping is based not so much on hearsay. It feeds on sporadic superficial reading: The average understanding of the reader will never be able to decide what has been drawn from primordial sources with a struggle, and how much is just gossip. Moreover, the average understanding will not even want such a distinction, will not have need of it, since, after all, it understands everything.34

It is no surprise that it has been said of Gerede that it offers ‘a devastating anatomy of journalism and the idiom of the media’.35 Magazines and newspaper supplements never-endingly advise everyone and no one (the They) according to the dictates of fashion and gossip: where to live, what to drive, what to wear, where to holiday, what to watch, what to read, what to hear, where to eat and so on. The point being that people actually want, seek and heed this advice, with their existence and its meaning lived for them on their behalf. Hence Heidegger writes of idle talk: ‘It says what one is to have read and seen.’36 And to illustrate this point, how many trains and aeroplanes contain passengers reading the latest must read, be that, for example, Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code or E. L. James’s Fifty Shades of Grey. Such works are primarily read not because they are good, even where they are, but because everyone else is reading them. If we are not ‘up’ on everything, such as what to read, then we run the risk of not fitting in, of not living the life worth living: ‘In inauthentic existence we are constantly afraid

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(of other men’s opinions, of what “they” will decide for us, of not coming up to the standards of material or psychological success though we ourselves have done nothing to establish or even verify such standards).’37 Heidegger writes: ‘Idle talk is the possibility of understanding everything without any previous appropriation of the matter. Idle talk already guards against the danger of getting stranded in such an appropriation. Idle talk, which everyone can snatch up, not only divests us of the task of genuine understanding, but develops an indifferent intelligibility for which nothing is closed off any longer.’38 Nothing is closed off any longer … or so it is thought in idle talk, and yet: The fact that one has said something groundlessly and then passes it along is in further retelling sufficient to turn disclosing around into a closing off. For what is said is initially always understood as ‘saying’, that is, as discovering. Thus, by its very nature, idle talk is a closing off since it omits going back to the foundation of what is being talked about. This closing off is aggravated anew by the fact that idle talk, in which an understanding of what is being talked about is supposedly reached, holds any new questioning and discussion at a distance because it presumes it has understood and in a peculiar way it suppresses them and holds them back.39

Accordingly, the way idle talk interprets the world establishes itself in us. The dominance of this understanding, interpreting and communicating is so extensive, says Heidegger, that there is no one who is completely free and not affected by it in some way. The ‘They’, he says, prescribes one’s state-of-mind and ‘determines what and how one “sees”’.40 Kearney writes: ‘Anonymous clichés and catchwords protect us from self-interpretation, from the need to use language thoughtfully; and by skimming over the surface of things, one contrives to suppress the fundamental question of our rootedness in Being.’41 Yet interestingly, Heidegger says that although a Dasein who engages in idle talk is cut off from its primary and primordial existentially genuine relationship with the world, with people, and itself, floating unattached (in einer Schwebe), it is nevertheless alongside the world, people and itself. And it is precisely this detached uprootedness that constitutes its stubborn, everyday reality.42

4.3 Language as interpretive discourse I have said above that in idle talk discoursing has lost its primary relationship-ofBeing towards the entity talked about. This implies that there is a distinction

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between authentically lived interpretive discourse and superficial, approximate verbalizing. The rest of this chapter will look to elaborate this notion of a more authentic discourse that has an existential relationship with what is spoken of. In standard texts of elementary logic it is argued that language is concerned with propositions that are objective entities. We saw this above with the textbook example: ‘Snow is white.’ Exploring this further, the English proposition ‘It is snowing’ can be translated universally into other languages, such as the French ‘Il neige’ and the German ‘Es schneit’. These phrases all identify one proposition, suggesting that the same meaning can be expressed and experienced in different linguistic terms. Crucially the sameness is said to be guaranteed by the proposition, and not the language itself. And yet contexts arguably exist where one cannot give universal translations of the same proposition. An example of this comes from an experience I once had in Norway. While I watched in astonishment as they made a table and benches from snow, my Norwegian friend spoke with his father about the different types of snow present. First they distinguished between the new snow (nysnø) and the old snow (gammelsnø). They then identified different types of the old snow according to their useful and meaningful qualities. For example, there were two types of old snow that were not useful for making the table and benches. These were corn snow (kornsnø), referring to a grainy snow that has no hold, and rotten snow (råtten snø) that in addition to having no hold is also dirty. From the last example alone we can say that ‘snow is not white’. The snow they were after was cloggy snow (kramsnø), which is easily formed into shapes because it is dense and wet. This snow being heavy is sticky and so distinct from loose snow (løssnø), which is too light and non-adhesive. My Norwegian friend identified ‘snows’ in ways that I had never even conceived of, given my own environment and language where snow is more or less simply snow that comes and eventually goes. But my friend was looking upon snow much like a carpenter looks upon wood. This example illustrates the argument that we think within the language of our own environment and the environment of our own language. The difference between my friend’s rich understanding of snow and my own limited understanding was determined by the language of our respective cultures with all their inherited presuppositions. The point here is that we did not think propositionally about snow, only then to apply language as representative labels to these propositions for the sake of abstraction and communication. I was unaware of the other types of snow simply because they were not available linguistically and environmentally to my thinking. We did not therefore think without language about snow, rather our

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different interpretations were guaranteed by different linguistic presuppositions, and not a single, prelinguistic, presuppositionless logical proposition. This seems to suggest that, existentially speaking, there are no pure meanings beyond the language. Thus my Norwegian friend suggests that to say ‘it is snowing’ (det er snø) in Norway is not the same as saying ‘it is snowing’ in England. We are not therefore referring to one universal proposition in our speaking. In fact it is not even the same across Norway, owing to local variations in dialects related to specific weather conditions in each particular area. It might, however, be counter-argued that there are universal propositions, but not every language has access to them yet. But this would further suggest that my access to them only comes through the language, and in some cases I could only access these through the Norwegian environment and language. An observation from Inwood is relevant here: Might words have meanings independent of the things they apply to and refer to, so that we can say that what corresponds to a fact is a meaningful sentence or a proposition? No. A word such as ‘hammer’ or ‘culture’ does not have a single determinate meaning or connotation; its meaning depends on, and varies with, the world in which it is used. … There is no pre-packaged portion of meaning sufficiently independent of the world and of entities within it to correspond, or fail to correspond, to the world. Words and their meanings are already world-laden.43

We can tentatively identify from the above that a distinction can be made between language as the ‘existential interpretation’ of things (concrete speech), and language as the ‘logical assertion’ of things (abstract speech).44 The more concrete existential speech is, as we will discuss below, equiprimordial with those things that are ready-to-hand (zuhanden), while the more abstract theoretical speech merely refers to those things that are present-at-hand (vorhanden). To Heidegger’s thinking the first sense is seen to be the more primordially authentic as interpretive discourse (Rede), which has an existential foundation in that the language genuinely concerns the Being of the individual’s Being-there (Dasein). Things are thus interpreted and spoken of existentially and not propositionally. This is to say that speech is of the actual snow as it is existentially witnessed, so that a child, for example, looks out of their bedroom window and exclaims with primordial excitement: ‘Snow’. This is very different to the abstract logical proposition mentioned above and taken as a paradigmatic truth that says ‘snow is white’. It is also very different to a person who has just seen snow for the very first time, and who utters with

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astonishment and wonder the same words: ‘Snow is white.’ A difference we might say between actual lived interpretation and detached logical assertion. Here we glimpse the radical distinction between ready-to-hand (zuhanden) and present-at-hand (vorhanden) in these different ways of speaking. Language as interpretive discourse circumspectively relates to those things that make up the world (such as the hammer and snow in the above examples). This existential concern and active-lived-knowing of the hammer and snow is prior to any abstract, theoretical or objective notion of it. And the same goes for speaking. Heidegger continues: ‘Its constitutive factors are: what discourse is about (what is discussed), what is said as such, communication, and making known. These are not properties which can be just empirically snatched from language, but are existential characteristics rooted in the constitution of being of Da-sein, which first make something like language ontologically possible.’45 Language as interpretive discourse does not simply assert that the snow is there (designation) or that it possesses a series of objective characteristics such as colour and density (predication). Rather it more primordially interprets the snow as something useful or meaningful for one’s existence. Hence snow is interpreted in its existential everydayness as something to be used by my friend for skiing to work, building a picnic table, boiling for water, and so forth, or deeply meaningful when lit by the full moon in the forest.46 The difference explored between language as ‘existential interpretation’ and ‘logical assertion’ also brings about a change in the meaning of communication: ‘Heidegger argues that the “communicative” function of language as assertion – i.e. as a logical exchange of coded information from one empirical subject to another – is merely a derivation from the more primary mode of communication as an existential sharing of a world with others.’47 This tells us that communication is better understood as the interpretation of a shared life-world, which involves us responding to one another’s project of meaning in a reciprocal fashion. Thus Heidegger writes of this distinction: ‘Communication’ in which one makes statements, for example, giving information, is a special case of the communication that is grasped in principle existentially. Here the articulation of being-with-one-another understandingly is constituted. It brings about the ‘sharing’ of being attuned together and of the understanding of being-with. Communication is never anything like a conveying of experiences, for example, opinions and wishes, from the inside of one subject to the inside of another. Mitda-sein is essentially already manifest in attunement-with and understanding-with. Being-with is ‘explicitly’ shared in discourse, that is, it already is.48

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4.4 Discourse and language In Being and Time it is fairly clear in retrospect that Heidegger has not yet developed his thinking on language. If we recall from the introduction, Heidegger was quoted as saying with regard to language: ‘The fundamental flaw of the book Being and Time is perhaps that I ventured forth far too early.’49 However, there are undoubtedly elements that will cement and provide the necessary building blocks for what will become the house of Being. Insightfully Daniel O. Dahlstrom writes: Already in Sein und Zeit Heidegger gives a complex and compelling if frustratingly truncated account of language. On the one hand, it is possible to see, if not the anticipation, then at least the seeds of his mature views in that account. On the other hand, the early account is abbreviated to a fault, a sure sign that his views at the time are less than full-formed.50

In Being and Time, Heidegger says of Rede (discourse or talk): ‘Discourse is existentially equiprimordial with attunement and understanding. Intelligibility is also always already articulated before its appropriative interpretation. Discourse is the Articulation of intelligibility.’ 51 Based on the above it is sometimes interpreted that language comes after and is superimposed upon understanding. For example, Inwood discussing this area notes: ‘Prior to language, logically if not temporally, is our understanding of the world and its significance, and our interpretations of particular entities.’52 Understanding is thought to be prior to discourse because Heidegger has said that ‘discourse is the Articulation of intelligibility’, meaning that discourse utters what is already intelligible. However, as the above quotation shows, before this Heidegger also says that discourse and understanding are equiprimordial, which is to say that they are co-original and exist together from the beginning as equally fundamental. In Being and Time language is seen to grow out of prelinguistic significance, while according to Heidegger’s mature thinking on language there is no prelinguistic significance.53 So is language superimposed upon understanding, or is it equiprimordial with it? Why this confusion? To make clear sense of this, we need to mark that in Being and Time Heidegger distinguishes between language (Sprache) and discourse (Rede). The later Heidegger will similarly distinguish between signs (Wörter) and words (Worte). As we have seen above, for Heidegger, interpretive discourse coincides with a ready-to-hand fore-having. I might say, for example, ‘too heavy’ as and when I am passed the hammer. For this reason it is one of the elements constituting our existential being-in-the-world. In contrast to discourse,

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language in Being and Time is discourse that has been voiced (hinausgesprochen). Dahlstrom writes: Language is not a way of being-here (da-seiendes) but something encountered within the world as ready-to-hand (ein Zuhandenes). It can then be broken down in turn into word-things on hand (vorhanden) in nature and culture, something that we find in other species and in other cultures, open for inspection like any other cultural artefacts, from ancient hieroglyphics to contemporary texting, fertile soil for sciences study of language such as philology, linguistics, psycholinguistics.54

We can therefore identify, says Dahlstrom, three different ontological aspects to language. First in the way we are existentially attuned to it, for example, my saying ‘too heavy’ when passed and holding the hammer. Saying ‘too heavy’ is something I do with language as much as hitting nails is something I do with a hammer, and thus discursive meaning is one of the ways I am here in the world. Second, and more subtly, as ready-to-hand language seems to become like the actual hammer that I can pick up and use. For example, I can use language to ask for a new hammer in the hardware shop. Here language becomes a tool for my use akin to the way the hammer is. Third, if when in the shop I am asked what type of hammer I want, for example, claw, ball, cross peen, club, or sledgehammer, I have to be aware of how culture has objectively determined different types of hammer in the form of linguistic meaning and use the right language accordingly. But interpretive discourse is seen to be more existentially true than the language I use. By way of example, Dahlstrom writes: There is more to discourse than the use of language precisely because the use of language presupposes the disclosiveness of discourse, i.e., the way discourse qua existential opens up Dasein’s world. We may use language as a tool – something ready-to-hand – to persuade others (or ourselves) of something but only because existential language, i.e., discourse – as a manner of being-here – reveals the world and our way of being in it to us. Thus, to take a plain example, we are able to use the words in the sentence ‘The water’s rising’ to convince people in a flood plain to evacuate, but the words are persuasive because they make plain the state of affairs.55

When language remains existential discourse it confirms in a fundamental way how I am being-in-the-world. But the moment it is abstracted from discourse and thus detached from concrete speech situations, then it becomes a thing among things and like them it is subject to inspection and analysis. We will come to see that Heidegger’s later endeavours to bring language as language

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to language and to thereby experience language’s way, have their seeds in the ground that is this early discursive, phenomenological approach. To Heidegger it seems that existential discourse or discursive meaning is an example of meaning in the broad sense as meaning-in-use. Again, an example would be my saying the hammer is ‘too heavy’ as and when I experience the weight in my hand. Furthermore, Heidegger appears to suggest that this sense of meaning or significance broadly construed makes word and language possible. Hence why language in Being and Time is seen as meaning added to and thus derived from meaning-in-use. The following passage is often quoted to confirm this: ‘But the significance itself with which Da-sein is always already familiar contains the ontological condition of the possibility that Da-sein, understanding and interpreting, can disclose something akin to “significations” which in turn found the possible being of words and language.’56 However, it is crucial for us to see that Heidegger is referring here to words and language, not to discourse. Thought this way, language is indeed superimposed upon meaning, whereas discourse is equiprimordial with meaning. Dahlstrom elucidates: We talk about and specify things in terms of meanings with which we are already acquainted, meanings that have taken shape ... in the course of our being-in-the-world. Discourse, not to be confused with language, contributes to the constitution of this meaningful whole (existential meaning) since discourse is no less basic an existential than understanding or disposedness. Meanings narrowly construed, i.e., the lexical (linguistic) meanings of words, take shape in the meaning-in-use (discursive meaning) that is co-extensive with an interpretative understanding of the meaningful whole.57

Where Heidegger says that ‘discourse is the articulation of intelligibility’, he is not then suggesting that discourse simply represents what is already known intelligibly. He is saying that discourse and intelligibility co-originate, and accordingly he might have even thought that they are mutually founding. This is confirmed by Heidegger saying: ‘Discourse is constitutive for the being of the there, that is, attunement and understanding.’58 To close, the following passage from Françoise Dastur confirms my point concerning the articulation of what can be understood: ‘This does not mean that discourse follows understanding as a kind of post-structuration of what has already been understood. On the contrary, understanding (Verstehen) is already itself articulated, and in the same way, disposition (Befindlichkeit) always implies understanding. The three existentials that constitute Dasein’s disclosedness, understanding, disposition, and discourse, are not based upon each other but are equi-original.’59

5

Foundations to the House of Being

5.1 Hearkening the logos In the previous chapter, Heidegger has been quoted as saying: ‘Discourse is constitutive for the being of the there, that is, attunement and understanding.’1 He immediately adds to this that Dasein as discursive Being-in has already expressed itself, that is, it has what we call language. Referencing the Greeks, he says that their everyday existing largely consisted of talking with one another, and yet they also ‘had eyes’ to see. He then asks if it is an accident that pre-philosophically and philosophically the Greeks defined the essence of man as zoon echon logon. This in later thinking is translated as ‘man is the rational animal’. That we live with reason is not false, says Heidegger: ‘But it covers over the phenomenal basis from which this definition of Da-sein is taken. The human being shows himself as a being who speaks.’2 Although it usually refers to the faculty of reason, Heidegger understands logos to derive from legein, which means to ‘to talk’ or ‘to hold discourse’.3 He also identifies this with noeîn, meaning ‘to cognize’, ‘to perceive’, ‘to see’, ‘to understand’, ‘to be aware of ’, hence his saying that the Greeks also ‘had eyes’ to see. The main point here, however, is that Heidegger interprets logos as Rede, namely, discourse or talk. The significance, as we will see, is that man’s nature depends on his discursive relation to being, and not on his rationality that would make him merely an animal with added reason.4 Man’s relation to Being then is determined by logos not as reason, but as discourse. Heidegger, however, argues that logos as speech or discourse is constantly covered up by the later history of the word with its numerous and arbitrary interpretations, such as, ‘reason’, ‘judgment’, ‘concept’, ‘definition’, ‘ground’ and ‘relation’.5 Logos as discourse, says Heidegger, comes to mean the same as the Greek dēloun (making visible), so that logos means: To make manifest ‘what is being talked about’ in speech. ... Logos lets something be seen (phainesthai), namely what is being talked about, and indeed for the speaker

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Language and Being (who serves as the medium) or for those who speak with each other. Speech ‘lets us see’ from itself, apo …, what is being talked about. In speech (apophansis), insofar as it is genuine, what is said should be derived from what is being talked about. In this way spoken communication, in what it says, makes manifest what it is talking about and thus makes it accessible to another. Such is the structure of the logos as apophanis.6

Here then the logos is understood as that which ‘reveals’ or ‘shows forth’ (apophanis). This would appear on the surface to tally with what has been said in Chapter 3 regarding the constitutive theory of language, and to a certain extent with language in the form of interpretive discourse discussed in Chapter 4. It certainly contains the seeds of Heidegger’s later thinking on language that we will come to explore. However, it in fact has more in common with the enframing view of language. As Inwood writes: ‘Logos in general shows forth, but it shows forth what the logos is about in such a way that showing forth tends to be restricted to assertion.’7 And as discussed in Chapter 4: ‘Assertion, 1. points out the entity that it is about; 2. predicates or asserts something of it, presents “something as … something” … 3. communicates to others.’8 This then is why Aristotle called an assertion a logos apophantikos, a logos that reveals or shows forth. Yet such assertive discourse, says Heidegger, can also be true or false, since it can present something as what it is not. He adds: ‘But because “truth” has this meaning, and because logos is a specific mode of letting something be seen, logos simply may not be acclaimed as the primary “place” of truth.’9 The reason for this is that truth has been defined as that which pertains to judgement, misunderstanding in the process what is the real Greek concept of truth. Heidegger claims that for the Greeks the sheer sensory perception of something (αìsthēsis) is more primordially true than the logos in the sense discussed. He writes: To the extent that an αìsthēsis aims at its idia [what is its own] ... perception is always true. This means that looking always discovers colors, hearing always discovers tones. What is in the purest and most original sense ‘true’ – that is, what only discovers in such a way that it can never cover up anything – is pure noeîn, straightforwardly observant apprehension of the simplest determinations of the being of beings as such.10

That the noeîn can never cover up means it cannot be false. The logos then always harks back to a truth that it lets be seen as something. It does this through a synthesis structure, a as b, such that, ‘a’ cannot be false, whereas ‘b’ can. Put another way, the discovered ‘truth of judgments’ are the opposite of being covered up. Heidegger continues: ‘And because the function of logos lies in letting something be seen straightforwardly, in letting beings be apprehended,

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logos can mean reason.’11 Furthermore, says Heidegger, because logos is not only used with the signification of legein but also legómenon (that which is pointed to as such) and because the latter is no more than hypokeimenon, namely, the underlying thing present-at-hand, logos as legómenon means the ground or ratio. And finally, because logos as legómenon can also mean what is addressed, for it becomes visible in its very relation to something else, in this relatedness logos acquires the meaning of relation and relationship. At a later point in Being and Time, Heidegger argues that the science of language, namely, linguistics, still views discourse as assertion. He adds: ‘If, however, we take this phenomenon in principle to have the fundamental primordiality and scope of an existential, the necessity arises of re-establishing the linguistics on an ontologically more primordial foundation.’12 Soon after the above quotation, Heidegger says that philosophical research must decide to ask what kind of Being belongs to language in general, and he is already asking preliminary questions about the being of language, which will lie at the basis of his future thinking: Is it an innerworldy useful thing at hand or does it have the mode of being of Da-sein or neither of the two? What kind of Being does language have if there can be a ‘dead’ language? What does it mean ontologically that a language grows or declines? We possess a linguistics, and the being of beings which it has as its theme is obscure; even the horizon for any investigative question about it is veiled.13

Following Being and Time, Heidegger explores in more depth and detail the notion of logos as discourse, enquiring into its nature and significance. In the rest of this chapter we will see how Heidegger seeks to move us away from the understanding of logos as rational assertion, and to a more profound, pre-metaphysical interpretation where logos is the primary place of truth. As we will discover, he wants to get back to what he calls the ‘measuring space’, where the ‘saying’ of logos gathers Being, the One and the All. This is because he wants to reconnect discourse (and language as a whole) with these essential senses, in order to re-establish the science of language on foundations which are ontologically more primordial. This in turn, he believes, will bring us closer to the essence of language. Anticipating the above-mentioned ‘measuring space’, Heidegger says in Being and Time: ‘Is it a matter of chance that initially and for the most part significations are “worldly,” prefigured beforehand by the significance of the world, that they are indeed often predominantly “spatial”? Or is this fact existentially and ontologically necessary and why?’14 In his lecture, ‘Logos and Language’ (produced in 1944 and thus seventeen years after the publication of Being and Time) Heidegger further expounds

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what the logos principle became for the Greeks as assertion. Here he focuses for the most part on how logos understood as assertion or statement serves to address the Platonic ideas and Aristotelian categories. But later in the lecture, Heidegger turns to the meaning of logos as it was understood by premetaphysical thinkers. Heidegger is aware that there is a mystery at work with the logos, in that it seems to have multiple meanings. He does not want, he says, to solve this mystery, but to be guided by it. The pre-metaphysical thinker of the logos that Heidegger turns to is Heraclitus. He looks at the following fragment: ‘If you have not only heard me, but have instead (obeying the Λóγο ς) listened to the Λóγο ς, then knowledge is (that which consists of) saying the same with the Λóγο ς, saying: All is one.’15 Heidegger calls this a preliminary yet clarifying translation. Hence it is punctuated by Heidegger with clarifications that are not in the original Greek. This fragment is translated typically as: ‘Listening to the Logos and not to me, it is wise to agree that all things are One.’16 Heidegger begins by saying that there is talk in this fragment of hearing, which if it is supposed to be a genuine hearing should not be directed to the thinker, but to the logos. Richard Geldard says of the fragment: The important distinction is being drawn here between the teacher’s arguments and statements (doxa) and the truth of the Logos. Whenever we speak, debate, or engage in conscious reflection, we are taking part in the multiplicity of existence, human, and otherwise. In saying ‘listening to the Logos and not to me’ Heraclitus separates his listeners from their momentary attachment to his own words and, in effect, casts them adrift philosophically.17

Geldard adds that by saying ‘do not listen to me’, Heraclitus is deliberately putting the burden of knowing the truth on the listener and not the speaker. However, Geldard imagines that we might ask Heraclitus, ‘How can we not listen to you? How can we listen to the Logos when we cannot hear it?’ Heidegger appears to answer these two questions for us, for he says that when told to hear the logos, it means that the logos is actually something hearable, and therefore a kind of saying or word. The knowledge or being wise (σοφόν), says Heidegger, stems from listening to the logos as a saying or word and then saying the same: All is One. Heidegger then asks: What does this hearing mean? He notes that hearing is usually associated with the ears. But then surprisingly he asserts that the anatomical and physical presence of the ears do not make for hearing, not even as the perception of sounds, reverberations and noises. He writes:

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Hearing, as the sensation of sounds, always occurs on the basis of that hearing that is a listening to something in the sense of hearkening [Horchens]. Our hearkening, however, itself already hearkens in each case and in some way to what is to be heard, ready for it or not ready, [and is] somehow an obedience [Gerhorsham]. The ear, which is necessary for correct hearing, is the obedience. That which is able to be heard – the hearkeningly perceivable – need not be anything sound-like or noise-like.18

It would be an understatement to say this is difficult to comprehend. We only hear, says Heidegger, because obediently we first hearken what is to be heard, and this need not be any manner of sound. He continues: ‘The ear, which is necessary for correct hearing, is the obedience.’19 And yet the hearkening is still perceivable. Heidegger then says that it is not easy to say what the obedience consists in, for we only know that knowledge stems from hearkening and saying the same as the saying of the logos, which is different from the speech of the thinker – hence he says, ‘if you have not only heard me’. But Heidegger makes it clear that ‘saying the same’ here does not mean to parrot what the logos says: ‘But to rather repeat in such a way that the same is said in a different way, such that the repetition pursues and “follows,” i.e. abides by what is said and is obedient to it.’20 Where in the more typical translation of Heraclitus’ fragment the second section reads ‘it is wise to agree that all things are One’, Heidegger’s translation says ‘then knowledge is (that which consists of) saying the same with the Λóγος, saying: All is one.’ It seems that Heidegger’s clarifying translation is being careful to make sure we do not miss the gist of what is actually being said. The word ómologeίn means either ‘to agree with’ or to ‘say the same’. In one sense then, the fragment of Heraclitus can be read to say that if we listen to the logos it would be wise of us to agree that all things are One. But according to Heidegger’s clarifications, if we listen to the logos, then knowledge consists of hearing and then saying the same with what it says, this being that, All is One. This demands elucidation.

5.2 Saying the same as the logos says From here Heidegger turns to the point made by Heraclitus, that the Logos says ‘All is One’. He asks, what does this ‘One’ (έν) mean? He explores the different senses it contains: singularity, selfsameness, unifying unity and uniqueness. He likewise asks what does ‘All’ (πάντα) mean – Is it sum, accumulation, totality, the whole? He writes:

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Language and Being From what has just been discussed concerning the έν and the πάντα, we see that these words presumably name something essential but that, to the degree that they mean something essential, they also remain ambiguous and empty and are occasionally only spoken as mere shells of words. Thought tries, again and again, to achieve clarity and a solid ground concerning the έν and the πάντα with the statement έν πάντα είναι. But again and again, these attempts fly apart and combine into new mixtures. It suffices here to name the term ‘pantheism’ in order to call to mind the manifold efforts of experience and thought that strove to clarify the έν πάντα είναι and thus clarify the world as a whole. One cannot deny what is strangely vague and futile about all of these endeavours. But it is also about time to ask about the reason for this undeniable state of affairs. The reason is that thought forgets – and until now has forgotten – to initially even seek out the measuring space … from which the dangerously harmless words έν and πάντα receive what is nameable and determinable in them.21

This is a significant move. The words ‘One’ and ‘All’ have remained ambiguous and empty, because they have not been thought of in the context of the ‘measuring space’ that serves to give them their name and essentially makes them what they are. The One and the All are named in what is perceivable, says Heidegger, out of the logos itself. And it is in fact the very logos that means hen panta einai (έν πάντα είναι – One is All). We touched upon this in Chapter 2, where we quoted Heidegger as saying: ‘Being is the gathering together – Logos,’22 and that the pre-Socratics, ‘Heraclitus and Parmenides were “greater” in the sense that they were still in harmony with the Logos, that is, with the “One (is) all.” ’23 For Heidegger, the One and the All are woven and come to presence in Being, that is, within the ‘is’ that says One is All. But how, asks Heidegger, is Being (einai) thought in the One is All, and how according to Heraclitus’s way of thinking, as well as early Greek thought generally? He also asserts that if we do not endeavour to think this way, then every attempt ‘to think and to thoughtfully experience’24 the One and the All will remain futile. Heidegger returns to the fragment from Heraclitus and notes how in the Greek it ends with the word ‘Being’. Heidegger asserts that this last word is in fact the first of all words in terms of the rank, worth and breadth of the speaking. However, the fragment of Heraclitus does not speak primarily of Being, but deals instead with the logos and saying the same with logos. Thus the obedient speaking, in which knowledge or wisdom consists, says with the saying of the logos, and the logos says: One is All. Crucially it is this ‘One is All’, says Heidegger, that is heard in and from the hearkening that listens to the logos. As its ‘measuring space’, the One is All comes from the logos. If we truly or obediently listen to the

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logos, then this is what is perceivable. But how, asks Heidegger, is this so? How do the One, the All and the Being belong to the logos? Heidegger notes that unlike the One, the All and Being, the logos speaks, it speaks the words One, All and Being, as well as their literal meanings. But it is not enough to say that the One, the All and Being are simply spoken by the logos. The logos is not simply a statement and speaking about other things. However, it is insightful, concedes Heidegger, that for the early Greeks, legein and logos do mean ‘talking’ and ‘saying’. However, it is not enough to say that legein and logos as talking and saying merely state, express or utter the One, the All and Being. This is because the fragment of Heraclitus suggests that the One, the All and Being originate from the logos itself. There is not, therefore, a synthesis structure, a as b. The logos does not therefore just say as a talking of them afterwards. Rather, the One, the All and Being, says Heidegger, hold sway in the logos, which likewise holds sway in their very essence. It would seem then, and this will be crucial in enabling Heidegger to establish linguistics on an ontologically more primordial foundation, that the One, the All and Being are only perceivable through the logos. Heidegger points out that although the words ‘One’, ‘All’ and ‘Being’ remain essentially ambiguous and ungraspable, especially the word ‘Being’, still there is nevertheless something graspable about the words ‘One’ and ‘All’. That is, we can grasp the uniting and conjoining sense within them in relation to beings as a whole. This uniting and conjoining, adds Heidegger, must also be the fundamental trait of the logos, if the One is All, because the perceivable is perceivable through and as the logos. It is this uniting and conjoining, then, that points to the more original meaning of the word logos. How is this so? The etymology of logos, stemming from legein, is ‘to gather’. This is in the senses, as Heidegger gives of: ‘to glean the field’, ‘to harvest the grapes in the vineyard’ and ‘to gather wood in the forest’.25 It is through this etymological guidingmeaning that Heidegger intends to elucidate the legein and logos, according to the Greek realm of experience and thought. To begin with Heidegger asks: What does gathering mean? He writes: To gather is to take up and pick up from the ground, to bring together and place together, λέγειν, collecting [Sammeln]. What is picked up and placed together in gathering, however, is not simply brought together in the sense of accumulation that just ends at some point. Gathering first has its completion in that picking up that preserves what is taken up and brought in. Gathering is simultaneously picking up [Aufheben] in the sense of taking something up from the ground,

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In addition to this fundamental trait of ‘preservation’ in gathering, wherein gathering begins and ends, there is another trait, says Heidegger, within gathering: ‘Gathering is not an arbitrary grasping, a snatching-up that rushes from one thing to the next; the preserving bringing-in is always an attentive taking-in. But this only becomes possible on the basis of a reaching-out that reigns in advance, and that gets its breadth and narrowness from what it has to preserve and care for.’27 Here then gathering is a preserving bringing-in as an attentive taking-in, made possible by a reaching-out for what is to be preserved. Gathering is a collection that brings in and reaches out, a collection already determined by what is to be preserved. In short, this means that all genuine collecting is collected according to an originary collectedness. This collectedness, says Heidegger, ‘already holds sway in every collecting that picks up’.28 The point here, it seems, is to show that gathering or collecting is not simply an additional bringing-together, but refers to an originary preserving collectedness that determines all collecting and in which it is held or gathered. He writes: Gatheredness is the originary retention in a collectedness, a retention that first determines all reaching-out and bringing-in, but also first permits all dispersion and scattering. Just as all real ‘concentration’ is only possible out of a concentrating centre that already holds sway, so all common collecting is carried by, and joined to, a gatheredness that reigns throughout the totality of reaching-out, picking-up, bringing-in and taking-in, and taking-up, and thus properly ‘collects’.29

Here then is the full meaning of ‘gathering’ for Heidegger, which is more than just a rounding-up and joining together that we only notice as so after the fact. Heidegger then asks: How does the gathering, legein, properly understood, give us an indication by which to think the logos, insofar as the latter reveals itself as the ‘One is All’? Based on what has just been said concerning the full nature of gathering, collecting and harvesting, Heidegger believes that we can intimate the originary sense of logos in accord with how it was first understood by the early Greeks in relation to origin and truth. The fragment of Heraclitus,

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says Heidegger, tells us that the logos reveals itself as the One is All, and nothing else besides. By exploring the logos and language in this way, Heidegger argues that there is more to the logos than our metaphysical understanding of it, and also more to language than its being understood to state this metaphysical view of logos. Logos does not just state or address as designation, and it is not the stated and addressed as idea, category, etc., rather it is heard as a word or saying. As the all-uniting one, the logos does not simply state the One, the All or Being, for these are first gathered in the preserving, ‘measuring space’ that is the logos. In sum then, knowledge consists of our saying what the logos says, which says: All is One. We do not therefore merely express the already self-subsistent idea as thought. We can see here the underpinnings for what will become Heidegger’s later thinking, which argues that all human speaking only takes place in so far as our nature has been admitted and entered into language’s aboriginal Saying (die Sage). For example, he will later come to write: ‘Such is the granting that abides in Saying. It allows us to attain the ability to speak.’30 But this also seems on the surface to introduce a division between our own saying and the saying of the logos. But if we recall, Heidegger has said that knowledge consists of saying the same with the Logos, which itself says: All is One. We say the same with the logos, that is, by, near or among the logos. With means ‘against’, in the positional sense of ‘very close to’. Heidegger will later say of the relation between Saying and speaking: ‘And Saying itself? Is it separated from our speaking, something to which we must first build a bridge? Or is Saying the stream of stillness which in forming them joins its own two banks – the Saying and our saying after it? Our customary notions of language hardly reach as far as that.’31 Heidegger’s study of a more primordial sense of logos serves in trying to re-establish its original relation to Being. He does this by interpreting logos as discourse, which questions the typical understanding of logos as the human faculty of reason. Heidegger is seeking to show that by saying the same with the more originary logos, our discourse says what logos says, namely: All is One. And saying wisely what the logos says, namely, All is One, thereby brings our saying back to Being. In his work Introduction to Metaphysics,32 Heidegger refers to another fragment of Heraclitus in order to explore the significance of the logos. A translation of the fragment reads: ‘Fools when they do hear are like the deaf; of them, does the saying bear witness that they are absent when present.’33 Heidegger adds: ‘Heraclitus wants to say: human beings do hear, and they hear words, but in

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this hearing they cannot “hearken” to – that is, follow – what is not audible like words, what is not talk but logos.’34 According to Heidegger’s interpretation, rather than hearkening in the form of being obedient, these people merely hear and so keep their ears open to what is commonly believed in hearsay or seeming, and so do not grasp. They do not therefore follow what logos is as: the gathering of beings themselves.35 They hear words and discourse, but are closed off to what they should listen to. They are thus absently present. In the midst of things, says Heidegger, they are away. What they are amid is the logos. This means that they always have to do with Being, and yet it remains alien to them. They have to do with Being in the form of beings, but not to Being itself because they do not grasp it as logos.36 Each person thus follows his or her own caprice, that is, insists arbitrarily on his or her own private preferences and opinions.37 Heidegger says: ‘Saying and hearing are proper only when they are intrinsically directed in advance toward Being, toward logos.’38 In this way, rather than closing off, language is the opening-up of Being. If we recall from Chapter 4, when something is said groundlessly through idle talk and constantly passed along in this way, it perverts the act of disclosing and instead closes off. This is because idle talk only proximally says, that is, uncovers something. Idle talk closes off because it never goes back to the ground of what is talked about.39 In contrast, says Heidegger: ‘logos grounds the essence of language.’40 We have also seen in Chapter 4 that discourse, as opposed to idle chatter, discloses or opens up Dasein’s world. But how does logos ground the essence of language? It does so in that logos is the ground of language, meaning that language reaches the ground of what is spoken through logos. Heidegger writes: It is not at all self-evident that language should be logos, gathering. But we understand this interpretation of language as logos on the basis of the inception of the historical Dasein of the Greeks, on the basis of the fundamental direction in which Being itself opened itself up to them, and in which they brought Being to stand in beings.41

In short this means that it was language as logos that opened up Being and in the process carried over beings from the immediacy of Being. The word and name, says Heidegger, preserves beings in this openness, delimitation and constancy.42 It also means that language gathers the gathering of logos. Heidegger continues: ‘In originary saying, the Being of beings is opened up in the structure of its gatheredness. This opening-up is gathered in the second sense, according to which the word preserves what is originally gathered. … Human beings, as those

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who stand and act in logos, in gathering, are the gatherers.’43 This therefore means: ‘Because the essence of language is found in the gathering of the gatheredness of Being, language as everyday discourse comes to its truth only when saying and hearing are related to logos as gatheredness, in the sense of Being.’44

5.3 The showing of language as logos We have seen in Chapter 3 that language is understood to express and merely represent internal ideas or external facts. Either way what is said already exists in the world or in the mind before being said. Heidegger’s view of this relation, however, is more what we might call conjunctive or intimate. Hitherto I quoted Potter who said that the word ‘has no direct or immediate relation with the referend except through the image in the mind of the speaker’.45 But Heidegger appears to hold the view that words have more than an indirect or mediate relation with what they refer to. Potter also says that primitive people still believe that words have power over things, and that a word participates in the nature of the thing.46 In a certain sense words, for Heidegger, do have a power over things and also participate in the nature of things. This is evident in his lecture, ‘What is Philosophy?’ (Was ist das - die Philosophie) from 1955, in which he asserts: If we listen now and later to the words of the Greek language, then we move into a distinct and distinguished domain. Slowly it will dawn upon our thinking that the Greek language is no mere language like the European languages known to us. The Greek language, and it alone, is logos. … In the Greek language what is said in it is at the same time in an excellent way what it is called. If we hear a Greek word with a Greek ear we follow its legein [its speaking], its direct presentation. What it presents is what lies immediately before us. Through the audible Greek word we are directly in the presence of the thing itself, not first in the presence of a mere word-sign.47

Heidegger says here of language that ‘what is said in it is at the same time in an excellent way what it is called’. In his Contributions to Philosophy (Beiträge zur Philosophie), Heidegger says similarly: ‘Its word is not by any means merely a sign for something quite other. What it names is what is meant.’48 This means that through the word we are directly in the presence of the immediate thing itself, and not in the presence of a word-sign and therefore indirectly in the presence of the mediated thing. This, as we will come to explore, radically alters

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how we understand the synthesis structure a as b. Furthermore, this means we are not directly or immediately in the presence of the thing prior to the word, or indirectly or mediately in the presence of the thing following the word. We might add, though aware of the confusion it occasions, that language is neither immediate nor mediated. As we will explore in Chapter 11, as the owning-event language as a fundamental, originative and enduring yielding brings all things into their own as things and accordingly ‘opens the very space for the immediate and mediated, the space of this very distinction, its vicissitudes, movements, sublations, and so forth’.49 To say of language ‘what is said in it is at the same time in an excellent way what it is called’ seems to align with the ‘constitutive’ theory of language discussed in Chapter 3. It would appear to suggest that language presents new meanings in our world, and does not merely represent meanings already there. To say, as Heidegger does, ‘what it presents is what lies immediately before us,’ means that language is not merely a cipher wherein speech just makes available what is already there subjectively or objectively. The creative side to expression, says Taylor, tends to be ‘screened out’ from the ‘enframing’ theory of language, and it took the ‘constitutive’ theories to draw it out. He adds: ‘The expression makes possible its content; the language opens us out to the domain of meaning it encodes. Expression is no longer simply inert.’50 In this way then word participates in the nature of the thing. When the poet, Gertrude Stein, wrote the line: ‘Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose’, she was not simply stating that in terms of the law of identity things are what they are, that is, a rose is a rose just as ‘A is A’. Rather she appears to be evoking the power of revelation that language had in the time of Homer, when the poet could use the name of a thing and the thing was really there.51 However, generally speaking, language is no longer understood this way. It appears that so much focus has been placed on the pre-existing meaning that language is understood to merely convey that we have neglected altogether the role of language as that which arguably granted such meaning in the first place. In two separate essays, ‘The Nature of Language’ (Das Wesen der Sprache; 1957), and ‘The Way to Language’ (Der Weg zur Sprache; 1959), Heidegger refers to the text from which this conventional enframing view of language may have emerged.52 It is, he says, the classical architectonic structure in which language as speaking remains secure. This is the opening paragraph of ‘On Interpretation’ (Peri Hermeneias) by Aristotle. The paragraph translated from Greek into German by Heidegger, and German into English by Peter D. Hertz, reads:

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Now, what (takes place) in the making of vocal sounds is a show of what there is in the soul in the way of passions, and what is written is a show of the vocal sounds. And just as writing is not the same among all (men), so also the vocal sounds are not the same. On the other hand, those things of which these (sounds and writings) are a show in the first place, are among all (men) the same passions of the soul, and the matters of which these (the passions) give likening representations are also the same.53

‘These lines of Aristotle’, says Heidegger, ‘constitute the classical passage that allows us to see the structure of which language as vocal sounds is a part: the letters are signs of sounds, the sounds are signs of mental experiences, and these are signs of things. The sign relation constitutes the struts of the structure.’54 Here language is defined by Aristotle as a sound that signifies (phōnē sēmantikē). The passage from Aristotle contains the words: ‘sign’ (semeia), ‘symbol’ (súmbola) and ‘image’ (homoiomata). These words, says Heidegger, mean respectively: ‘that which shows’, ‘that which holds to each other’ and ‘that which likens’. However, in his translation of the passage above Heidegger has deliberately used the word ‘show’ in place of all these words. In a passage crucial to our understanding of his thinking on language, Heidegger writes: Showing is what forms and upholds the intertwining braces of the architectonic structure. In various ways, disclosing or disguising. Showing makes something come to light, lets what has come to light be perceived, and lets the perception be examined. The kinship of Showing with what it shows – a kinship never developed purely on its own terms and those of its origins – later becomes transformed into a conventional relation between a sign and its signification. The Greeks of the Classical Age know and understand the sign in terms of showing – the sign is shaped to show. Since Hellenistic times (the Stoa), the sign originates by a stipulation, as the instrument for a manner of designation by which man’s mind is reset and directed from one object to another object. Designation is no longer a showing in the sense of bringing something to light. The transformation of the sign from something that shows to something that designates has its roots in the change of the nature of truth.55

At their highest point then, the Greeks according to Heidegger viewed language as a way of showing (die Zeige) and letting appear. This is how, as logos, what is said in language is at the same time what it is called. This differs then from the sense of revealing or showing forth (apophansis) understood by Aristotle as assertion. For the Greeks of the Classical age the speaking of the logos is a direct presentation – not an indirect representation. As we will come to explore in

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more detail, a word’s showing and so letting appear constitutes its force or power as an originative leap (Ur-sprung), which as a result gives being to beings. The word, says Heidegger, has the power to endow a thing with being.56 A thing is thus be-thinged (be-dingt) by the word, letting that thing be a thing.57 It is this originary event that makes the later understanding of the sign and its signification in terms of designation possible, in which ‘words become things that refer to other things. Language hooks the set of words up with the set of referents, and truth consists in the correct correlation between sentences and states of affairs.’58 Thus language moves from showing as a coming to light, where there is a kinship between the showing and what it shows, to designation, which serves to assert that a thing is there, and so merely consists of a relation between the sign and its signification. We can thus see that Heidegger distinguishes between words (Worte) and terms or signs (Wörter). Only later, says Heidegger, do words as an originative leap (Ur-sprung) that beget worlds become mere linguistic signs (Zeichen).

6

In the Beginning was the Word

6.1 Manifestation or creation Understood as the mere handle on pre-existing thoughts or things, the nature of language is to Heidegger devalued and diminished. Heidegger looked back to a time before philosophy, when the Greek language was logos. Language thus understood did not simply assert (that is, designate, predicate and communicate) in a nebulous way mental experiences or physical things. It was not a man-made instrument of representation or a semantic prop, but the source of revelation. It was the reason why there are thoughts and things at all. Language as logos revealed or showed forth Being to the extent that it let beings appear. In his preface to William J. Richardson’s, Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought, published in 1963, Heidegger tells us that he interprets the Greek word logos as essentially meaning ‘to make manifest’.1 He writes: ‘To bring to language thus means: to first raise to language that which remained unformulated, that which was never said, and to make appear, by a saying that shows, that which until then remained withdrawn.’2 As the logos, a word is not regarded as a mere parcel of cognitive data that deposits information. Heidegger writes: ‘Words and language are not just shells into which things are packed for spoken and written intercourse. In the word, in language, things first come to be and are.’3 A word then is not an instrument, a tool, a vehicle, a coin, a package, a label, a handle and such like. Nor does it abstract, represent, suggest, falsify, cloud or conceal. Rather it is, for Heidegger, as much what it names, as what it names only exists (that is, stands out of Being) through being named. This last sentence will no doubt puzzle, even vex many, because it comes across as a claim denying common sense. For example, the exasperated reader might ask: How does the tree not exist before being named? I can simply see it standing there. This of course cannot be denied, but it is only the tree that one sees standing there because of the word ‘tree’. As we have seen in Chapter 5, according to Heidegger it is language’s ‘showing’ that lets something first come to light and lets what has

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come to light be perceived. Our being in a world made up of things is therefore simultaneously a living in language. Furthermore this is why, for Heidegger, language is the house of Being wherein man dwells. He writes: Language is the precinct (templum), that is, the house of Being. … It is because language is the house of Being, that we reach what is by constantly going through this house. When we go to the well, when we go through the woods, we are always already going through the word ‘well’, through the word ‘wood’, even if we do not speak the words and do not think of anything relating to language.4

The well and the wood are each distinguished as such by the respective words that allow them to exist, that is to say, ‘stand out of ’, ‘stand forth’, ‘arise’ or ‘appear’, so as to come out of Being and into being as this or that. Alongside our dwelling in language, it would seem that Heidegger uses the metaphor of a house because, to quote John Richardson, ‘language is a stable and lasting framework … Language houses being by serving as the enduring structure, only in or through which entities can show up as entities.’5 It is for this very reason that borrowing the well-known opening sentence to the Gospel of John, I have titled this chapter, In the Beginning was the Word. I am aware that Heidegger would not approve of this formulation. In fact he writes: It was Christianity that first misinterpreted Heraclitus. The misinterpretation already begun with the church fathers. ... Heraclitus’s teaching on logos is taken as a predecessor of the logos mentioned in the New Testament, in the prologue to the Gospel of John. The logos is Christ. Now because Heraclitus already speaks of the logos, the Greeks arrived at the very doorstep of absolute truth – namely, the revealed truth of Christianity.6

The reason the Greeks only arrived at the doorstep of truth is because they were classical philosophers and not fully-fledged Christian theologians. John of course refers to the logos as the incarnation of Jesus, and does not understand the logos to be language as Heidegger does. But I have deliberately used this as a title to suggest that all things as things begin with language understood as logos, and with a view to using the Johannine formula to rethink the meaning of revelation. However, the claim that all things begin with language naturally tends to jar with people. It is deemed preposterous and contrary to reason or sense, because the mind of thoughts and the world of things had to already exist so as to be named. But let us ask ourselves, before being spoken and thus known as a tree, what was a tree? In its own way it was already in Being, but it did not exist so as ‘to stand out meaningfully’ as a tree. We therefore cannot answer that it was a tree, because

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it was not. It most certainly was what it was, and was perhaps dimly seen, but it was neither perceived nor conceived as being a tree. The tree was not even a ‘part’ of Being, because there was nothing to distinguish it meaningfully from Being as a whole. Not until it was named as a tree did it come to be as a tree. So what was it? If I borrow the examples from Watts quoted in Chapter 3 and say it was an impression on my senses, a vegetable structure or a complex of electrons, I am as Watts argues merely putting new sets of words in place of the original word ‘tree’. However, it is here that Watts claims that just with the word or noise ‘tree’, we have not said what it is at all. For Watts what the tree is in itself is one thing, and the word ‘tree’ that obscurely represents it another. Where Watts argues that all we do is put new words in place of the original word ‘tree’, and so continue to fail to say what it is at all, we note rather that we are actually accounting for the being of the tree linguistically. This is because language is our first port of call, and to paraphrase Heidegger once again, when we come to the tree, we do so through the word ‘tree’, even if we do not speak the word or think of anything relating to language. And so we continuously notice what becomes accessible to us through language. To account for the existence of the tree linguistically endorses our dwelling in language, and that words essentially bring all things into being as things. Heidegger writes: In the current view, language is held to be a kind of communication. It serves for verbal exchange and agreement, and in general for communicating. But language is not only and not primarily an audible and written expression of what is to be communicated. It not only puts forth in words and statements what is overtly or covertly intended to be communicated; language alone brings what is, as something that is, into the Open for the first time. Where there is no language, as in the being of stone, plant, and animal, there is also no openness of what is, and consequently no openness either of that which is not and of the empty.7

Prior to being named a ‘tree’, a tree is not a thing that can be conceptually or even in certain respects perceptually distinguished from other things. It is of course self-predicating in that it is in Being (in terms of phusis) in its own respect. But from our human viewpoint it only is so in an indistinct and somewhat chaotic manner, as not even yet a part of an otherwise agglomerative mass of meaninglessness. Cassirer is helpful here: The formulation of a general concept presupposes definite properties; only if there are fixed characteristics by virtue of which things may be recognized as similar or dissimilar, coinciding or not coinciding, is it possible to collect objects

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Language and Being which resemble each other into a class. But – we cannot help asking at this point – how can such differentiae exist prior to language? Do we not, rather, realize them only by means of language, through the very act of naming them?8

In short, before being spoken from out of Being and into being as a being, what subsequently comes to be a thing is no-thing. This is why Heidegger says: ‘In the word, in language, things first come to be and are.’9 Kearney says: ‘Things do not exist as independent empirical facts. They only come into being insofar as they are summoned by language which bestows their meaning upon them.’10 But what exactly is it according to Heidegger that language actually does? Does language, akin to the ‘enframing’ model, manifest and so find what is already in some sense there? Or does it akin to the ‘constitutive’ model more radically create and thus make something so for our consciousness in the first place? If it is the first option, we must ask what is being found and manifested? Typically, expression is understood to manifest something, and what is manifested is more usually thought to be our own mental experiences in the form of our ‘reason’ or ‘intellect’. Hence we refer to self-expression. But this sense of the self as reason or intellect might also be identified with something other than and thus beyond our own subjective content, so that reason or intellect as logos can also refer to soul, spirit or God. What is manifested can also be something more objective. For Heidegger, if language indeed manifests it does not manifest any of these. On the other hand one can question the notion that expression brings to light something already there, and argue that it brings it about in the first place. Here the word still manifests something, but not in the sense of replicating something that already is. Rather it is the creative medium through which an otherwise hidden reality can come into the open. Before this expression through the word, the hidden reality is concealed and so there cannot be any question of merely representing it. It is moreover presented through the medium, so that a degree of creation is involved that discloses the reality for the first time.11 So is it manifesting something or not? The issue seems to revolve around the meaning of the words ‘something’ and ‘manifest’. If what is expressed is already a mental or physical thing, then language simply manifests that as representation. However, if that something (so to speak) is a hidden reality until expressed, then it is not as yet a thing until it is manifested and so made to appear through language. Nevertheless, the language still manifests a hidden reality. So where are we? It would seem, as Taylor asserts, that ‘expression partakes of both finding and making’.12 According to the dominant manifestationist tradition, there is

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a balance between the two, but as Taylor argues the second is basically in the service of the first. That is, the emphasis is on what is found. Hence language plays a somewhat secondary role as mere symbolic representation. But as Taylor suggests, Heidegger is doing something subtly different: ‘The radical step is to overturn this balance. ... Through the power of expression we make this space, and what appears in it shouldn’t be seen as a manifestation of anything. What appears is a function of the space itself.’13 In this respect Heidegger appears to see language as a constitutive mixture of the manifesting view and the creating view. To a degree Heidegger appears to adhere with the constitutive tradition, in that he believes language does not simply represent or copy some prior model. But this does not simply mean that for Heidegger language therefore creates, rather it seems to manifest with an element of creation in terms of allowing the hidden reality to appear for the first time. Heidegger does not see expression as representing some mental or physical thing. Taylor notes that we might confuse Heidegger’s radical departure from the manifestationist position with an out-and-out creationist view, in that if there is nothing internal or external to express then it must be created by expression. But this is not the case, and the gist here is that by removing any ontic underpinning, Heidegger is looking to avoid any sense of our subjectively or objectively predetermining the space of expression. But this does not mean that expression, therefore, simply creates what comes to appear: Heidegger alters the whole philosophical landscape by introducing the issue of the clearing and its ontic placing. Once we disintricate this question from that of the nature of the expressive power, we can combine a manifestationist view on this latter with a rejection of all ontic grounding. But on what, then, do we base this manifestationist view, if we can no longer recur to some ontic underpinnings of the familiar kind? On a reading of the space of expression itself. Otherwise put, the clearing itself, or language itself, properly brought to light, will show us how to take it. Heidegger as always moves to retrieve what is hidden, not in some beyond, but in the event of disclosure itself.14

Taylor’s analysis of Heidegger’s take on language serves in refining our understanding of what it is that Heidegger means by ‘manifesting’. In this light, we are perhaps better able to subtly distinguish Heidegger’s take on language from other forms that at first sight appear very similar. Take, for example, the Vedantic view of language in the Hindu tradition. In his work, The Essence of Vedanta, Brian Hodgkinson writes: ‘Objects, so called, are the creation of words. A word does not merely stick a label on a perceived

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object. On the contrary, the perceived object exists only in so far as a word, sounding in the consciousness which is its source, gives it a form in the physical world.’15 Hodgkinson gives the following example. You see a black speck in the sky. You then see that this is an aeroplane. As it gets closer you see it is a Boeing 747. Then you see it is the plane arriving from New York. We assume that what we have seen is the same object through successive stages of perception based on different labels. But according to Advaita Vedanta this is not the case, for the whole standpoint is a product of language. It is the series of words themselves that have created the sequence of sense experiences. The mind then interprets this as the independent motion of an individual thing, that is, the plane arriving from New York. What about the black speck? Was that not an object like the plane that words then labelled? Advaita Vedanta argues no, it was the words ‘black’ and ‘speck’ that created the black speck. For if we think about it, even though we see one in the sky, passengers were not sitting in a black speck. And thus it is chiefly through language that we derive our experience of the objective world – including the plane from New York.16 Is Heidegger saying the same kind of thing when he argues the following? Saying is showing. In everything that speaks to us, in everything that touches us by being spoken and spoken about, in everything that gives itself to us in speaking, or waits for us unspoken, but also in the speaking that we do ourselves, there prevails Showing which causes to appear what is present, and to fade from appearance what is absent. Saying is in no way the linguistic expression added to the phenomena after they have appeared – rather, all radiant appearance and all fading away is grounded in the showing Saying.17

Superficially it would seem that Heidegger is saying the same, but then again the Vedantic position above appears at times to accord more with the out-andout ‘creationist’ view. It is the words ‘black’ and ‘speck’ that create black specks. And as we have seen, where Heidegger leans to what we might call a qualified ‘manifestationist’ stance he is not quite so extreme. But then again this may be a misreading of Advaita Vedanta, or indeed of Heidegger. There are elements of Heidegger’s take on language that are seemingly difficult to distinguish from the Vedantic perspective. Hodgkinson quotes the Chandogya Upanishad that says: ‘All transformation has speech as its basis, and is name only.’18 He adds: Transformation refers to the apparent modification of the one substance of consciousness into a multitude of forms. The world appears as a mass of individual entities – physical objects, living organisms, animals, people, processes, actions,

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events – whereas in reality they are all Brahman. Each of these entities is discriminated in language by a word or a name. But these words are not merely labels, placed, as it were, upon pre-existing things. Language creates the things. Brahman seems to undergo transformation into a multitude, because the agency of words creates the illusion of multiplicity.19

If we were to replace the word Brahman with that of ‘Being’, it would be hard to not see this as consistent with Heidegger’s view on language. From the perspective of ontotheology, Brahman is another word that creates the limiting adjunct Brahman, turning Brahman into a grammatical object, whereas Brahman as Brahman is without any such limits. It would indeed be intriguing to have known Heidegger’s take on Advaita Vedanta in relation to language. However, Taylor, I think, has a point in seeming to locate Heidegger somewhere between the manifestationist and the creationist view, and yet is precisely aware that for this reason he is doing neither and is even moving away from such models (as we will further explore). Language for Heidegger does not manifest and so represent something that is already so ontically. But nor does is it completely create a particular something in its mode of presenting. This, as we will see, is because it reveals what is otherwise hidden so as to bring what is concealed into unconcealment as the twofold-oneness of the ontological difference.

6.2 The law of mediacy This brings us to another related sense of how the term ‘in the beginning was the word’ might be understood. For Heidegger, language as Saying is not the result of discursive thinking, but of poetic experience. Language is seen by Heidegger to be primordial poetry that both founds Being and is founded by Being. In a lecture first given in 1939, Heidegger explores a poem by Friedrich Hölderlin titled ‘As When On a Holiday …’ (Wie Wenn Am Feiertage …). Drawing from the poem, Heidegger equates Being with the holy. He writes: ‘The holy bestows the word, and itself comes into this word. This word is the primal event of the holy.’20 As we will explore in a later chapter, this is akin to saying: ‘Language comes into the world through Being that comes into the world through language.’21 In the poem, Hölderlin refers to ‘nature’ as the wonderfully all-present. It is clear that, as with the holy, Heidegger also equates nature with Being. He writes: ‘Wonderful’ is the omnipresence of nature. She can never be found somewhere in the midst of the real, like one more isolated actual thing. The all-present

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Language and Being is also never the result of combining isolated real things. Even the totality of what is real is at most but the consequence of the all-present. The all-present escapes explanation on the basis of what is real. The all-present cannot ever be indicated by something real. Already present, it imperceptibly prevents any particular intrusion on it. When human deeds attempt this intrusion, or when divine activity is directed to it, they only destroy the simplicity of what is so wonderful. The wonderful withdraws from all producing, and nevertheless it passes through everything with its presence.22

Heidegger adds that nature’s all-presence is not a quantitative comprehension of all that is real, but rather the manner in which nature permeates all real things. But in that nature is divinely beautiful and wonderfully all-present, it embraces the poets that are likewise drawn into its embrace. This, says Heidegger, is a fundamental characteristic of poets: ‘Only because there are those who divine, are there those who belong to nature and correspond to it. Those who co-respond to the wonderfully all-present, to the powerful, divinely beautiful, are “the poets.” ’23 These are not any old poets, but those who correspond with nature and whose being is decided anew on the basis of this correspondence. Heidegger identifies this sense of nature (natura) with the Greek phusis (φύσιϛ). This signifies growth, but not as a quantitative increase, nor development, nor even becoming. Heidegger tells us: Φύσιϛ is an emerging and an arising, a self-opening, which, while rising, at the same time turns back into what has emerged, and so shrouds within itself that which on each occasion gives presence to what is present. Thought as a fundamental word, φύσιϛ signifies a rising into the open: the lighting of that clearing into which anything may enter appearing, present itself in its outline, show itself in its ‘appearance’ (ειδος, ἰδέα) and be present as this or that. Φύσιϛ is that rising-up which goes-back-into-itself; it names the coming to presence of that which dwells in the rising-up and thus comes to presence as open.24

This is understandably cryptic at present, but it is central to Heidegger’s thinking, and we will draw from and elucidate this area more and more as we proceed. In the poem, ‘As When On a Holiday …’ Heidegger notes that nature seems at times to be sleeping and enshrouded in a mournful darkness, which equates with the night. But then daybreak comes, which is the coming of the divine nature that has been at rest. Hölderlin’s line, ‘But now day breaks!’ is a call to something coming, says Heidegger, and this is the pure calling of the poet’s word, the poetic naming that says what the divining poet is compelled to say. Thus compelled, says Heidegger, ‘Hölderlin now names nature “the holy” ’.25

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This is because nature is older than the ages and above the gods. The poet’s naming word is a crucial event in nature, the holy, and for Heidegger, Being. He writes: ‘Because it is named, indeed, even itself demands the naming, the awakening “of nature” comes into the sound of the poetic word. The essence of what is named unveils itself in the word. For by naming the essential, the word separates the essence from the non-essence.’26 Nature then causes the naming through poetic inspiration, and is named by coming into the open or clearing of the poetic word. When this happens nature unveils her own essence as the holy: ‘The clear lets everything emerge into its appearance and illumination, so that everything real, set aflame by it, will stand in its own contour and measure.’27 This happens because of the mediation of the poetic naming word. Actual things, the real, making up what we call ‘a world’, are constituted by mediation so that mediatedness must be present in all. It is immediate, all-present nature that does this: ‘Immediate all-presence is the mediator for everything mediated, that is, for the mediate. The immediate is itself never something mediate; on the other hand, the immediate, strictly speaking, is the mediation, that is, the mediatedness of the mediated, because it renders the mediated possible in its essence.’28 If you could recall from Chapter 5 I have said that language as logos opened up Being, and in the process carried over beings from the immediacy of Being. This frame of reference will become ever clearer as we proceed, for it is a critical reference to the structure that underlies Heidegger’s whole ontological linguistics in that the relation between immediacy and mediacy mirrors that between Being and beings. In Chapter 7, we will also explore the full significance of the open as the clearing. But at this stage we can discern that the immediacy of nature is before (in advance of everything real) and behind all mediation, and is that which is mediated. However, the immediate itself does not ever become mediated, which put another way says that the Beingness of Being and the reason why there are beings is never itself a being: ‘The holy is quietly present as what is coming. That is why it is never represented and grasped as an object.’29 And prior to this Heidegger says: ‘What is always former is the holy (Heilige). It is the primordial, and it remains in itself unbroken and “whole” (heil).’30 But a factor is added when Hölderlin says that mediatedness is the law. This is not meant in a judicial or legalistic sense. Heidegger writes: ‘“Nature” is the allmediating mediatedness, is “the law”. Because nature remains prior to everything, the primordial, the originally unshakeable, she is the “firm law.”’31 Law is contrasted with the gaping, yawning, openness of holy ‘chaos’, which is lawlessness and confusion.

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This is the chasm that sustains no support for anything distinct and grounded, that is the mediated, for it knows no differentiation because: ‘Nothing that is real precedes this opening.’32 Only through what Hölderlin calls ‘The Law of Mediacy’, that is the poet’s naming word, can the immediate stand forth from the open. This is also why in the first stanza of Hölderlin’s poem, ‘The Poet’s Vocation’, the gods cry: ‘O give us the laws, and give us life.’33 The mediation of the poet’s word in song bears witness and conveys the holy: ‘The poets must leave to the immediate its immediacy, and yet also take upon themselves its mediation as their only task.’34 But in the process of the holy becoming word, its innermost essence begins to vacillate, and by losing its fixed anchor the law is endangered. The endurance of the holy is threatened with annihilation by the mediation that is the word of the poet’s song, because it is potentially deprived of its immediateness. But what springs from the origin, though shaking it deeply, cannot do anything against the origin and it remains the firm law. Here in the poet’s calling is the intimacy between the immediate and the mediate. The process whereby the holy becomes word is the beginning: The beginning is an arising, a bestowal, that is never lost or ended, but is always only a more magnificent beginning, a more primordial intimacy. In remaining firm, the holy is to be spoken. Its remaining, however, never signifies the empty endurance of something present at hand: It is the coming of the beginning. Before this, as what is former, nothing more primordial can be thought. As coming, abiding is the primordiality of the beginning before which nothing else can be thought.35

What is coming then is said in its coming through the poet’s calling word. Thus as we began this section: ‘The holy bestows the word, and itself comes into this word.’36 Nature, the holy, the immediate, or Being is not adulterated through mediation, but actually requires this as the scene of its emerging from out of concealment and into unconcealment. The mediating scene of the holy is language. The poet’s vocation and role in this is as mediator.

6.3 The irruption of occasioning With the intention of getting back to ‘things themselves’, phenomenology is the science or study of phenomena. The word ‘phenomena’ is the plural of ‘phenomenon’, which means: ‘to show, make appear’. It is derived from the Greek phainomenon. The element phenol, from the Greek phainein, also means ‘to shine’. The root it would seem refers to ‘coming to light’. Phrases that include this element are translated as: cause to appear, show by bearing,

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make known, uncover, reveal, disclose, show forth, ring clear to the ear, come into being, manifest, etc.37 In short, a phenomenon is literally ‘a remarkable appearance’. Gripped by the sheer fact of appearing as appearing, it is no surprise that Coleridge whose quotation has opened this study first coined the word ‘phenomenal’, which still conveys the sense of something being remarkable. But while phenomenology studies the appearance of things as things, we are here strongly suggesting that the primary origin of all phenomena is language. Hence Kearney says of language that it is ‘the horizon of meaning wherein all things appear to us qua phenomena. Consequently, if phenomenology is precisely the ‘science of appearing as appearing’ (phainesthai), language is its ultimate horizon: the act of bringing things to light as appearances (phainomena)’.38 We have already quoted Heidegger above to say: ‘Saying is in no way the linguistic expression added to the phenomena after they have appeared – rather, all radiant appearance and all fading away is grounded in the showing Saying.’39 Saying as showing, to Heidegger’s thinking, reveals and thus lets appear. Language’s Saying is a ‘letting see’ (sehen lassen). This ‘letting see’ allows things to arrive from out of Being, qua phenomena. The unfolding of Being refers in one sense to nature, as phusis, explored above. This refers to ‘origin’ or ‘birth’, and in another respect points to ‘the natural form or constitution of a person or thing as the result of growth’.40 The essence of this suggests, perhaps, the originating power of nature, on account of which we say something is ‘natural’. Phusis can also mean the ‘nature’, as in essence, of a thing. The base phu, means ‘to grow, to be’. All in all, phusis refers to nature’s own dynamic drive to produce and grow. Halliburton refers to this as ‘a poetry without poets – the blooming of a blossom, the coming out of a butterfly from a cocoon, the plummeting of a waterfall when the snow begins to melt’.41 And the meaning of phusis is said to be captured perhaps by the title of Dylan Thomas’ poem, ‘The force that through the green fuse drives the flower’. But while phusis refers to a natural growth that erupts in itself (en heautōi), there is another sense in which the Greeks understood Being to unfold. This is poiēsis, wherein something ‘irrupts’ (not erupts) ‘in another’ (en allōi). Where phusis ‘erupts’ and so bursts out of itself, as an oak tree does from the acorn, or the moth does from the chrysalis, poiēsis’s irruption suggests a bursting into another. In this respect poiēsis refers to what Heidegger says is an ‘occasioning’ that calls something into existence that was not there before, and does so through some other. For Heidegger, language is arguably the supreme example of this occasioning. Language does not erupt in and out

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of itself as an act of phusis, rather it irrupts or bursts into human speaking within the occasioning of poiēsis. This occasioning of poiēsis is the poetic inspiration discussed above. If language is seen to irrupt or burst into humanity, then which, we might ask, is caused by which? Is language caused by humankind in the very act of speaking? The answer from Heidegger is yes, but only in a certain sense and not in the way we usually understand it. As we will see, the essence of what makes us human is for Heidegger also caused by language, which grants us our identity as the speakingbeing. Taylor explores a similar area when speaking of the ontic status of the space of expression.42 This asks where the expression of language is actually taking place. Does the expression of language take place outside of humanity and irrupt into so as to in effect present us, or inside of humanity and erupt out of so as to represent us? He writes: The space of expression is not the same as, that is, it can’t be reduced to either ordinary physical space or inner ‘psychic’ space, the domain of the ‘mind’ on the classic epistemological construal. It is not the same as the first, because it only gets set up between speakers. (It is Dasein-related). It is not the same as the second, because it can’t be placed ‘within’ minds, but is out between the interlocutors. … In conversation, a public or common space gets set up, in which the interlocutors are together.43

This raises the question of how we actually understand the meaning of causation. The word ‘cause’ is apt to be misconstrued. A cause, for example, is typically seen as that which produces an effect, and therefore that which gives rise to an action, a phenomenon or condition. We usually understand it as the impetus or driving force that makes the effect happen. But if we reflect on this, it is not so simple to say what in any given context the impetus was. Again, we tend to see it as that which initiates the movement as the prime mover. But we can ask what impelled the driving force? When we do this the impetus is broadened and it includes not only the mover but also that which stirred or moved the mover as purpose or setting forth. We might say that this caused the cause. This might be written off by some as circuitous semantics, but it serves to highlight a wider traditional understanding of causation, which does not limit it to that which simply ‘brings about’. Drawing from Aristotle, Heidegger therefore reminds us: For centuries philosophy has taught that there are four causes: (1) the causa materialis, the material, the matter out of which, for example, a silver chalice is made; (2) the causa formalis, the form, the shape into which the material

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enters; (3) the causa finalis, the end, for example, the sacrificial rite in relation to which the required chalice is determined as to its form and matter; (4) the causa efficiens, which brings about the effect that is the finished, actual chalice, in this instance, the silversmith.44

We tend to understand only the causa efficiens as the cause of something, so much so, that the other three are largely no longer considered to be causes at all. And this becomes the precedent for interpreting all causality. This, argues Heidegger, is because later ages understood ‘causality’ in terms of ‘bringing about and effecting’, but this is not how Greek thought understood it. He asserts: ‘What we call cause (Ursache) and the Romans call causa is called aition by the Greeks, that to which something else is indebted (das, was ein anderes verschuldet). The four causes are the ways, all belonging at once to each other, of being responsible for something else.’45 Heidegger uses a silver chalice as an example of the verb aitiō, which he translates as ‘to occasion’. He also discusses how all the causes are co-responsible for the chalice. The silver material, the form of chalice, the circumscribing end and the silversmith are all responsible for the sacrificial vessel. Heidegger writes: ‘Thus four ways of owing hold sway in the sacrificial vessel that lies ready before us. They differ from one another, yet they belong together.’46 Heidegger then asks: ‘What unites them from the beginning? In what does this playing in unison of the four ways of being responsible play? What is the source of the unity of the four causes? What, after all, does this owing and being responsible mean, thought as the Greeks thought it?’47 The answer is poiēsis. Heidegger refers to poiēsis through a quotation from Plato: ‘Every occasion for whatever passes beyond the nonpresent and goes forward into presencing is poiēsis, bringing forth. (Her-vor-bringen).’48 This passage is taken from Plato’s Symposium, and Benjamin Jowett translates the same line as saying: ‘All creation or passage of non-being into being is poetry or making.’49 For Heidegger, both phusis and poiēsis refer to a ‘bringing forth’ into presencing. They are each in different respects processes of creation. We might say that phusis is the natural way that Being unfolds and brings forth. This is poetry without poets. But then of course there is poetry with poets. This is poiēsis. Poiēsis (note that this includes all art as making and not simply poetry [poesie] as we understand it) is the occasioning as a bringing forth into presencing that unifiedly governs the four causes. Language for Heidegger, as we will come to see, is the ultimate form of poiēsis, bringing forth, or occasioning, and not simply this or that cause within it.

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At this point then we can tentatively put forward the notion that man as the speaker of language, and therefore the causa efficiens, is ‘co-responsible’ for language’s bringing forth. Language is Dasein-related and not Dasein-centred. A helpful analogy here comes from Heidegger saying that ‘truth is not primarily the truth of man or Dasein, but the truth of being. (If man is a light bulb, being is electricity)’.50 We have already touched upon the sense of ‘correspondence’ in Chapter 2 in terms of our need to be answerable to the question of Being, and in this chapter when referring to the poet’s correspondence with nature. Likewise in this context humanity is co-responsible for language, which, importantly, is not the same as saying humanity is solely responsible. For Heidegger, man as the speaking-being appears to be more an effect of language than its sole cause. Rather than being its instigator, he is only a part of its disclosure in respect of being co-respondent. As speakers of language, we are each a corresponder (die Entsprechenden). Drawing on this sense of ‘correspondence’ is also why for Heidegger, as we will come to explore in more detail, man only speaks in that he first hears and then gives reply to (or answers to) language speaking. Language speaks. Throughout his reflections on language, Heidegger is at pains to show that language is not the result of mere human expression. Man is not the rational, sovereign ego who happens to speak his mind. Steiner writes: For Descartes, truth is determined and validated by certainty. Certainty, in turn, is located in the ego. The self becomes the hub of reality and relates to the world outside itself in an exploratory, necessarily exploitative, way. As knower and user, the ego is predator. For Heidegger, on the contrary, the human person and self-consciousness are not the centre, the assessors of existence. Man is only a privileged listener and respondent to existence.51

In his ‘Letter on Humanism’, Heidegger also asserts that those who think and create with words are the ‘guardians’ of the house of Being, and that man is the ‘shepherd’ of Being.52

7

The Flower of the Mouth

7.1 Unconcealment and the clearing We have seen that for Heidegger, poiēsis occasions or brings forth the truth of beings from out of Being. And I have suggested that according to his thinking language is the ultimate form of poiēsis in terms of being a ‘letting see’ that allows things to first arrive as things from out of Being qua phenomena. In bringing forth beings from out of Being, language as poiēsis unveils, uncovers, discloses and manifests. Language therefore brings (what become in the process) things from out of concealment and into unconcealment. Saying as a showing is the condition that is necessary for beings to come to be determined as beings. They are not already present in a state of concealment, but appear and so come to be through unconcealment.1 Heidegger refers to concealment through the Greek word lēthē, and to unconcealment or unhidden through the words alētheia or alēthēs, respectively.2 Traditionally, truth (veritas) was seen as an adaequatio. This refers to the correctness or conformity between a thing and the intellect, in that the understanding must be ‘adequate’ to the thing known. This view was taken up by Aquinas drawing largely from Aristotle, Augustine and Avicenna. The last of the above three, for example, writes: ‘The truth of a thing is the property of the being of each thing which has been established in it.’3 What does this mean? For Aquinas, like Aristotle, perception and abstract thought involve separating the form of a thing from its material conditions. For example, the form ‘dog’ from that particular Labrador. The form ‘dog’ comes from the individual essence of the Labrador. The intellect abstracts a universal essence from the distinct but similar essences of individual things. Consequently, the logical truth of the human intellect is based on the ontological truth in things.4 But for Heidegger, truth as adaequatio was derivative and so secondary. For him a more primal truth is manifest or revealed through the unconcealment of alētheia, which serves

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to bring forth into the open, thus causing to appear what has previously been hidden. This event of unconcealment or alētheia Heidegger calls the lichtung. This, he tells us, borrowing a word from Goethe, is a ‘primal phenomenon’ (Urphänomen).5 He then quotes from Goethe’s Maxims and Reflections, no. 993: ‘Look for nothing behind phenomena: they themselves are what is to be learned.’6 The words lichtung and lichten are derived from licht, meaning ‘light’. Heidegger’s reference to light is influenced here by Plato’s analogy of the cave, where prisoners ascending from the shadows pass from the darkness of ignorance to the light of knowledge. The words lichtung and lichten refer to a ‘clearing’ or a ‘glade’ in a forest, and given that they stem from licht, Heidegger uses the words in the sense of ‘to light(en)’ and ‘light(en)ing’.7 Accordingly, Heidegger scholars often translate lichtung as ‘lightning-clearing’. Heidegger tells us that the German word lichtung derives from the French clairière, and accords with the older words Waldung (foresting) and Felding (fielding). He continues: The forest clearing [Lichtung] is experienced in contrast to dense forest, called Dickung in our older language. ... The adjective licht is the same word as ‘light’. To lighten something means to make it light, free and open, e.g. to make the forest free of trees at one place. The free space thus originating is the clearing. ... Light can stream into the clearing, into its openness, and let brightness play with darkness in it. But light never first creates the clearing. Rather, light presupposes it. However, the clearing, the open region, is not only free for brightness and darkness but also for resonance and echo, for sound and the diminishing of sound. The clearing is the open region for everything that becomes present and absent.8

While Heidegger is perhaps looking to emphasize the disclosive shine of phenomena presencing as appearance through the word lichtung, he does not overlook that the ‘lightning-clearing’ of lichtung also happens as concealment or Verbergung. Hence there is brightness and darkness, sound and diminishing sound, presence and absence. This is because truth as unconcealment, the Greek alētheia and German unverborgenheit, only makes sense in relation to the concealment or hiddenness from which it emerges. Hence Heidegger writes: ‘This means: the open place in the midst of beings, the clearing, is never a rigid stage with a permanently raised curtain on which the play of beings runs its course.’9 Regarding this rigid stage with a permanently raised curtain, Heidegger immediately adds that truth does not belong to factual things or propositions. This sense of truth it would seem is derived from that discussed above as adaequatio, and also points to truth understood as propositional assertions

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explored hitherto.10 Truth then, for Heidegger, happens as a ‘lighting-concealing’ (lichtende Verbergung), reminding us that the privative un- in un-concealment (unverborgenheit) and likewise the a- of a-lētheia always depend on that which the prefix says it is not. This concealment remains as such until its aspects are called forth and shown into appearance by language’s Saying. This Saying has the effect of freeing ‘this’ or ‘that’ aspect as a thing in the world. Kelly, for example, writes: ‘For Heidegger, hiddenness is never merely negative, but is the soil out of which revelation grows. Something is promised in language, a promise which is as the unspoken, the pregnant darkness out of which the light of revelation shines.’11 Yet to say, as I have said above, that concealment remains as such until its aspects are called forth and shown into appearance by language’s Saying requires further elucidation. For concealment also remains as concealment despite being called forth and shown. Halliburton explains: ‘Concealment is not something shed like a coat or left behind like the darkness of the tunnel when the train comes forth; rather, it adheres to what emerges as a condition of emergence, and it persists as the future possibility of a return to concealment.’12 Here a sense of mystery remains in both Being and in words, a mystery that metaphysics wishes to eliminate by using words to represent exact definitions in the form of concepts. Werner Marx says something similar, when he writes of ‘Saying’, that it ‘has its source in that which must remain unsaid: the “unsaid”. Thus, all “giving” and “granting” of that which is linguistically present comes from lethe, from concealment’.13 We have then a mutually dependent play between concealment and non-concealment: ‘Being as the process of non-concealments is that which permits beings to become nonconcealed (positivity), although the process is so permeated by “not” that Being itself remains concealed (negativity). To think Being in its truth, then, is to think it in terms of both positivity and negativity at once.’14 Relevant it seems to this ‘lighting-concealing’, Heidegger titled six essays published in 1950, Holzwege, which in English was translated loosely as Off the Beaten Track. The English translators note in their preface: ‘Heidegger chose a term that carefully balances positive and negative implications.’15 The word Holzwege means ‘timber tracks’ or ‘forest paths’. A translation of Heidegger’s own note on the title reads: ‘Wood’ is an old name for forest. In the wood there are paths, mostly overgrown, that come to an abrupt stop where the wood is untrodden. They are called Holzwege. Each goes its separate way, though within the same forest. It often appears as if one is identical to another. But it only appears so. Woodcutters and forest keepers know these paths. They know what it means to be on a Holzweg.16

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What unfolds in language then is the illuminative appearance of Being as lichtung. The lichtung as clearing or glade is akin to the woodsman’s trail (Holzwege) in the forest. It is the lit-darkness. Based on all we have explored hitherto, we are in a better position to tentatively glimpse what it is that language does. Rather than merely stand for what is already manifest, language first brings Being as this or that being into the open of the clearing as unconcealment. Heidegger writes: Language alone brings what is, as something that is, into the Open for the first time. Where there is no language, as in the being of stone, plant, and animal, there is also no openness of what is, and consequently no openness of that which is not and of the empty. Language, by naming beings for the first time, first brings beings to word and to appearance. Only this nominates beings to their being from out of their being. Such saying is a projecting of the clearing, in which announcement is made of what it is that beings come into the Open as. Projecting is the release of a throw by which unconcealedness submits and infuses itself into what is as such. This projective announcement forthwith becomes a renunciation of all the dim confusion in which what is veils and withdraws itself.17

7.2 Speaking petals Following the above passage, Heidegger continues: Projective saying is poetry: the saying of world and earth. ... Actual language at any given moment is the happening of this saying, in which a people’s world historically arises for it and the earth is preserved as that which remains closed. ... In such saying, the concepts of an historical people’s nature, i.e., of its belonging to world history, are formed for that folk, before it.18

In his essay, ‘The Nature of Language’, Heidegger refers to different manners of speaking in different sections of the country. This of course typically points to what we call ‘dialect’, as the way in which a specific region or social group talks with words, or to ‘accent’, as the way in which a country, area or social class sounds with words. Heidegger notes that in Germany these different manners of speaking are called Mundarten, which translates as modes of the mouth. He writes: Those differences do not solely nor primarily grow out of different movement patterns of the organs of speech. The landscape, and that means the earth,

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speaks in them, differently each time. But the mouth is not merely a kind of organ of the body understood as an organism – body and mouth are part of the earth’s flow and growth in which we mortals flourish, and from which we receive the soundness of our roots. If we lose the earth, of course, we also lose the roots.19

The significance of this is that words are earthy and sensuous, historical and cultural, with roots going down to the soil, and not abstract concepts. With this, Heidegger then quotes the fifth stanza of Hölderlin’s hymn ‘Germania’, where the eagle of Zeus is made to say to ‘the quietest daughter of God’: And secretly, while you dreamed, at noon, Departing I left a token of friendship, The flower of the mouth behind, and lonely you spoke. Yet you, the greatly blessed, with the rivers too Dispatched a wealth of golden words, and they well unceasing Into all regions now.20

Heidegger responds to this with the phrase, ‘Language is the flower of the mouth’, and adds: ‘In language the earth blossoms toward the bloom of the sky.’21 He then quotes the first stanza of an elegy from Hölderlin, titled ‘Walk in the Country’: Therefore I even hope it may come to pass, When we begin what we wish for and our tongue loosens, And the word has been found and the heart has opened, And from ecstatic brows springs a higher reflection, That the sky’s blooms may blossom even as do our own, And the luminous sky open to opened eyes.22

These verses need to be thought in the light of his lectures, says Heidegger, so that the audience can see ‘how the nature of language as Saying, as that which moves all things, here announces itself ’.23 Heidegger adds that ‘one word that the poet says about the word must not be passed over’.24 This, presumably, is the word ‘flower’. He next quotes lines from the end of the fifth stanza of another elegy from Hölderlin, namely, ‘Bread and Wine’: Such is man; when the wealth is there, and no less than god in Person tends him with gifts, blind he remains, unaware. First he must suffer; but now he names his most treasured possession, Now for it words like flowers leaping alive he must find.25

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Once again, says Heidegger, ‘words like flowers’. The word, he adds, is given back into the keeping of the source of its being. He continues, in a way that seems to show just how language as poiēsis mirrors phusis: When the word is called the mouth’s flower and its blossom, we hear the sound of language rising like the earth. From whence? From Saying in which it comes to pass that World is made to appear. The sound rings out in the resounding assembly call which, open to the Open, makes World appear in all things. The sounding of the voice is then no longer only of the order of physical organs. It is released now from the perspective of the physiological-physical explanation in terms of purely phonetic data. The sound of language, its earthiness is held with the harmony that attunes the regions of the world’s structure, playing them in chorus.26

Language like a blossoming flower then rises like the earth from Saying. In this respect, language as the sound of the voice is not simply phonetic data from a physiological organ. Speaking comes from language’s own Saying. This is nature or phusis as logos, namely, the gathering of the One is All. Drawing from Heidegger’s Introduction to Metaphysics, Inwood helpfully writes: ‘Man became an “animal having logos [discourse, reason]”; originally phusis was “logos [gathering, collection] having man.” ’27 In his ‘A Dialogue On Language’, Heidegger explores language in a way that is very similar to Hölderlin’s understanding of language as ‘the flower of the mouth’. He tentatively asks Professor Tezuka (with whom he is in dialogue) a preliminary question that has, he says, troubled him for a long time and compels him to ask: ‘What does the Japanese world understand by language? Asked still more cautiously: Do you have in your language a word for what we call language? If not, how do you experience what with us is called language?’28 Tezuka answers by saying that no one has ever asked him that question. He also adds that he is of the view that no one in the Japanese world pays any heed to that question. This being so, Tezuka asks for a few minutes to ponder over the question. He then closes his eyes, lowers his head and sinks into a long reflection. Heidegger waits until his guest is ready to resume the conversation. Tezuka then replies by saying: ‘There is a Japanese word that says the essential being of language, rather than being of use as a name for speaking and for language.’29 Heidegger replies: ‘The matter itself requires that, because the essential being of language cannot be anything linguistic. The same holds true for the phrase “house of Being.”’30 Tezuka states that the word he has in mind gives a ‘hint’ of the nature of language. Still, some time passes in the dialogue before Tezuka returns to

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the Japanese word that says the essential being of language. This, it is stated, is because the force of the word will surprise, and has consequently held Tezuka captive ever since being asked the question. Nevertheless, he is emboldened to say the word only if it is seen in terms of a ‘hint’, as opposed to a sign in the sense of mere signification. Heidegger acknowledges the hesitation, and does not want to urge on Tezuka too rashly. Heidegger then asserts: ‘I shall not hide from you that you are throwing me into a state of great agitation, especially because all my efforts to get an answer to my question from language experts and linguistic scholars of language have so far been in vain.’31 It is, however, still much later in the dialogue, precisely when Tezuka acknowledges that Heidegger is hearing his ‘probing intimations’, that he feels confident enough to drop his hesitations in attempting to answer Heidegger’s earlier question. He states: ‘Up to this moment I have shied away from that word, because I must give a translation which makes our word for language look like a mere pictograph, to wit, something that belongs within the precincts of conceptual ideas; for European science and its philosophy try to grasp the nature of language only by way of concepts.’32 Ever more eager to know the word that Tezuka has on his lips, Heidegger asks boldly: ‘What is the Japanese word for “language”?’33 Still hesitating, Tezuka finally says: ‘It is Koto ba.’34 He then explains within the dialogue what it is this word says. He begins with the element ba, saying: ‘Ba means leaves, including and especially the leaves of a blossom – petals. Think of cherry blossoms or plum blossoms.’35 Heidegger then asks after the first element, Koto, but this is not so easy to say. And just as Tezuka struggles to speak, we can be forgiven for struggling to understand his reply. Even Heidegger later admits that he requires further clarification, in order to think at all adequately the word Koto ba. At first, Tezuka speaks of the Japanese word Iki, which he describes as: ‘The pure delight of the beckoning stillness.’36 This follows an earlier description of Iki, which saw it metaphysically as the ‘sensuous radiance through whose lively delight there breaks the radiance of something suprasensuous’.37 This, he says, is brought into its own by the reign of the breath of stillness, which in turns brings the delight. He then states that Koto ‘always also names that which in the event gives delight, that which uniquely in each unrepeatable moment comes to radiance in the fullness of its grace’.38 This appears to understand language in a way analogous to what Heidegger calls the ‘Owning Event’ (Er-eignis), which we will come to explore in Chapter 11. For the time being, it will suffice to say that Koto is perhaps also akin to the lichtung, or ‘lightning-clearing’ discussed above. Koto, we might venture to say, is the delightful, uniquely unrepeatable moment

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of illumination and radiance, brought about by the lit-darkness that occurs as unconcealment when the Saying of language shows. Tezuka then mentions the Greek word charis, which Heidegger had used in his work, ‘Poetically Man Dwells’ (… dichterisch wohnet der Mensch). The word charis was quoted by Heidegger in a passage from Sophocles, and then translated by Heidegger as ‘graciousness’. This, says Tezuka, serves to elucidate what he is struggling to say. Heidegger adds that he had wanted to say in that work that charis is there called tikousa, referring, he says, to that which brings forward and forth. This further point helps Tezuka to say more clearly what Koto is. Much earlier in the dialogue, when discussing the nature of Iki, the two speakers had spoken of the Western metaphysical distinction between the aistheton (what can be perceived by the senses), which allows the noeton (the nonsensuous) to shine through. These terms are derived from European aesthetics, which Count Kuki, a deceased friend of the two speakers, had previously employed to try and define Iki. In a similar fashion, the Japanese say Iro, which is colour, and Ku, which is emptiness, the open, the sky. Accordingly, they say: ‘without Iro, no Ku.’ Likewise, Westerners might say ‘without the aistheton (sensed), no noeton (nonsensuous).’ Here I am reminded of a scholastic maxim influenced by Aristotle’s view that experienced universals derive from sense-perception. The maxim says: There is nothing in the understanding which was not prior in the senses. However, Tezuka now states that Iro means more than colour and whatever can be perceived by the senses, and Ku as the open or sky’s emptiness means much more than the suprasensible. With this, Tezuka asserts that the two words Iro and Ku hint at the source from which the mutual interplay of the two comes to pass. This source as mutual interplay is Koto, as the happening of the lightening message of the graciousness that brings forth. From here, Tezuka is able to say that Koto is the ‘holding sway over that which needs the shelter of all that flourishes and flowers’.39 The shelter spoken of here would appear to be a veiled reference to Heidegger’s phrase ‘the house of Being’. Heidegger then asks, as the name for language: What does Koto ba say? Tezuka replies: ‘Language, heard through this word, is: the petals that stem from Koto.’40 This pleases Heidegger immensely, and he refers to it as a wondrous word. He confirms that it names something other than our own names: language, glossa, lingua, langue. When I in turn spoke about this with a Japanese friend, she told me that Koto ba literally says ‘to utter leaves’ or ‘to speak petals.’ This equates with why for Heidegger, drawing on Hölderlin, language is the flower of the mouth.

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7.3 Language as saying Although Heidegger is referring to what we usually call language, he is aware that the word ‘language’ does not name the essence of what language is. He tells us that for a long time he has ‘been loth to use the word “language” when thinking on its nature’.41 This is why he is both intrigued and excited by the Japanese word Koto ba, as it seems to say more of language than the word ‘language’ does itself. Tezuka then asks Heidegger if he can think of a ‘more fitting word’ than language? In reply, Heidegger says that he thinks he has found this word, and adds: ‘But I would guard it against being used as a current tag, and corrupted to signify a concept.’42 Tezuka asks what word Heidegger uses? Heidegger replies: ‘The word “Saying.” It means: saying and what is said in it and what is to be said.’43 Tezuka presses Heidegger further, asking what does ‘say’ mean. Again Heidegger replies: ‘Probably the same as “show” in the sense of: let appear and let shine, but in the manner of hinting.’44 In this way, for Heidegger, ‘Saying’ is akin to the Japanese term Koto ba. Saying is therefore a flowering or flourishing that lets things as things appear and shine. By using the word ‘Saying’ (Sage), which is related to the word sehen, ‘to let see’ or ‘to show’, Heidegger is deliberately wanting to distinguish it from the word Aussage or ‘assertion’ that, as we have explored, asserts a proposition. But it is also distinct from ‘speaking’, which the word ‘language’ as essentially meaning ‘tongue’ appears to reference. As we will see, saying is a showing prior to speaking. And furthermore, for Heidegger: ‘We do not merely speak the language – we speak by way of it. We can do so solely because we always have already listened to the language. What do we hear there? We hear language speaking.’45 Because Heidegger is wanting to guard against the word ‘Saying’ being used as a current tag, and so becoming a conceptual catchword just as the phrase ‘house of Being’ had, he asks Tezuka to forgive him if he is ‘sparing with indications that could perhaps lead to a discussion of the nature of Saying’.46 This is also why Heidegger has been, he says, reluctant to allow a particular lecture on this subject to appear in print.47 Tezuka adds that he has read a transcript of that lecture, to which Heidegger says: ‘Such transcripts, even if made carefully, remain dubious sources … and any transcript of that lecture is, anyway, a distortion of its saying.’48 Tezuka asks what Heidegger means by such a harsh judgement? Heidegger says that it is not a judgement about transcripts: ‘But about an unclear characterisation of the lecture.’49 When asked, how so? Heidegger states that the lecture is not speaking about language.

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Heidegger, much taken by the term Koto ba, says: ‘Petals that stem from Koto. Imagination would like to roam away into still unexperienced realms when this word begins its saying.’50 These unexperienced realms refer to the ‘wellspring’ of thinking, the ‘single source’ that is the concealed essence of all language worlds. But neither Heidegger nor Tezuka are at that wellspring, they are only on their way to it. For this reason, then, Heidegger is reluctant to come out and say what language is as Saying. And he is disturbed by the fact that this is what others have looked for in a transcript of his work on language, just as they had prior to this with other works that led them to misinterpret the meaning of the term ‘house of Being’. It is worth noting that in his dialogue with Tezuka, Heidegger says that his calling language the house of Being was clumsy.51 It is for this reason that Heidegger is at pains to avoid a distortion of what he calls provisional remarks about language. Heidegger wishes to acknowledge and to a certain extent preserve the mystery of Saying. He is not speaking about language. He is not trying to get to the bottom of it by objectively defining what it is. This is because he knows such a move is a false one. Objectively defining language does not get to the bottom of what it is at all. Rather, it moves us further away from language as language. This I would add is proven time and time again by theory after theory that attempts to capture what language is, but in so doing describes language in terms of something other than language. Heidegger does not want to make the same mistake by attempting to clarify how saying differs from speaking, with the intention that this new definition or description will get closer to the truth of language. Rather than explain what he thinks language is, he wishes rather to guard what he calls ‘the purity of the mystery’s wellspring’.52 This, of course, is the kind of language that infuriates many of his critics, who are able to respond by saying that this is just meaningless, mystical vapour. It does not say anything and so proves that Heidegger has nothing to say. However, Heidegger acknowledges that we must still strive to speak about language. His concern is that this speaking does not take the form of what he calls a ‘scientific dissertation’. Heidegger then wonders if there is really any such thing as speaking about language. This no doubt sounds bizarre, but it gets to the very heart of what Heidegger is wishing to say, or more accurately ‘not to say’ about language. He is deliberately asking the question: Can we speak about language? Tezuka notes that what they are doing now is evidence that there is a speaking about language. Heidegger acknowledges this by saying: ‘All too much, I am afraid.’53 Here, Tezuka is somewhat lost, and does not understand why Heidegger hesitates to speak. It

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seems that for Tezuka we must risk speaking about language, just so long as the questioning of the movement does not congeal into what Heidegger has called scientific dissertation. But Heidegger is suspicious of any form of speaking about language. This is because to do so: ‘Turns language almost inevitably into an object.’54 For Heidegger the problem does not just lie with what it is we say language is. We might say many things, some things more accurate than others. Regardless of these different definitions, the problem seems to lie more with what we intend when we attempt to say what language is. Whatever language is captured as, all these endeavours to grasp language have the same end in mind. They want to objectify language, and in so doing they want to say ‘this’ or ‘that’ object is what language definitively is. Following Heidegger’s assertion that speaking about language inevitably turns it into an object, Tezuka notes that when this happens, language’s own reality vanishes. Heidegger adds that this is because we have taken a position above language. This, it appears, is a thinly veiled critique of meta-language, namely, language used to examine language and which is thus a language making statements about an object language. For Heidegger, as we will see, language can never be objectified. And that with such an objectifying or reductive move, we no longer hear from language.55 As we will come to explore, to ‘hear from language’ is a significant point in Heidegger’s reflections on language. In order to stay with language’s reality and not take up a position above language by objectifying it, we need to speak from rather than about language. This can only happen, says Heidegger, in the form of a dialogue. This is not a dialogue in the manner of that between Heidegger and Tezuka, but a dialogue sui generis that is from out of the nature of language. This dialogue then is not mere talk between people. It is Saying that brings about the dialogue. Heidegger says that he had previously identified this dialogue with a variation of the ‘hermeneutic circle’. Here, for Heidegger, there is a relation between the message and the message bearer or messenger. The message bearer must come from the message, this is to say, that man’s speaking must come from language’s Saying. But having said this, Heidegger wants to avoid the superficiality of the term ‘hermeneutic circle’, again from a fear that it will become a conceptualizing catchword. Such a dialogue, between man as the messenger and language as the message, is how any genuine movement towards the nature of language is to take place. In this way, Saying does the speaking. This does not say about language but of language. And with this being so, there would be more silence on our behalf than talk. Heidegger even refers to this as a silence about silence, which

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Tezuka calls authentic saying. This then is why I have said above that Saying is a showing prior to speaking. And this is why it is that language speaks before, and in order that man speaks. Tezuka then asks Heidegger if they are not attempting the impossible. Heidegger replies: ‘Indeed – so long as man has not yet been given the pure gift of the messenger’s course that the message needs which grants to man the unconcealment of the two-fold.’56 Put another way, this means that any authentic movement towards the nature of Saying can only occur when man receives the gift that he needs to be man and that language needs to be language. This brings about the unconcealing nature of the twofold, touched upon in previous chapters, and which we will discuss from different angles in the ensuing chapters. Tezuka describes the dialogue between the message and the messenger, as akin to what an unknown Japanese poet refers to as the intermingling scent of cherry blossom and plum blossom on the same branch. This is a delicate reference to the echo of the nature of language, which Koto ba names as petals stemming and flourishing from the lightning message of the graciousness that brings forth. The graciousness comes from language, because language speaks. But, says Heidegger: ‘Who would find in all this a serviceable clarification of the nature of language?’57 Tezuka responds by saying that this nature will never be found: ‘As long as we demand information in the form of theorems and cue words.’58 Heidegger adds that many could be drawn into what he calls the ‘prologue’ to a messenger’s course, if only he keeps himself ready for a dialogue with language. Tezuka then wonders if Heidegger and himself have tried to follow this course that entrusts itself to the nature of Saying. Highlighting the un-wilful activity of this course, Heidegger notes it promises and dedicates itself to the nature of Saying. He adds that they should be glad if it not only seems so, but actually is so. Mugerauer, speaking of the nature of Heidegger’s and Tezuka’s dialogue, notes: ‘Clearly we are in the bower of language, where language speaks and sings.’59 ‘If this is indeed the case, what, then?’, Tezuka asks Heidegger. Heidegger tells him that it will be the farewell of all ‘it is’. This is a reference to the conceptual objectification of the world. Instead there will be a move to what Heidegger calls the ‘coming of what has been’. ‘Is this not the past that has gone?’, asks Tezuka. Heidegger replies: ‘The passing of the past is something else than what has been.’60 This points to the message as a gathering that endures, the logos as Saying, it would seem, which needs us as messengers. Mugerauer writes: Thus, the dialogue on language articulates the originary playful relation of respect which allows mystery and silence, where, for example, man as thinker

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allows language to hide, trusting that in its own way and time it will show itself to play – and that it will allow the free play for humanity, whom it needs and who needs to seek it.61

We can see from the above that Heidegger is careful for us not to think that we can grasp language conceptually. Terms such as Koto ba and ‘house of Being’ are not attempts to seize what language is through definitional assertions. It is clear and will become clearer that Heidegger is moving more towards a Zen-like encounter with language.

8

The Dif-ference that Tears and Bears

8.1 A division in the middle In Chapter 6, I have briefly touched upon Hölderlin’s understanding of the Word as the Law of Mediacy. This chapter will focus in more detail upon the meaning and significance of language as mediation. We more usually understand ‘mediation’ in terms of an intervening act of arbitration. Accordingly, the emphasis is placed upon the middle in a division. Thus mediation frequently refers to the intervention of the ‘go-between’. We can see this at work if we consider, for example, the role of the US president as the arbitrator between Israel and Palestine, or the mediating third party helping to settle disputes between divorcing parties. However, the etymology of the word ‘mediation’, coming from the Latin mediātiō, does not mean the middle in a division, but rather a division in the middle.1 Understood as a division in the middle, it is the middle that generates the division, rather than being merely placed between an already existing divide. An example that serves to illustrate the difference between the middle in a division and a division in the middle is a river. More usually when looking at a river we tend to assume that it has come to flow between the two banks. The river is therefore seen to be the middle in a division. And to the eye this is of course the case. But if we reflect a little, it is more likely that the banks are in fact there because of the initial cut of the river. The river is more truly a division in the middle. In Chapter 1, we briefly discussed the contrast between Being per se and beings. This, it was stated, is known as the ‘ontological difference’. As the primordial act of mediation, language calls from out of Being what subsequently become things in the world, as the world of things. Thus language is seen to be the disclosing scene of Being’s hiddenness. Concealed Being comes into the radiant open when bodied forth by language, and thus shown as this or that thing. Being is called

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forth and thus disclosed by language, which only is as this disclosure of Being.2 Being and beings each rely upon the other in a joint dependence that serves to bring them both to fulfilment. It is this relation that first allows things to exist, that is, to ‘stand out’ of Being per se so as to become ‘this’ example of being, and ‘that’ example of being. Thus language’s act of bodying forth being from out of Being effects an ontological difference between Being (as it is in itself) and beings. In so doing, language’s Saying is a division in the middle, which is to say, language is like the river that occasions the two banks between which the river only appears to sit subsequently. Banks then first arise from the river’s cutting surge.

8.2 The striving-strife of the rift-design The division in the middle that language’s Saying occasions creates a tension or conflict between Being and beings arising from their simultaneous difference and identity, which necessarily forms a dialectical distinction-in-unity. Heidegger referred to this tension or conflict as a streit, which can be translated from the German as ‘struggle’ or ‘strife’. We have already glimpsed this struggle in the opposition between concealment and unconcealment or lēthē and alētheia, where there is simultaneous brightness and darkness, sound and diminishing sound, presence and absence in the form of the ‘lighting-concealing’ (lichtende Verbergung). We have also discussed that in Saying: ‘A people’s world historically arises for it and the earth is preserved as that which remains closed.’3 Halliburton says of this: ‘On the one hand, the world, as though impatient with anything closed, endeavours to surmount the earth. On the other hand, earth, unwilling to change its ways, draws the world back towards itself.’4 Heidegger’s streit seems to deliberately mirror what Heraclitus understood to be polemos, according to which ‘conflicting powers belong together precisely insofar as they oppose each other, their “antagonism” being the very definition of their essential oneness’.5 The dialectical distinction-in-unity between Being and being is therefore a oneness-twoness-oneness, in that being moves from out of and yet simultaneously back to Being from which it derives. Heraclitus himself is understood to have said: ‘What is opposed brings together; the finest harmony (harmonia) is composed of things at variance, and everything comes to be in accordance with strife.’6 Rather unconventionally, Heidegger translates this as: ‘What stands in opposition carries itself over here and over there, the one to the other, it gathers itself from itself.’7 Another fragment from Heraclitus captures

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the tension within the polemical distinction-in-unity: ‘They do not understand how, though at variance with itself, it agrees with itself. It is a backwardsturning attunement like that of the bow or lyre.’8 Paul Tillich provides a helpful commentary on this passage: ‘For Heraclitus everything is in inner tension like a bent bow, for in everything there is a tendency downward (earth) balanced by a tendency upward (fire). In his view nothing whatever is produced by a process which moves in one direction only; everything is an embracing but transitory unity of two opposite processes. Things are hypostasized tensions.’9 The Heraclitean polemos or Heideggerian streit in the bow refers to the centrifugal and centripetal tension caused by the simultaneous forces in either direction. Heidegger, interpreting a poem from Hölderlin, titled ‘Remembrance’ (Andenken), seems to capture this whole dialectical process when he writes: ‘The spirit of the river carries the source into the sea and brings the sea back to the source, which only now, in the backward-moving current, manifests itself as the source.’10 The divide within Being in the form of the ontological difference occurs primordially through language’s Saying as a division in the middle. However, we are so fixed in our habit of believing that ‘a middle’ can only be such because it is situated between an already existing divide, that we struggle to see that a divide is such because of the middle. Because we are used to understanding the middle as necessarily between two things, it is difficult for us to comprehend how in this instance the middle has actually begotten the twain – rather like an axe splitting a log. It is through the antagonism of the between begotten by the middle that Being and beings come to form an ontological difference, or more accurately, an ontological dif-ference. Why is the hyphen significant? When we more usually refer to a difference, it is to stress an ‘unlikeness’, but as Heidegger writes: The word difference is now removed from its usual and customary usage. What it now names is not a generic concept for various kinds of differences. It exists only as this single difference. It is unique of itself, it holds apart the middle in and through which world and things are at one with each other. The intimacy of the dif-ference is the unifying element of the Diaphora, the carrying out that carries through.11

The word ‘difference’ is now referred to in its more original sense. When used in the term ‘ontological difference’, it does not simply indicate the disparity between Being and beings. It also, or more so, refers to language’s Saying, which in fact creates the disparity. This is because, as discussed, it is language that primarily

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engenders the difference. But let us explain more fully the understanding of language as dif-ference creating difference. The hyphen is added to emphasize the elements that the word ‘difference’ is composed of. The word ‘difference’ stems from the Latin differe. The prefix dif is an assimilated form of dis, which means: ‘to rip asunder’. The main element ferre means ‘to bear’ or ‘to carry’. Putting the elements dif and ferre together, the word differe can be translated as a ‘rip that carries’ or a ‘tear that bears’. In the quotation above, Heidegger refers to the intimacy of the dif-ference as ‘the unifying element of the Diaphora, the carrying out that carries through’. Diaphora is the Greek word for ‘difference’. It is composed of dia, which like dis means ‘asunder’ or ‘in two’. Phora, like ferre, means ‘to bear’ or ‘to carry’. With constructive clarity, Richardson writes: Inseparable, Being-beings are correlative. This means that on the one hand they are distinguished by more than simply a mere rational distinction, but on the other the difference must not be conceived as a ‘relation’ that (re)presentative thought can propose to itself as a subsequent coupling of two entities already constituted as separate. The difference must be understood in the deepest sense of a dif-ferre, a ‘bearing of each other out’, as if both shared a common center which remains interior to each (the cum, so to speak or correlation), a common measure by which each is measured, which serves as the single dimension of both, a primal unity by reason of which each adheres to the other and out of which both ‘issue forth’. We must conceive the (ontological) difference, then, as a scission (-Schied) between (Unter-) Being and beings that refers them to each other by the very fact that it cleaves them in two.12

Heidegger refers to this more original meaning of the word ‘difference’ as ‘dif-ference’, because it is language’s Saying that brings about the ‘rip that carries’ or the ‘tear that bears’. Language’s Saying is the middle that consequently effects the between of Being and beings. Language is therefore like the river that effects the between of the banks, the axe that effects the split in the log, or the rip that effects the tear in the veil. It rips and carries, or tears and bears, beings from out of Being. We have two simultaneous acts here. First, through unconcealment being is carried over from out of Being, which polemically draws it back into its concealment as a lit-darkness to effect an ontological dif-ference. Second, a division is created in the middle as Being-beings bringing about an ontological difference. Heidegger names the linguistic intimacy of the ontological difference, the ‘rift-design’ (der aufriss), which he also calls the essence of language. This loses

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some of its force and significance in translation, but Heidegger wants to elicit the meaning of the German der Riss, which is, and I quote Krell: ‘A crack, tear, laceration, cleft, or rift; but it is also a plan or design in drawing. The verb reissen from which it derives is cognate with the English word writing.’ 13 Heidegger himself writes: ‘The conflict is not a rift (Riss), as a mere cleft is ripped open; rather, it is the intimacy with which opponents belong to each other. This rift carries the opponents into the source of their unity by virtue of their common ground.’14 Elsewhere Heidegger writes: Let the unity in the essence of language that we are seeking be called the riftdesign. The name calls upon us to descry more clearly what is proper to the essence of language. Riss (rift) is the same word as ritzen (to notch, carve). We often come across the word Riss in the purely pejorative form, for example, as a crack in the wall. Today when farmers speak in dialect about plowing a field, drawing furrows through it, they still say aufreissen or umreissen (literally, to tear up, to rend or rive, to turn over). They open up the field, that it may harbor seed and growth. The rift-design is the totality of traits in the kind of drawing that permeates what is opened up and set free in language. The rift-design is the drawing of the essence of language, the well-joined structure of a showing in which what is addressed enjoins the speakers and their speech, enjoins the spoken and its unspoken.15

Enjoining the speakers and language’s speech, and enjoining the spoken beings and the unspoken Being, is the stream of language. The rift as a simultaneous dividing and uniting of opposites, a distinction-in-unity, is the cleavage where Being and beings (and Saying and speaking) come together to be themselves through the other, without losing themselves in the process. Language as the rift-design rips and carries, or tears and bears, in that it is both a breach and an emancipation of what it names. It is as this yielding scission that language is the reason for the ‘dif-ference’ that bears beings from out of the tear in Being, and therefore the ‘difference’ between Being per se and beings as things in the world.

8.3 The pain of the threshold’s joining The linguistic dif-ference, as a ‘rip that carries’ or ‘tear that bears’, is the threshold through which all things, in order to become things, must pass. It is the event or occasion that moves from out of Being and into being to produce the ontological

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difference. Reflecting on language as ontological ‘threshold’, the bond between thinking and speaking, and the relation between thing and world, Heidegger interprets a poem by Georg Trakl, titled ‘A Winter Evening’. We have already had a taste of how Heidegger has freely interpreted poetry by Hölderlin, and in later chapters the same will be so of, for example, Stefan George and Rainer Maria Rilke. In the rest of this section we likewise experience a manner of exegesis that can flummox and even exasperate Heidegger’s most devoted supporters, while inviting the wrath and condemnation of his critics. A translation of Trakl’s poem reads: Window with falling snow is arrayed, Long tolls the vesper bell, The house is provided well, The table is for many laid. Wandering ones, more than a few, Come to the door on darksome courses. Golden blooms the tree of graces Drawing up the earth’s cool dew. Wanderer quietly steps within; Pain has turned the threshold to stone. There lie, in limpid brightness shown, Upon the table bread and wine.16

Heidegger begins by giving a very simple outline of the poem and what it describes. He then writes: The content of the poem might be dissected even more distinctly, its form outlined even more precisely, but in such operations we would still remain confined by the notion of language that has prevailed for thousands of years. According to this idea language is the expression, produced by men, of their feelings and the world view that guides them. Can the spell this idea has cast over language be broken? Why should it be broken? In its essence, language is neither expression nor an activity of man. Language speaks. We are now seeking the speaking of language in the poem. Accordingly, what we seek lies in the poetry of the spoken word.17

A little further, after giving for argument’s sake what might be a typical account of the poem as composition, Heidegger writes and in the process gives a hint of how his own hermeneutics works: Language is expression. Why do we not reconcile ourselves to this fact? Because the correctness and currency of this view of language are insufficient to serve

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as a basis for an account of the nature of language. How shall we gauge this inadequacy? Must we not be bound by a different standard before we can gauge anything in that manner? Of course. That standard reveals itself in the proposition, ‘Language speaks.’ Up to this point this guiding proposition has had merely the function of warding off the ingrained habit of disposing of speech by throwing it at once among the phenomena of expression instead of thinking it in its own terms. The poem cited has been chosen because, in a way not further explicable, it demonstrates a peculiar fitness to provide some fruitful hints for our attempt to discuss language.18

It would seem from initial hearing that by telling us that ‘language speaks’, Heidegger is implying that humankind does not therefore speak. But as ever with Heidegger, his task is more subtle than this. He writes: Language speaks. This means at the same time and before all else: language speaks. Language? And not man? What our guiding proposition demands of us now – is it not even worse than before? Are we, in addition to everything else, also going to deny now that man is the being who speaks? Not at all. We deny this no more than we deny the possibility of classifying linguistic phenomena under the heading of ‘expression’. But we ask, ‘How does man speak?’ We ask, ‘What is it to speak?’19

Looking in a different way at the poem, so as to explore how language speaks, Heidegger says that the naming of snow, bell, window, falling and ringing in the first stanza is not just a case of handing out titles or applying terms, but is the actual invitation for these things to be. Heidegger writes: The naming calls. Calling brings closer what it calls. However this bringing closer does not fetch what is called only in order to set it down in closest proximity to what is present, to find a place for it there. The call does indeed call. Thus it brings the presence of what was previously uncalled into a nearness. But the call, in calling it here, has already called out to what it calls. Where to? Into the distance in which what is called remains, still absent.20

Notice here that Heidegger tells us that the naming does not ‘fetch’ what is called, like a dog, a maid or a taxi. Language is no instrument, servant or vehicle. It does not simply bring what it calls into presence, for what it calls also remains in its absence. Crucially, Heidegger tells us that the call, in calling it here, has already called out to what it calls. On the one hand this appears to be a reference to language’s antecedent speaking that enables humans to speak only after hearing it – more on this below. On the other hand, what is absent is already present in

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the call that calls it here. If we read the poem we read of snow and bell, which are therefore present in the call, but they are not actually present as though we have actually stood shivering in the snow hearing the vesper bell toll in our ears. Rather, of the naming call, Heidegger says: It invites things in, so that they may bear upon men as things. … In the naming, the things named are called into their thinging. Thinging, they unfold world, in which things abide and so are the abiding ones. By thinging, things carry out world. Our old language calls such carrying bern, bären – Old High German beran – to bear; hence the words gebaren, to carry, gestate, give birth, and Gebärde, bearing, gesture. Thinging, things are things. Thinging, they gesture – gestate – world.21

Naming then brings things into their thinging as things and simultaneously names world. The second stanza of Trakl’s poem begins: ‘Wandering ones, more than a few, come to the door on darksome courses.’ The ‘wandering ones’, says Heidegger, refers to the wayfaring mortals who through their darksome courses are capable of dying as the wandering towards death. In death, says Heidegger: ‘The supreme concealedness of Being crystallizes.’22 It would seem that Heidegger interprets Trakl as meaning that these mortals, presumably poets, pass into the darkness of concealed Being for the sake of bringing things into the world for the many.23 Heidegger writes: ‘The many think that if they only install themselves in houses and sit at tables, they are already bethinged, conditioned, by things and have arrived at dwelling.’24 But things are only bethinged on account of the ‘golden-blossoming tree’ of the next line. Heidegger writes of this tree: ‘Its sound blossoming harbors the fruit that falls to us unearned – holy, saving, loving toward mortals. In the golden-blossoming tree there prevail earth and sky, divinities and mortals. Their unitary fourfold is the world.’25 To elaborate, Heidegger focuses on the word ‘golden’, and drawing on a poem by Pindar, Isthmians V, he writes: ‘At the beginning of this ode the poet calls gold periosion panton, that which above all shines through everything, panta, shines through each thing present all around. The splendour of gold keeps and holds everything present in the unconcealedness of its appearing.’26 The tree’s golden blossoming of sound is the unconcealedness of appearing that occasions the ontological dif-ference. Here, says Heidegger, things bear world, as simultaneously world grants things. These two modes of bidding, namely, world granting things and things bearing world, are different, says Heidegger, but not separated.27 Nor, he adds, are they merely coupled together, so as to

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merely subsist alongside one another. Instead, emphasizing our reference to language as a division in the middle as opposed to the middle in a division, Heidegger writes of world and things: They penetrate each other. Thus the two traverse a middle. In it, they are at one. Thus at one they are intimate. The middle of the two is intimacy – in Latin inter. The corresponding German word is unter, the English inter-. The intimacy of world and thing is not a fusion. Intimacy obtains only where the intimate – world and thing – divides itself cleanly and remains separated. In the midst of the two, in the between of world and thing, in their inter, division prevails: a dif-ference.28

It is the intimacy of the middle then that begets a division which prevails as the dif-ference. The yielding scission of the middle is inter, so as to become ‘inter-mediate’. Still, from a habit that takes the simultaneous bethinging and beworlding of language for granted, when hearing the term ‘inter-mediate’, we still imagine it to refer to the middle in a division. But the intimacy of naming’s inter is a division in the middle. Heidegger writes: The dif-ference carries out world in its worlding, carries out things in their thinging. Thus carrying them out, it carries them toward one another. The difference does not mediate after the fact by connecting world and things through a middle added onto them. Being the middle, it first determines world and things in their presence, i.e., in their being toward one another, whose unity it carries out.29

Hence, the word ‘difference’, says Heidegger, ‘no longer means a distinction established between objects only by our representations. Nor is it merely a relation obtaining between world and thing, so that a representation coming upon it can establish it. The dif-ference is not abstracted from world and thing as their relationship after the fact.’30 As we will come to explore, the dif-ference disclosingly appropriates things into bearing a world, and world into granting things. In this way, the dif-ference is the actual ‘dimension’, ‘space’ or ‘clearing’ that brings world and things into their own. This brings us to the third stanza of Trakl’s poem. Where the first stanza bid the things to come in their thing and so bear world, and the second stanza bid world to come in its worlding and so grant things, the third stanza, says Heidegger, ‘bids the middle for world and things to come: the carrying out of their intimacy’.31 Here the threshold is spoken of. Heidegger writes: The threshold is the ground-beam that bears the doorway as a whole. It sustains the middle in which the two, the outside and the inside, penetrate each other. The threshold bears the between. What goes out and goes in, in the between,

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is joined in the between’s dependability. The dependability of the middle must never yield either way. The settling of the between needs something that can endure, and is in this sense hard. The threshold, as the settlement of the between, is hard because pain has petrified it. But the pain that became appropriated to stone did not harden into the threshold in order to congeal there. The pain presences unflagging in the threshold, as pain.32

To what, we must ask, does this pain refer? Heidegger tells us that it is the ‘rift’ spoken of above. Pain, he says, rends. Here the Heraclitean polemos comes to the fore. As Heidegger writes: Pain indeed tears asunder, it separates, yet so that at the same time it draws everything to itself, gathers it to itself. Its rending, as a separating that gathers, is at the same time that drawing which, like the pen drawing of a plan or sketch, draws and joins together what is held apart in separation. Pain is the joining agent in the rending that divides and gathers. Pain is the joining of the rift. The joining is the threshold. It settles the between, the middle of the two that are separated in it. Pain joins the rift of the dif-ference. Pain is the dif-ference itself.33

I am tempted for much-needed conceptual ease, and because it invites it, to call this the pain threshold, but though not meant this would be open to misinterpretation. Pain, says Heidegger, is not meant here anthropologically, as in a sensation that afflicts us. And he also adds that intimacy should not be thought upon psychologically, in terms of a sentimental nest-making. Pain here is the separation of the between and the gathering middle where the bearing of things and granting of world pervade one another and so take place. This taking place leads to the last lines of Trakl’s poem: ‘There lie, in limpid brightness shown, upon the table bread and wine.’ The pure brightness, says Heidegger, shines on the threshold, in the settling of the pain. He writes: ‘The rift of the dif-ference makes the limpid brightness shine. … The pure limpid brightness of world and the simple gleaming of things go through their between, the difference.’34 The third stanza then calls world and things into the middle as the middle, that is, the intimate seam that binds their being towards one another as pain. The pain threshold that makes this so, is language speaking.

8.4 Language speaks as the peal of stillness This primal calling that bids the intimacy of world and thing is the actual nature of speaking. The speaking of Trakl’s poem is, for Heidegger, the speaking of

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language. Language speaks. It speaks, says Heidegger, by bidding the thingworld and world-thing to come to the between of the dif-ference. Here, there occurs what Heidegger calls a twofold ‘stilling’: It stills by letting things rest in the world’s favour. It stills by letting the world suffice itself in the thing. In the double stilling of the dif-ference there takes place: stillness. … The dif-ference stills particularly in two ways: it stills the things in thinging and the world in worlding. Thus stilled, thing and world never escape from the dif-ference. Rather, they rescue it in the stilling, where the difference is itself the stillness.35

What does this mean? By way of this double stilling of the dif-ference, world and thing are able to rest (Ruhe), that is, to be calm and settled. This is because the gathering call of the dif-ference gives them a place to stand as what they are. They are the world of things and the things of world, which stand still and rest in language. Inwood writes: ‘To converse or communicate we need to extract relatively stable, intersubjectively accessible entities from the flux of becoming. But this is possible only if we have an enduring framework in which such entities appear, in particular words whose meanings do not change every time we use them.’36 If we recall from Chapter 6, this reference to a stable framework or enduring structure suggests why Heidegger refers to language as the house of Being that has logos as its foundation. In this way then things are able to stand still and thus be lasting and constant. Thomas Kelly also provides the following helpful clarification: To remain at rest is ‘to be still’ (stillen). Therefore the Difference stills the Thing, as Thing, by giving it over to the world. Stilling takes place, firstly insofar as it allows things to rest in the favour which is the granting of the world, and secondly, insofar as it allows the World to find its corresponding completion in Things. In this way, stillness happens, taking as its origin the twofold stilling of the Difference. This stillness is, by no means, a mere stasis, or silence. It is said to be more mobile than all movement, yet it is at the same time stillness. It would, therefore, seem that this stillness is the abiding presence and holding of World in its world-ing and Things in their thing-ing.37

Note that the stillness that gives rest is neither a mere standing still nor a silence. It is more mobile than movement while being still. This does not point to an oppositional movement starting like a vehicle from stillness, or sound coming from silence through the sensuous externalization of inner meaning. It is still and moving, silent and sounding simultaneously. The stillness shatters and

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breaks as the crack, tear, laceration or cleft of the sounding word’s rift-design. Daniela Vallega-Neu writes: ‘Even in speaking what remains most fundamental is silence, a silence that keeps reverberating in the word as it holds the word in its (the silence’s) bind. Heidegger speaks in this context of Er-schweigen, of bearing silence.’38 Heidegger refers to the gathering calling that gives ‘world’ and ‘things’ a place to stand and rest, as the ‘sounding’ or ‘pealing’, which is different from a mere excitation and spreading of sound. This sounding it appears is equivalent to the difference as calling. As language’s speaking this does not refer to an acoustic sounding, rather it is an ‘active articulation of the two elements in the most original and fundamental sense’.39 Language resonates in this silent ringing peal of stillness. Heidegger thus writes: When the dif-ference gathers world and things into the simple onefold of the pain of intimacy, it bids the two to come into their very nature. The dif-ference is the command out of which every bidding itself is first called, so that each may follow the command. The command of the dif-ference has ever already gathered all bidding within itself. The calling, gathered together with itself, which gathers to itself in the calling, is the pealing of the peal.40

This Behest gathering all bidding and calling in itself as the difference is the sounding of stillness (Das Geläut der Stille), which Kelly calls ‘a paradoxical formulation whose tension seems to carry a deliberate twisting of the “clarity and distinctness” required by calculative thought’.41 From this, Heidegger is able to affirm that language speaks as the peal of stillness. Language, he adds, ‘goes on as the taking place or occurring of the dif-ference for world and things’.42 The sound of language as human voice co-responds to and thus emerges from the ringing peal of language’s stillness. Thus Heidegger tells us that this fundamental ‘peal of stillness’ as the way in which language speaks is not anything human. On the contrary, he writes: The human is indeed in its nature given to speech – it is linguistic. The word ‘linguistic’ as it is here used means: having taken place out of the speaking of language. What has thus taken place, human being, has been brought into its own by language, so that it remains given over or appropriated to the nature of language, the peal of stillness. Such an appropriating takes place in that the very nature, the presencing, of language needs and uses the speaking of mortals in order to sound as the peal of stillness for the hearing of mortals. Only as men belong within the peal of stillness are mortals able to speak in their own way in sounds.43

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Here Heidegger is arguing that human speech is not merely the voicing of the inner man. If speech is simply regarded in this way, the nature of language can only appear as the expression and activity of man. But significantly, and utterly alien to our modern way of thinking, Heidegger tells us that human speech as the speech of mortals is not self-subsistent. It rests in its relation to the prior speaking of language’s peal of stillness. Neither utterance nor expression is the decisive element of human speech. Mortals speak by responding as co-responders. Mortals speak insofar as they listen. Mortals, says Heidegger, ‘speak by responding to language in a twofold way, receiving and replying’.44 Accordingly, says Heidegger: Man speaks only as he responds to language. Language speaks. Its speaking speaks for us in what has been spoken.45

And to indicate what has indeed been spoken, Heidegger quotes once more Trakl’s poem ‘A Winter Evening’ in its entirety. We have already heard Heidegger in Chapter 7 say: ‘We do not merely speak the language – we speak by way of it. We can do so solely because we always have already listened to the language. What do we hear there? We hear language speaking.’46 But, Heidegger asks, does language speak? And how is it meant to do so without the organs of speech? He replies: Yet language speaks. Language first of all and inherently obeys the essential nature of speaking: it says. Language speaks by saying, this is, by showing. What it says wells up from the formerly spoken and so far still unspoken Saying which pervades the design of language. Language speaks in that it, as showing, reaching into all regions of presences, summons from them whatever is present to appear and to fade. We accordingly, listen to language in this way, that we let it say its Saying to us. No matter in what way we may listen besides, whenever we are listening to something we are letting something be said to us, and all perception and conception is already contained in that act. In our speaking, as a listening to language, we say again the Saying we have heard. We let its soundless voice come to us, and then demand, reach out and call for the sound that is already kept in store for us.47

In short, we speak owing to the original projective Saying as phenomenal showing that opens up a world of things for us to then speak of. As we proceed, we will come to explore in more detail what it means to say that language speaks, and how in turn man receives and replies to language’s speaking.

9

Language as It Gives and not It Is

9.1 The nothing noths Towards the end of Chapter 2, I marked briefly that Being is nothing, that is to say, ‘no-thing’ until it is said. I then said that this negation is not an absolute denial of Being, so as to say that Being is not at all, but is rather a relative rejection of Being in terms of saying that it is no particular thing. The Greek language recognizes this subtle distinction between ‘absolute denial’ and ‘relative rejection’ in the meaning of the word ‘nothing’. The Greek mé means ‘not’, and is said to be the negative of will and thought, while the Greek ou also means ‘not’, and is the negative of fact and statement. The first rejects, and is both relative and subjective. The second denies, and is both absolute and objective.1 So when Heidegger says that Being is nothing, it is we might say a relative rejection of Being in relation to present things. It tells us that Being is no-thing in particular as an object present. In this way it is ‘non-presently present’ (ungegenwärtig Anwesende). In his essay ‘What is Metaphysics?’ (Was ist Metaphysik?), Heidegger says thus of science’s approach: ‘What should be examined are beings only, and beyond that – nothing.’2 Heidegger then asks: ‘What about this nothing?’3 He argues that science wants to know nothing of the nothing, yet he, on the contrary, wants to ask: ‘What is the nothing?’4 He continues: ‘Is the nothing given only because the “not,” i.e. negation is given? Or is it the other way around? Are negation and the “not” given only because the nothing is given? We assert that the nothing is more original than the “not” and negation.’5 For Heidegger, the ‘nothing’ in its way is, and he goes so far as to say, notoriously, the nothing noths (Das Nichts selbst nichtet).6 Furthermore, as Heidegger sees it, ‘nothing’ is not simply the counterconcept of beings, rather ‘in the Being of beings the nihilation of the nothing occurs’.7 Heidegger argues that ‘science would like to dismiss the nothing with a lordly wave of the hand’.8 He then adds provocatively: ‘The presumed soberness of mind and superiority of science become laughable when it does not take the nothing seriously.’9

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However, for the logically minded and scientifically inclined, the word ‘nothing’ tends only to refer to the nullifying annihilation of absolute denial. This is the case with the German logical positivist, Rudolf Carnap, who soon attacked Heidegger in an essay titled ‘The Elimination of Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of Language’. This, as predicted by Heidegger, was science’s lordly wave of the hand dismissing the nothing. Carnap argued that for Heidegger to say the ‘nothing noths’ was like saying the ‘rain rains’.10 The latter expression makes sense because the rain as a noun rains as a verb. However, to say that the ‘nothing noths’ is, according to Carnap, a pseudo-statement devoid of meaning. This is because in Carnap’s view Heidegger treats the indefinite pronoun ‘nothing’ as though it were a noun. Whereas, for Carnap, the word ‘nothing’ is denied as a noun by its very definition. Heidegger, Carnap seems to believe, like all metaphysicians (or as logical positivists think of metaphysicians), creates a grammatical fiction. For Heidegger, akin perhaps to apophatic mystical theologians, this is not the case.11 For him, ‘nothing’ also refers to the indefinite ground of Being, which precedes and grants every existent thing as such. It is Being qua Being. As Steiner writes: Being is neither a substance nor an agency nor an occult force. It is ‘everything’, but it is also, in respect to its source, indivisibly implicit in nothingness, in that Nichts which, as Carnap and A. J. Ayer scornfully pointed out, can be neither defined nor verified, but which all of us, ripostes Heidegger, know at first hand in moments of anguish and vertigo. We can write Sein: Nichts, says Heidegger. But this equation is not negative. The Nichts is not nihil. Nothingness is not negation of Being. The very word teaches us that: no-thing-ness signifies a presentness, an existential ‘thereness’ which is not naively enclosed in or circumscribed by any particular extant, specific object. ‘Das Nichten des Nichts “ist” das Sein’: ‘the negation of nothingness “is” Being.’12

Heidegger refers to this as an ‘emptiness’ that is the same as nothingness.13 It is Being as Being, which is the other to all that is present or absent. Speaking of this with Heidegger, Tezuka states: Surely. For this reason we in Japan understood at once your lecture ‘What is Metaphysics?’ when it became available to us in 1930 through a translation which a Japanese student, then attending your lectures, had ventured. – We marvel to this day how the Europeans could lapse into interpreting as nihilistic the nothingness of which you speak in that lecture. To us, emptiness is the loftiest name for what you mean to say with the word ‘Being’.14

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Being as Being then is not a thing as ‘this’ and ‘that’ thing are, but is in contrast ‘nothing’ in respect of being no-thing. It is that from which all things emerge as things. The revelatory power of naming brings things from out of no-thing’s concealment and into unconcealment as a thing. This linguistic place of arrival or revelatory mode of being present is the ‘presently present’ (gegenwärtig Anwesende). As such, before being called into nearness as a thing, that which has not yet been said is the ‘non-presently present’ (ungegenwärtig Anwesende). This perfectly describes Being per se, which, while it does not ‘stand out’ as present in terms of existence, nevertheless is as isness itself. It is thus that from which the ‘standing out’ of existence stands out from. Paul Tillich puts it in a different, though helpful, way: ‘The metaphor “to stand out” logically implies something like “to stand in.” Only that which in some respect stands in can stand out.’15 If we recall I have also noted at the beginning of Chapter 2 that ‘existence’ in terms of pointing to present things refers to a stepping out of Being’s constancy, so that for the Greeks ‘existence’ means ‘not-to-be’. This is not the contradiction it might seem. It simply indicates that all beings as the ‘presently present’ are dependent on Being or the ‘non-presently present’ in order to be.

9.2 The giver never given I have endeavoured to show that according to Heidegger’s thinking, a thing only comes to be ‘this’ or ‘that’ thing through language. Hence, when we come to the well in the wood, we come to the word ‘well’ in the word ‘wood’. We therefore dwell in language as the house of Being. But having explored the absent-present, negative-positive relation between Being and beings that language occasions as the ontological difference, how is it with language in this respect? As a division in the middle, is it absent or present? As that which brings forth things as things, is it too a thing? Is it simply a case of calling language ‘language’, or calling word ‘word’? Must language, like all those things it names as things, also be named so as to be a thing? Or is it different with language? Is language already so, and only so, in that it brings all other things into existence as things? Is it therefore not a thing at all? Heidegger writes: There is some evidence that the essential nature of language flatly refuses to express itself in words – in the language, that is, in which we make statements about language. If language everywhere withholds its nature in this sense, then

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such withholding is in the very nature of language. Thus language not only holds back when we speak it in the accustomed ways, but this its holding back is determined by the fact that language holds back its own origin and so denies its being to our usual notions.16

Unable to be named, so that the word ‘language’ does not capture the nature of language, language as language remains unsaid and thus to a certain extent concealed as no-thing. And yet, concurrently, it nevertheless is as that which brings all beings into existence as things. Language is that which brings all things into presence as things, but is not itself brought into presence as a thing in the process. Language calls all things as things into presence from out of absence. As a result the non-presently present is called into a nearness, the neighbourhood of the presently present. As the presently present, what is called emerges as a said-thing, while the non-presently present nevertheless remains or abides in its concealed absence as the unsaid-no-thing. The revelatory nature of language therefore grants things their present being as things in the world, while retaining their sense of absent Being as concealment. Heidegger writes: ‘ “To say,” related to the Old Norse “saga,” means to show: to make appear, set free, that is, to offer and extend what we call World, lighting and concealing it. This lighting and hiding proffer of the world is the essential being of Saying.’17 This we have referred to earlier as the ‘lighting-concealing’ (lichtende Verbergung). In another work, Heidegger writes: ‘The calling here calls into a nearness. But even so the call does not wrest what it calls away from the remoteness, in which it is kept by the calling there. The calling calls into itself and therefore always here and there – here into presence, there into absence.’18 All things then are brought into existence, that is to say ‘stand out’ through language’s showing, but they are absent in their presence owing to Being that remains concealed ‘there’, and yet present in their absence as beings unconcealed ‘here’. But while language produces this distinction-in-unity as both an absentpresence and a present-absence, is language itself present or absent? Heidegger’s answer to this is that we should not say of language that it is, but should rather say of it that it gives. Language is the giver never given. He writes: If our thinking does justice to the matter, then we may never say of the word that it is, but rather that it gives – not in the sense that words are given by an ‘it’, but that the word itself gives. The word itself is the giver. What does it give? To go by the poetic experience and by the most ancient tradition of thinking, the word

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gives Being. Our thinking, then, would have to seek the word, the giver which itself is never given, in this ‘there is that which gives’.19

Kearney, commenting on this, writes: ‘Language, for Heidegger, is not an entity which exists (ein Seiendes) but the very giving of Being (Es gibt Sein) whereby everything exists. It is not a present object but presencing. It is not something true but the very coming to be of truth.’20 While Ziarek says of language, as the giver never given as a thing, the following: Because the word ‘gives’, it is the word of being in a double sense: it both gives ‘of ’ being, that is, it lets something be, but it is also itself ‘of ’ being, that is, it issues from being. Language thus is the issue of being in the double, subjective and objective, momentum of the genitive. Being issues (into) language; and language provides the issue for being.21

The last sentence above both captures and leads us nicely to what is understood as Heidegger’s guide-word.

9.3 The guide-word Language, as discussed hitherto, is not merely a bridge that spans a between, be that the subject-object divide, Being and beings, or even the word and sign, but is the river, so to speak, that begets two banks in the form of the ontological difference. Language is not, we have argued, the middle in a divide, but more accurately, a divide in the middle. The ontological divide and therefore difference between Being and beings is brought about by language’s Saying as a division in the middle. However, as well as producing this divide in the middle in the form of the ontological difference, language first forms a reciprocal relation and dependency with Being that is grounded in the gathering and preserving nature of the logos. In this respect, according to Heidegger’s thinking, language seems to bear Being, which simultaneously grants language. This mutual indebtedness simultaneously occasions the ontological difference between Being and beings, which emerges from the middle. In Chapter 10, we will explore how Heidegger sought to undergo an experience with language. His intention was to ‘bring language as language to language’, so as to find a way to language that in the process transforms our relation to it as we hear language speak. But of this way, Heidegger marks that it leads us only to where we already are. He writes:

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The ‘only’ here does not mean a limitation, but rather points to this way’s pure simplicity. The way allows us to reach what concerns us, in that domain where we are already staying. Why then, one may ask, still find a way to it? Answer: because where we already are, we are in such a way that at the same time we are not there, because we ourselves have not yet properly reached what concerns our being, not even approached it. The way that lets us reach where we already are, differing from all other ways, calls for an escort that runs far ahead.22

This escort that runs far ahead is Heidegger’s Leitsatz, which can be translated along the lines of ‘guide-word’ or ‘guiding-principle’. The Leitsatz says: The being of language: The language of being.23

‘The being of language: the language of being’ (Das Wesen der Sprache: Die Sprache des Wesen), says Heidegger, consists of two phrases held apart by a colon and each the inversion of the other. In the first phrase language is the subject whose being is to be determined. It concerns therefore the very ‘being’ (wesen) of language. In the second phrase, being is the subject that possesses language. However, each phrase understands ‘being’ differently. In the first phrase the sense of ‘being’ that is to be determined points to the ‘nature’ or ‘essence’ of language. In the second phrase, ‘being’ no longer means ‘what something is’, but is meant as a verb as in ‘being present’ or ‘being absent’. In short, it means to be, which, says Heidegger, means to perdure or persist in its being. The second phrase tells us that language belongs to this latter sense of ‘being’, and that this is its distinctive property in respect of the way it ‘moves’ and makes a way for all things.24 Thus we can attempt to interpret the Leitsatz or guide-word as saying that, the essential nature of language is its manner of allowing things to continuously be. We might therefore tentatively translate the guide-word as: The essence of language is the language of existence. This guide-word, says Heidegger, serves in beckoning us to undergo an experience with language. The guide-word can be paraphrased, says Heidegger, as follows: ‘What concerns us as language receives its definition from Saying as that which moves all things.’25 Heidegger also writes: ‘The guide-word beckons us away from the current notions about language, to the experience of language as Saying.’26 In short, this appears to indicate that our experience of language as language comes about through seeing that the essence of language is what it does. Language speaks. And again, we can say of language that ‘it gives’ rather than ‘it is’. This also shifts our understanding of wesen from its traditional meaning of essentia to perduring and persisting.

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10.1 Bringing language as language to language I have explained that according to Heidegger language is the house of Being in which human beings dwell, so that humans reach what is by constantly going through this house. This is because language first brings things into being as things. For this reason, Heidegger writes, ‘language belongs to the closest neighbourhood of man’s being. We encounter language everywhere.’1 Humankind lives in language, and everything that is accessible to the human comes through language, for as stated near the end of Chapter 8: ‘Its speaking speaks for us in what has been spoken.’2 As the house of Being we are at home in language because we dwell in language. We would therefore think that by being at home in language, we have already arrived at language as the closest neighbourhood of our being. Yet, for Heidegger, despite being so close to language on account of dwelling in it, we still appear to be some distance from the Being of language. In short, we do not realize that we dwell in language, but rather believe that language resides in us. We have not yet found our ‘way’ to language as language. Hence the title of another of Heidegger’s linguistic essays, ‘The Way To Language’. In his introduction to this essay, Farrell Krell writes: ‘Heidegger seeks a way to language. He does not come on the scene already outfitted with a programme and a procedure, a methodology and a prescription for language. … He does not even formulate arguments concerning language, spin out a theory of it, or concoct a meta-language that would allow him to say impossible things about language.’3 We have already seen in Chapter 2 that, for Heidegger, the way is the destination. We have quoted him as saying: ‘To proceed toward a star, only this’ (Auf einer Stern zugehen, nur dieses) and ‘All is Way’ (Alles ist Weg) or ‘underwayness’, as in the word Tao. During his discussion with Tezuka, Heidegger mentions that he no longer uses the word ‘hermeneutics’ in his later writings. Tezuka says of this: ‘You are said to have changed your standpoint.’4 This is a

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telling phrase in itself if we hear it right, for Heidegger is said (which means by others) to have changed. Heidegger’s reply gives us a valuable insight into the way he thinks, and the danger of trying to compartmentalize his work: I have left an earlier standpoint, not in order to exchange it for another one, but because even the former standpoint was merely a way-station along the way. The lasting element in thinking is the way. And ways of thinking hold within them that mysterious quality that we can walk them forward and backward, and that indeed only the way back will lead us forward.5

Elsewhere, Heidegger writes of the way to language: ‘The way to language: that sounds as if language were far away from us, some place to which we still have to find our way.’6 Heidegger then asks if this way to language is really needed. For according to ancient understanding, humankind is the being that speaks and so already possesses language. This ability to speak is not one talent among many, but is what distinguishes humankind as humankind. Language is the foundation of human being. He continues: We are, then, within language and with language before all else. A way to language is not needed. Besides, the way to language is impossible if we indeed are already at that point to which the way is to take us. But are we at that point? Are we so fully within language that we experience its nature, that we think speech as speech by grasping its idiom in listening to it? Do we in fact already live close to language even without our doing? Or is the way to language as language the longest road our thinking can follow? Not just the longest, but a way lined with obstacles that come from language itself, as soon as our reflection tries to pursue language straight into its own, without ever losing sight of it?7

Despite being (or because we are) the ‘rational animal’ (zoon logicon) whose defining trait is that we speak language, according to Heidegger we are not already there in language but are distanced from this the closest nearness. It is for this reason that Heidegger comes to tell us that his essay ‘The Way To Language’ is to attempt a strange undertaking, which he adumbrates in the following way: ‘To speak about speech qua speech.’8 This line in the same essay has been translated by Farrell Krell as ‘To bring language as language to language’.9 At first glance or even after many readings, this appears to be another example of the kind of Zen-like utterance designed to baffle rather than enlighten. Braver writes: ‘Such Dr. Seussian repetition is just the kind of wording that makes many readers suspicious that he is engaging in intentional obfuscation for the appearance of profundity.’10 But this is not the case.

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For Heidegger, drawing on his phenomenological roots, we miss language because of the ‘Natural Attitude’ (naturliche Einstellung) in which we unreflectively take the world and the things in it, like language, for granted. In the Natural Attitude we experience the things which we experience rather than our experiencing of them. This is only possible in the first place because we do have an experience with language. The problem with the Natural Attitude is that we focus on the things, but not on our experiencing of those things. Edmund Husserl sought to go back and look at the things themselves, but as they are given to us through our experiencing. To do this we must move from the Natural Attitude to the ‘Phenomenological Attitude’ (phänomenologische Einstellung), which is a move from ‘thing-orientation’ to ‘experienceorientation’. This requires that we suspend or bracket (epoché) all thingorientated concerns and focus solely on how the experience is given. Thus when Heidegger says he wants: ‘To bring language as language to language’, his focus is on the middle phrase in that he wants to bring us back to an experience of language as language. In this way he wants to faithfully get back to language itself as a phenomenon. The reason for this is that ‘Western philosophy has consistently conceived of language not as language but as something else, which dooms all attempts to understand it.'11 An example of conceiving language not as language but as something else, says Heidegger, is Wilhelm von Humboldt’s work. We have seen this when touching upon Humboldt’s view of language in Chapter 3. Humboldt’s starting point is a quasi-Kantian or Hegelian theory of human conception, which determines all his ideas on language. Accordingly, Humboldt sees everything from the framework of ‘subjectivity’, and so instead of being studied on its own terms, language is seen to be only one element of a subject’s behaviour. Rather than bringing language as language to language, Humboldt is ‘bringing language as the subject’s activity to the language of modern metaphysics’.12 By using the word ‘language’ or ‘speech’ three times, in the phrase ‘bringing language as language to language’, Heidegger says something different about it in each respect, and yet says the same language or speech. This underlying ‘same’, says Heidegger, holds together what is kept separate in the above formula. What is kept separate points to a web or weft of relations, in which we as human beings are included because language has woven us into its speaking. Heidegger then states boldly: ‘The web indicated by the formula designates the predetermined realm in which not only this lecture series but

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all linguistic science, all linguistic theory and philosophy of language, in fact any attempt to reflect on language, must live.’13 What does Heidegger mean here? He tells us that the web of relations of which the formula speaks is the proper matter of language. Any attempt to track down language’s way, must stay within the wheel ruts of language’s path or go off course. We must not go around or outside of language, despite the urge to untangle ourselves from it, but keep within the weft that it weaves. Only by this way can we bring language as language to language, and so deliver language into its own by experiencing it on its own terms. He writes: ‘Instead of explaining language in terms of one thing or another, and thus running away from it, the way to language intends to let language be experienced as language.’14 Heidegger’s concern is the same in yet another of his linguistic essays. Here he writes: The three lectures that follow bear the title ‘The Nature of Language’. They are intended to bring us face to face with a possibility of undergoing an experience with language. To undergo an experience with something – be it a thing, a person, or a god – means that this something befalls us, strikes us, comes over us, overwhelms and transforms us. When we talk of ‘undergoing’ an experience, we mean specifically that the experience is not of our own making; to undergo here means that we endure it, suffer it, receive it as it strikes us and submit to it. It is this something that comes about, comes to pass, happens.15

Heidegger continues: To undergo an experience with language, then, means to let ourselves be properly concerned by the chain of language by entering into and submitting to it. If it is true that man finds the proper abode of his existence in language – whether he is aware of it or not – then an experience we undergo with language will touch the innermost nexus of our existence.16

To undergo an experience with language is not the same as providing information about it. We have an endless supply of information about language, says Heidegger, from: linguists, philologists, psychologists and analytic philosophers. Heidegger is careful to add that the scientific and philosophical investigation of language that the aforementioned disciplines typically pursue has its own particular justification, and retains its own importance. Nevertheless, scientific and philosophical information about language is not the same as experiences we undergo with language. He writes: ‘The determination of the essence of language, and even the act of asking about it, regulates itself in each case according to what has become the prevailing preconception about the essence of beings and

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about how we comprehend essence. But essence and Being speak in language.’17 However, concerning experiences with language, Heidegger (highlighting the Natural Attitude) writes: In experiences which we undergo with language, language itself brings itself to language. One would think that this happens anyway, any time anyone speaks. Yet at whatever time and in whatever way we speak a language, language itself never has the floor. Any number of things are given voice in speaking, above all what we are speaking about: a set of facts, an occurrence, a question, a matter of concern. Only because in everyday speaking language does not bring itself to language but holds back, are we able simply to go ahead and speak a language, and so to deal with something and negotiate something by speaking.18

But when, Heidegger asks, does language speak itself as language? The answer, he says, is when we cannot find the right word for something that concerns us, carries us away, oppresses or encourages us. On these occasions language has distantly and fleetingly touched us with its essential being. All the while we freely speak with language it is absent in its presence, but when we are ‘lost for words’, language is suddenly present in its absence. And this, literally unbeknown to us, is where the being or essence or nature of language lies. This curious fact leads Robert Bernasconi to say of language: What makes the subject a particularly appropriate one for phenomenological investigation is the way language for the most part conceals itself by directing us away from itself toward that which is spoken about. That means we cannot examine language as language head on. When we speak about language, it is, as something spoken about, reduced to the status of a thing. However correct what we might say about language is, the Being of language belongs more to our speaking than to anything we can say about it. All attempts to put what is spoken about to one side, so that we may concentrate on language, simply dissolve language by reducing it to mere sounds.19

It does indeed sound very odd, contradictory even, to say that the Being of language belongs more to our speaking than to anything we can say about it. However, by simply speaking, the Being of language is present, but only in its absence. We cannot make language presently present, so to speak, by saying or defining what it is. This is why when we speak, language, as Heidegger has asserted hitherto, never has the floor. Language holds back in the speaking, and this is how it speaks. It is as though the guise of language is a permanent disguise. Language hides behind what it brings to appearance. Language necessarily

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appears as something else. This something else prevents us from seeing language as language. Here, Heidegger is again remarkably similar to apophatic mystical theologians. But where with such mystics it is language that cannot say, here it is in fact language that cannot be said. Heidegger is arguing that language cannot be used to capture in words the essence of language. Whatever we say about language and with language, we never get to the heart of what language is as language. Language speaks everything that is, but does not speak itself. And yet, it is precisely in this way that language is. Hence, Kelly writes: ‘As with the dark gods of negative theology, our denials regarding it are of more value than our affirmations.’20

10.2 The way-making movement I have reiterated that language speaks, and man only speaks in that he first hears and responds to language’s speaking. Concerning this listening and responding, Heidegger says: ‘The encountering saying of mortals is answering. Every spoken word is already an answer: counter-saying, coming to the encounter, listening Saying. When mortals are made appropriate for Saying, human nature is released into that needfulness out of which man is used for bringing soundless Saying to the sound of language.’21 Thus, for Heidegger, human speaking is a counter-saying, or ‘making answer’ (Antworten). It is here, in the relation between originative Saying and responsive speaking, that we can begin to see the essence of language as a way. Heidegger is referring to the way in a specific sense here. When he speaks of the way to language, he does not mean that this way is already there. Rather, it refers to the actual creation of the way as a waymaking. He writes: To clear a way, for instance across a snow-covered field, is in the AlemannicSwabian dialect still called wëgen even today. This verb, used transitively, means: to form a way and, forming it, to keep it ready. Way-making understood in this sense no longer means to move something up or down a path that is already there. It means to bring the way … forth first of all, and thus to be the way.22

The gist here is that language is not a mode of transport heading in the direction of a pre-existing way, like logistical haulage, but is the actual waying. In a separate essay, Heidegger writes: ‘To the modern mind, whose ideas about everything are punched in the die presses of technical-scientific calculation, the object of

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knowledge is part of the method. And method follows what is in fact the utmost corruption and degeneration of a way.’23 Heidegger contrasts this with what he calls reflective thinking, in which, he says, the way belongs to the country or region. This country or region, he continues, has a freeing and sheltering character as the way-making movement, which yields those ways that belong to the region. He argues: To a thinking so inclined that reaches out sufficiently, the way is that by which we reach – which lets us reach what reaches out for us by touching us, by being our concern. The way is such, it lets us reach what concerns and summons us. … The country offers ways only because it is country. It gives way, moves us. We hear the words ‘give way’ in this sense: to be the original giver and founder of ways.24

Heidegger continues in the same essay to suggest that the word ‘way’ is an ancient word that speaks to the reflective mind of man. Here he endeavours to get to the originative and fundamental sense of language’s way, as the way that gives all ways. Here he likens it to the Tao of Lao Tze’s philosophical and poetic thinking: Perhaps the mystery of mysteries of thoughtful Saying conceals itself in the word ‘way’, Tao, if only we will let these names return to what they leave unspoken, if only we are capable of this, to allow them to do so. Perhaps the enigmatic power of today’s reign of method also, and indeed preeminently, stems from the fact that the methods, notwithstanding their efficiency, are after all merely the runoff of a great hidden stream which moves all things along and makes way for everything. All is way.25

Here Heidegger appears to be drawing from the two opening lines of Lao Tze’s Tao Te Ching, which reads: 1. The Tao that can be trodden is not the enduring and unchanging Tao. The name that can be named is not the enduring and unchanging name. 2. (Conceived of as) having no name, it is the Originator of heaven and earth; (conceived of as) having a name, it is the Mother of all things.26

It is by way of this way-making that gives all ways that we are able to tentatively glimpse the way to language which, as we have seen, Heidegger adumbrates as: To bring language as language to language. The way brings language (the essence of language) as language (the Saying) to language (the resounding word). Put more succinctly, the way-making movement brings the essence of language as Saying to speech. This is language’s way. This being so, Heidegger can assert that when

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speaking of the way to language, we no longer mean exclusively or primarily the advance of our thinking as it reflects on language. We are not therefore finding our way to language through thought or concepts. On the contrary: The way to language has become transformed along the way. From human activity it has shifted to the appropriating nature of language. But it is only to us and only with regard to ourselves that the change of the way to language appears as a shift which has taken place only now. In truth, the way to language has its unique region within the essence of language itself. But this means also: the way to language as we first had it in mind does not become invalid; it becomes possible and necessary only in virtue of the true way which is the appropriating, needful way-making.27

Let us try to elucidate what Heidegger means here. Rather than bringing and conforming language to our understanding, we are brought and conform to its primary nature. It is only to our way of thinking that this looks like a shift, precisely because the shift is with us and not language. The way to language was, is and always will be with the essence of language itself. This does not make our initial thinking about language superfluous, but that way is only possible on account of the genuine way. In short, the linguistic way that provides our speech produces the proper path to language. This being so, the path’s formula, to bring language as language to language, says Heidegger, no longer encapsulates a directive for reflecting on language, but speaks the very form in which the essence of language makes its way. This means then that it is language that brings language as language to language. Heidegger concedes that the formula owing to the web of relations it calls upon is apt to leave language in a tangle. Yet, if we keep to the simplicity of the way-making movement itself that the idiomatic formula conveys, we may well glimpse language qua language instead of representing language as this or that. Heidegger appears to suggest here that we see what the formula as a whole guides us towards. Thus, rather than hear the individual components referring to the essence of language, to Saying, and to speech, we catch sight of a greater meaning not needing to be deduced from the parts. This whole greater than the sum of its parts is the way-making movement, delivering Saying to speech as the essence of language. Heidegger writes, though not necessarily making it clearer: What looks like a confused tangle becomes untangled when we see it in the light of the way-making movement, and resolves into the release brought about by the way-making movement disclosed in Saying. That movement delivers Saying to speech. Saying keeps the way open along which speaking, as listening, catches

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from Saying what is to be said, and raises what it thus has caught and received into the sounding word.28

Elucidating this, the way-making movement is disclosed in Saying that is delivered to speech. Saying opens the way for speaking as listening to catch from Saying what is to be spoken, and duly raises what it catches into the resounding word. The overall point being, I believe, that we come to the essence of language through its actual Saying heard in our own speaking, and not through this or that which our speaking happens to say in words.

10.3 Seeking the prize so rich and frail It was stated above that when we are lost for words we are, according to Heidegger, closer to the essential being of language. However, it is on those occasions when we are lost for words that we are apt to say that ‘language fails us’. Owing to the habit of seeing language as a mere instrument of our expression, it never crosses our mind to say, ‘I have failed language’. This is to say I was not in a position to receive what language is able to give, and it therefore withheld the right word. However, Heidegger says: ‘When the issue is to put into language something which has never yet been spoken, then everything depends on whether language gives or withholds the appropriate word.’29 This, says Heidegger, is so of the poet. He adds: ‘Indeed, a poet might even come to the point where he is compelled – in his own way, that is, poetically – to put into language the experience he undergoes with language.’30 Such a poet is Stefan George, and Heidegger converses with his poem titled ‘The Word’ (Das Wort), which explores the nature of language. A translation of the poem reads: Wonder or dream from distant land I carried to my country’s strand And waited till the twilit norn Had found the name within her bourn – Then I could grasp it close and strong It blooms and shines now the front along … Once I returned from happy sail I had a prize so rich and frail, She sought for long and tidings told: ‘No like of this these depths enfold.’ And straight it vanished from my hand,

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The treasure never graced my land … So I renounced and sadly see: Where word breaks off no thing may be.31

The poet speaks of a journey, a happy sail that fuses wonder and dream, which appears to describe how poetry itself comes to be. Thus, ‘wonder or dream from distant land’ is the poetic experience that takes the poet away from the border of his land, or shore of his country. Here, in the wonder-dream of poetic experience, the twilit Norn finds the ‘name’ in her bourn. The ‘Norn’ is one of three goddesses of fate in Scandinavian mythology. She finds the ‘name’ in her bourn, which is to say, in the well-spring source of her own fountain or stream: ‘In whose depths she searches for the names she would bring forth from it.’32 Heidegger suggests that the name here is not a mere sign that designates with a cipher: ‘The terms “name” and “word” in George’s poem are thought differently and more deeply than as mere signs.’33 More normally, the wonder-dreams of the poet’s poetic experience lead to the Norn who finds the name within her bourn: ‘It seems as though the poet needed only to bring the wonders that enthral and the dreams that enrapture him to the well-spring of language, and there in unclouded confidence let the words come forth to him that fit all the wonderful and dream-like things whose images have come to him.’34 Thus the poet is able to grasp the name found, which blooms and shines as the production of his poetry. In this respect, a word or name for the poet was typically ‘like a grasp that fastens upon the things already in being and held to be in being, compresses and expresses them, and thus makes them beautiful’.35 But on one occasion the ‘conventional self-assured poetic production’36 abruptly ends. For returning full of hope following a previous happy sail, the poet reaches the Norn and demands the name of the rich and frail prize he has in his possession. Only this time the Norn looks for the name and then tells the poet: ‘No like of this these depths enfold.’ In short, the Norn cannot find the name for the prize so rich and frail in his hand. Heidegger writes: ‘Such a word, which would let the prize lying there plainly be what it is – such a word would have to well up out of the secure depths reposing in the stillness of deep slumber. Only such a word from such a source could keep the prize secure in the richness and frailty of its simple being.’37 Consequently, the poet says: ‘And straight it vanished from my hand, the treasure never graced my land.’ Heidegger writes: ‘The frail rich prize, already plainly in hand, does not reach being as a thing, it does not come to be a treasure, that is, a poetically secured possession of the land. The

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poet remains silent about the prize which could not become a treasure of his land, but which yet granted to him an experience with language.’38 We do not explicitly know the name of the prize that the poet fails to retain, for of course we cannot, only that it is both rich and frail and that it gives (as Heidegger affirms) the poet an experience with language. Coming back without the treasure, the poet has to renounce and sadly see: ‘Where word breaks off no thing may be.’ Generally speaking this means that ‘no thing is’ where the word is lacking. This is in line with the argument that underlies this work, that from out of Being a thing is only distinguished as this or that thing by way of the naming of language. Heidegger writes: ‘Only where the word for the thing has been found is the thing a thing. Only thus is it. Accordingly we must stress as follows: no thing is where the word, that is, the name is lacking. The word alone gives being to the thing.’39 The poet can usually speak, and so knows that only where the word for the thing has been found is the thing a thing: ‘Only the word makes a thing appear as the thing it is, and thus lets it be present.’40 But Heidegger is aware that reading the poem solely in this way ‘would have reduced poetry to the servant’s role as documentary proof for our thinking, and taken thinking too lightly’.41 Heidegger is not interested here in using the poem to handsomely confirm his linguistic principle that language is the house of Being that provides the world of things with its stable framework and enduring structure. Doing so would overlook the overriding point here of undergoing an experience with language. This is not a case then of simply confirming that where there is no word there is no thing. For in this instance it is clearly not any old word that the poet has. It is a prize rich and frail and that vanishes from his hand, and so never graces his land in terms of being named. So what is this rich and frail prize? Heidegger writes: Stefan George’s poetic experience means something age-old, something that has struck thinking long ago and ever since has held it captive, though in a manner that has become both commonplace and indiscernible to us. Neither poetic experience with the word nor the thinking experience with Saying gives voice to language in its essential being. … The being of language nowhere brings itself to word as the language of being. There is some evidence that the essential nature of language flatly refuses to express itself in words – in the language, that is, in which we make statements about language. If language everywhere withholds its nature in this sense, then such withholding is in the very nature of language. Thus language not only holds back when we speak it in the accustomed ways,

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but this its holding back is determined by the fact that language holds back its own origin and so denies its being to our usual notions.42

The word that the poet cannot find, so that the thing he seeks in turn cannot be, is the word that captures the essence of language. The poet has learned through renunciation that he cannot say language. But if we recall Heidegger has earlier hinted in the same essay that this is precisely when language speaks itself as language, when we cannot find the right word and so being left unspoken: ‘Language has distantly and fleetingly touched us with its essential being.’43 Here then we tentatively experience language’s own manner of being. Here we encounter language on its own terms. This is because the disruption of not finding the right word prevents the poet from simply treating language as a relationship between word and thing, or sign and meaning. The structure of naming in this manner collapses.44 To repeat, when we freely speak with language it is absent in its presence, but when we are ‘lost for words’, language as language is suddenly present in its absence rather like Pierre that Sartre seeks in the café.45 Not finding the right word gives a glimpse of language’s way, the experience we undergo with language that brings language as language to language. Only in this way does language have the floor, by precisely not having the floor as such.

11

The Owning-Event Alone Speaks

11.1 Appropriation Heidegger argues that the Saying (die Sage) of language as Showing (die Zeige) comes to pass in what he calls in his later thinking, ‘the Event’ (das Eignen). When simply meaning ‘event’ the word is usually spelt Ereignis, from sich ereignen, ‘to happen’, or ‘occur’. But for Heidegger it means more besides an event understood as a happening or occurrence, and is frequently translated as ‘Appropriation’. For this reason Heidegger often writes it as Er-eignis, associating it with the German eignen, meaning ‘to be suitable, belong’, aneignen, ‘to appropriate’, and eigen ‘(one’s) own’.1 The word ‘own’ (eigen) is the base for many cognate words used by Heidegger: Eigentlich, the crucial epithet of Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein, meaning ‘appropriate’, applied … to language ‘proper’, eignen, to own or possess, especially in the form an-eignen, ‘to appropriate’, a word Heidegger often employs; … eigens, meaning ‘expressly’ or ‘explicitly’, as when Heidegger tries to say explicitly what language on its own is; das Eigene, whatever is a thing’s ‘own’, that is, whatever shows itself when language lets a being advene under its own power, or lets it withdraw into concealment and abide on its own; and finally, das Eigentümliche, what is ‘peculiar’ to language proper. By far the most important and complex of these words is Ereignis, often written Er-eignis, and its verb sich ereignen.2

Heidegger says of the phrase the event of Appropriation that it ‘should now speak as a key term in the service of thinking’,3 but adds that it is no more translatable than the Greek Logos or Chinese Tao.4 Furthermore he says that it is a unique, singular event and continues: The event of appropriation is that realm, vibrating within itself, through which man and Being reach each other in their nature, achieve their active nature by losing those qualities with which metaphysics has endowed them. … Thinking receives the tools for this self-suspended structure from language. For language is

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the most delicate and thus most susceptible vibration holding everything within the suspended structure of the appropriation. We dwell in the appropriation inasmuch as our active nature is given over to language.5

In his essay, ‘The Way to Language’, Heidegger asks, concerning the ‘Showing’ of Saying: From where does the Showing arise? He answers: ‘The moving force in Showing of Saying is Owning.’6 This moving force or bestirring of language, continues Heidegger, is what brings all present and absent beings each into their own. It is where they show themselves in what they are, and where they abide according to their kind. Heidegger adds: ‘This owning which brings them there, and which moves Saying as Showing in its showing we call Appropriation.’7 This owning as Appropriation, he argues, and in doing so reminding us of the ‘presently present’ and the ‘non-presently present’, yields the opening of the clearing ‘into which’ what is present can enter and ‘from which’ what withdraws can depart into absence, yet keeping something of itself while in withdrawal. He then adds: ‘What Appropriation yields through Saying is never the effect of a cause, nor the consequence of an antecedent. The yielding owning, the Appropriation, confers more than any effectuation, making, or founding.’8 This means that the Event as Er-eignis is not a happening, an occurrence or incident that can be understood in terms of any causal relation. Rather, as the Event that brings all things into their own, Heidegger wants to suggest that it is a more fundamental, originative and enduring yielding. To explain the sense he wants to convey, Heidegger uses the word gewahrender, which is a present participle used as a comparative from the verb gewahren. This typically means: ‘to grant’, ‘afford’, ‘give’, ‘yield’, ‘provide’ or ‘support’. But key here is that it stems from Wahren, which essentially means, ‘to last’, but also, ‘preserve’, ‘safeguard’, ‘protect’ and ‘keep’. Thus for Heidegger the Event as Er-eignis yields more than any causing or effecting can grant. It cannot be understood as a simple event or happening and: ‘It can only be experienced as the abiding gift yielded by Saying.’9 All things it seems persevere as what they are on account of its primordial and fundamental yielding. It even appears to make possible conceptions of causality, in the same way that the four causes were understood to be within the uniting source of poiēsis in Chapter 6. All in all, for Heidegger, Appropriation is understood as the linguistic event by which all things come into their own as things. It is therefore seen as the ‘Owning-Event’. Heidegger writes: What is yielding is Appropriation itself – and nothing else. … There is nothing else from which the Appropriation itself could be derived, even less in whose

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terms it could be explained. The appropriating event is not the outcome (result) of something else, but the giving yield whose giving reach alone is what gives us such things as a ‘there is’, a ‘there is’ of which even Being itself stands in need to come into its own as presence.10

Language as the Owning-Event then is not the result of anything else, but the reason why all other things are given and thus brought into their own to endure as things. As discussed in Chapter 9, language is the very giving of Being (Es gibt Sein) whereby everything else exists. Language as the ultimate Event is the ‘it gives’ (es gibt), but is not itself given as a thing. It is the presencing that commissions the ‘essential unfolding-in-presence’11 of things, but is never a present object. Heidegger says that we can only give a name to this Appropriation that prevails in the saying, when we ourselves say: ‘it – Appropriation – appropriates or owns.’12

11.2 The essence of humanity The Showing (die Zeige) of Saying (die Sage) as Owning-Event (das Eignen) brings all things into their own as things, and owns itself in terms of being without a cause as originative yielding. All active-coming-to-presence as the ‘presently present’ from out of the ‘non-presently present’ is therefore granted by the Owning-Event and so, says Heidegger, is needed by Being if it is to come into its own as presence. But moreover, and accordingly, this Appropriation grants humans residence (as a bestowal) in their own essence or nature, and, as such, they are those who speak. It is not the case that there is already an ‘I’ apart from language and related to it, rather as Richardson puts it: ‘It’s rather that I come to be the same time as language does for me: through language there’s instituted something stable enough to be a self, over and against a stable world. My own continuity is secured only by my being planted in language: I come to be as speaking being.’13 In a nutshell, the Owning-Event makes humans what they are. The Owning-Event that brings things into their own and is its own simultaneously brings man into his own, thus appropriating us in the process. Appropriation, as language’s OwningEvent, confers upon us our proper mode of Being – in that it appropriates. Thus Heidegger says: ‘The human is indeed in its nature given to speech.’14 Taylor writes: ‘Language is seen as the condition of the human world being disclosed. The disclosure is not intrapsychic, but occurs in the space between

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humans; indeed, it helps to define the space that humans share.’15 While a little later he says: It is not something we accomplish. It is not an artefact of ours, our ‘Gemächte’. It must be there as the necessary context for all our acting and making. We can only act insofar as we are already in the midst of it. It couldn’t happen without us, but it isn’t our doing. It is the basis for all the sense that our lives make; or that anything makes.16

Heidegger asserts that Appropriation appropriates mortals by envisaging or beholding human nature.17 In German, this passage is as follows: ‘Das Ereignis ereignet in seinem Er-äugen des Menschenwesens die Sterblichen da-durch.’ Farrell Krell says in the notes to his own translation: The homophony and homology of Er-eignen/Er-äugnen is lost in translation. … Goethe provides the fundamental clue. Where one would expect to find ereignen in Faust (e.g. 11. 5917 and 7750) one finds instead sich eräugnen, containing the root Auge, ‘eye.’ Although the relation to eignen, ‘to own’, cannot be denied, Ereignis also has to do with ‘bringing something before the eyes, showing.’ Ereignis is as much related to envisagement (Old High German irougen, Middle High German eröugen) as to enownment.18

We might cautiously interpret this to mean that Saying’s Owning-Event brings man into his own, and thereby brings him (along with everything else) before the eyes so as to show him his own nature. But what is this nature? We have already hinted that man is brought into his own essence or nature as he who listens and then speaks. But why is this necessary? Referencing Being and Time, Heidegger says in his dialogue with Tezuka: Inquirer: What mattered then, and still does, is to bring out the Being of beings – though no longer in the manner of metaphysics, but such that Being will shine out, Being itself – that is to say: the presence of present beings, the two-fold of the two in virtue of their simple oneness. This is what makes its claim on man, calling him to its essential being. Japanese: Man, then, realizes his nature as man by corresponding to the call of the two-fold, and bears witness to it in its message. Inquirer: Accordingly, what prevails in and bears up the relation of human nature to the two-fold is language. Language defines the hermeneutic relation.19

A few pages later, Tezuka asserts: ‘Man stands “in relation” then says the same as: Man is really as man when needed and used by …’ Interrupting, Heidegger

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says: ‘what calls on man to preserve the two-fold’.20 Through this relation, or the co-responding as an answering-to, man comes to be what he is and simultaneously preserves the two-fold of the ontological difference, namely, Being/beings or the ‘non-presently present’ and the ‘presently present’. Ziarek, drawing from Volume 71 of Heidegger’s Gesamtausgabe, eponymously titled Das Ereignis or The Event, says: The event dedicates its ‘giving to be’ to ‘man’ and in the same move dedicates man’s thinking to itself, that is, to the event. This reciprocal dedication, the event’s saying itself to the human and the saying by the human ‘of ’ the event into words, comes to transpire only because what takes place as and in the event is the rendering of the human ‘appropriate’ (An-eignung), that is, alert and attentive to, the truth, the unconcealment, of being.21

11.3 The peculiarity of language We have explored above how the Showing of Saying as Owning-Event brings all things into their own as things, and that this Appropriation bestows or grants humans residence or abode in their own essence or nature, as those who speak. But there is another ‘owning’ aspect of language. For Heidegger, language owns itself and is therefore its own. Here, Heidegger is referring to what is peculiar to language (das Eigentumliche). What is peculiar, that is exclusive to and characteristic of language, is that as the way of all ways it brings all things including humankind into their own, and is its own by owning itself. As that which brings all things into their own, makes them known to humankind and as such makes humankind what it is, language itself stands alone. That language owns itself and is its own is conveyed in the hitherto discussed clause (or even phrase) of Heidegger that says ‘language speaks’. It is language that speaks what man says after. The mystery of language, says Heidegger, is that it speaks solely and solitarily with itself. But we have to take care of how we understand this. Heidegger opens his essay ‘The Way To Language’ with the following words of Novalis: ‘The peculiar property of language, namely that language is concerned exclusively with itself – precisely that is known to no one.’22 These words come from a text by Novalis titled, Monologue, which, says Heidegger, directs us to the mystery of language. Yet to say that language ‘is concerned exclusively with itself ’, says Heidegger, resembles a selfish solipsism. He answers: ‘But language does not insist upon

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itself alone in the sense of a purely self-seeking, all-oblivious self-admiration. As Saying, the nature of language is the appropriating showing which disregards precisely itself, in order to free that which is shown, to its authentic appearance.’23 From here, Heidegger argues that we cannot grasp language in the same way that calculative thinking assumes to grasp everything else, that is, by ‘enframing’ everything that comes to presence into a technical inventory. When we do, ‘speech’, he says, ‘is challenged to correspond in every respect to Framing in which all present beings can be commandeered’.24 Speech when understood in this manner becomes information and thus: ‘It informs itself about itself in order to safeguard its own procedures by information theories.’25 This enframing is the nature of modern technology, says Heidegger, and holds sway in all directions. It commandeers for its purposes a formalized language, namely: ‘the kind of communication which “informs” man uniformly, that is, gives him the form in which he is fitted into the technological-calculative universe, and gradually abandons “natural language”.’26 Formalization then is the aim and measure. Heidegger adds: But even if a long way could lead to the insight that the nature of language can never be dissolved in formalism to become a part of its calculations, so that we accordingly must say that ‘natural language’ is language which cannot be formalized – even then ‘natural language’ is still being defined only negatively, that is, set off against the possibility or impossibility of formalization.27

But what if, Heidegger asks, ‘natural language’, which is seen to be a disturbing remnant or troublesome residue, drew its essential unfolding nature from the Saying? In response, Heidegger almost seems to be wishfully inviting the following possibility he raises: What if Saying, instead of merely impeding the destructiveness of informationlanguage, had already overtaken it in virtue of the fact that Appropriation cannot be commandeered? What if Appropriation – no one knows when or how – were to become an insight whose illuminating lightening flash enters into what is and what is taken to be? What if Appropriation, by its entry, were to remove everything that is in present being from its subjection to a commandeering order and bring it back to its own?28

Heidegger returns to the following words of Novalis: ‘The peculiar property of language, namely that language is concerned exclusively with itself – precisely that is known to no one.’29 He explains that with the word peculiar, Novalis is pointing to the particularity that makes language exceptional. The word ‘peculiar’ means

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‘belonging exclusively to’, so as to be ‘one’s own’. It is in this respect that language belongs to itself, as its own. Heidegger, drawing on the quotation from Novalis, argues that language is monologue. What he means by this is that language alone speaks, and does so in solitude, or lonesomely. Crucially, Heidegger qualifies this by adding: ‘Yet only he can be lonesome, who is not alone, if “not alone” means not apart, singular, without any rapports. But it is precisely the absence in the lonesome of something in common which persists as the most binding bond with it.’30 This is to say that the Saying needs to resound in the spoken word. Yet, as we have seen, humankind can only speak by first listening to and answering the Saying. Man can do this only because he belongs to language. His saying is always a resaying. Accordingly, Heidegger writes: In order to be who we are, we human beings remain committed to and within the being of language, and can never step out of it and look at it from somewhere else. Thus we always see the nature of language only to the extent to which language itself has us in view, has appropriated us to itself. That we cannot know the nature of language – know it according to the traditional concept of knowledge defined in terms of cognition as representation – is not a defect, however, but rather an advantage by which we are favoured with a special realm, that realm where we, who are needed and used to speak language, dwell as mortals.31

In short, Saying will not be definitively grasped by assertion. We cannot reach the nature of language, says Heidegger, by fabricating neologisms and novel phrases. To think back so as to reflect on language’s nature, there needs to be a transformation of language that we can neither force or invent. Our relation to language has to change, or more accurately, has to be acknowledged. This is to say, we must acknowledge that our speaking as hearing-answering is integrally related (by our being held) to the way-making movement of language’s OwningEvent. Marc Froment-Meurice writes: It is in this way that language ‘has’ us (but also dupes us): every word returns to language, even though we think we are its initiators. We need language to speak, even though it gives nothing in giving itself. If it requires us, this is not because it ceases to be the only one to speak, but because it remains the only one that properly speaks. Language always has the last word.32

Language is peculiar in that it owns itself and is therefore its own. Language speaks as a monologue in terms of ‘alone speaking’, and doing so ‘lonesomely’. What then is left for us to say, that does not ground language in a metalanguage? Everything and nothing, for as Heidegger says: ‘We leave the speaking

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to language. We do not wish to ground language in something else that is not language itself, nor do we wish to explain other things by means of language.’33 Language speaks. All we can say tautologically, declares Heidegger, is that language is language.34 But we should take care not to see the term language speaks also as a tautology. Haar writes: One ought to point out that an expression such as die Sprache spricht is in fact not a tautology at all, but an attempt to intensify the role of the ‘verb’, the phenomenon, and to diminish that of the subject, of substance. Nietzsche had already noted the purely grammatical, false substantialization of the subject that occurs when language forces us to say ‘lightning flashes’: we wrongly isolate the lightning that cannot in fact be distinguished from the phenomenon of ‘flashing.’35

Haar, I suspect, is referring to the following passage from Nietzsche: A quantum of strength is equivalent to a quantum of urge, will, activity, and it is only the snare of language (of the arch-fallacies of reason petrified in language), presenting all activity as conditioned by an agent – the ‘subject’ – that blinds us to this fact. For, just as popular superstition divorces the lightning from its brilliance, viewing the latter as an activity whose subject is the lightning, so does popular morality divorce strength from its manifestations, as though there were behind the strong a neutral agent, free to manifest its strength or contain it. But no such agent exists; there is no ‘being’ behind the ‘doing’, acting, becoming; the ‘doer’ has simply been added to the deed by the imagination – the doing is everything.36

This I believe makes Heidegger’s case even more compelling, or even more difficult to take on board, because he applies the same argument to language itself. This is to say that there is not language as one thing, which also happens to speak as another. There is no ‘being’ of language behind the ‘doing’ of speaking. If this is so, it is momentous, because it forces us to be more careful in terms of how we approach Heidegger’s notion that language speaks. For example, when we are told that language speaks, and that we only speak by first listening and then replying to its speaking, it is not simply the case that there is a separation between language and man. While Heidegger is indeed inverting the roles, so that ‘language speaks man’ rather than ‘man speaks language’, this does not mean that language is now the subject. As we have seen, for Heidegger, language is not something that is spoken by a subject, be that God or human. But we can also see that the term language speaks does not make language out to be a kind of

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subject that does its own speaking, or that exists without our speaking. Language does not simply exist as a subject independently and regardless of whether we speak it or not, but neither do we simply exist as humankind independently, and regardless of language. The emphasis, as we explored in Chapter 9, is on the doing of language as an ‘it gives’. As we have argued, for Heidegger, language is what it does. Yet Heidegger’s subtle take on causality in terms of co-respondence, tells us that language is the ‘Event’. Everything, including man and his speaking, is what it is by virtue of this all inclusive Event.

11.4 Language is language The statement language speaks brought us to another statement of Heidegger’s, namely that language is language. This is indeed a tautology, and in the Heideggerian dialectic A is defined as A so as to prevent Being’s definitional dispersal in beings.37 Heidegger says of the statement, language is language: This statement does not lead us to something else in which language is grounded. Nor does it say anything about whether language itself may be a ground for something else. The sentence ‘language is language’, leaves us to hover over an abyss as long as we endure what it says. Language is – language, speech. Language speaks. If we let ourselves fall into the abyss denoted by this sentence, we do not go tumbling into emptiness. We fall upward, to a height. Its loftiness opens up a depth. The two span a realm in which we would like to become at home, so as to find a residence, a dwelling place for the life of man.38

This residence and dwelling place is the mystery of language itself – the ‘house of Being’ – in which man as man dwells. Heidegger’s intention, as by now should be clear, was not to ask what language is, and then come up with a clever theory about it. He sought to bring us to language’s place of being, as opposed to bringing language to our own, as is typically the case with those who study language. Heidegger did not wish to simply reflect on language as something to think about which would, he says, ‘make even language into one more object’.39 He tells us: ‘Reflection on the essence of language must … attain a different rank. It can no longer be a mere philosophy of language.’40 While a little later in the same work, he says: The widely and rapidly spreading devastation of language not only undermines aesthetic and moral responsibility in every use of language; it arises from a

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threat to the essence of humanity. A merely cultivated use of language is still no proof that we have as yet escaped the danger to our essence. These days, in fact, such usage might sooner testify that we have not yet seen and cannot see the danger because we have never yet placed ourselves in view of it. Much bemoaned of late, and much too lately, the downfall of language is, however, not the grounds for, but already a consequence of, the state of affairs in which language under the dominance of the modern metaphysics of subjectivity almost irremediably falls out of its element. Language still denies us its essence, that is the house of the truth of Being. Instead, language surrenders itself to our mere willing and trafficking as an instrument of domination over beings.41

Elsewhere, he writes: ‘We do not wish to assault language in order to force it into the grip of ideas already fixed beforehand. We do not wish to reduce the nature of language to a concept, so that this concept may provide a generally useful view of language that will rest all further notions about it.’42 This problem is also mentioned during Heidegger’s dialogue with Tezuka. In this instance the discussion concerns Heidegger’s phrase that language is the ‘house of Being’. The passage here begins with Heidegger: Inquirer: What are you thinking now? Japanese: Of the Same as you have in mind, of the nature of language. Inquirer: That is what is defining our dialogue. But even so we must not touch it. Japanese: Surely not, if by touching you mean grasping it in the sense of your European conceptualizations. Inquirer: No, those conceptualizations are not what I have in mind. Even the phrase ‘house of Being’ does not provide a concept of the nature of language, to the great sorrow of the philosophers who in their disgruntlement see in such phrases no more than a decay of thinking.43

Here we again get a sense of Heidegger viewing language in much the same way as the apophatic mystics view God. That is, even the phrase ‘house of Being’ does not capture what language is, and must be negated. As early as Being and Time, Heidegger writes: Attempts to grasp the ‘essence of language’ have always taken their orientation toward a single one of these factors and have understood language guided by the idea of ‘expression’, ‘symbolical forms’, communication as ‘statement’, ‘making known’ experiences or the ‘form’ of life. But nothing would be gained for a completely sufficient definition of language if we were to put these different fragmentary definitions together in a syncretistic way.44

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Heidegger was not seeking to nail down what language is for certain because language cannot be so grasped. He was not following the epistemological quest for certainty that had determined the nature of philosophy since Descartes. Heidegger’s fundamental question of Being, which brought him to explore language as the house of Being, deliberately took a very different approach to that of Descartes, and subsequent thinkers. Heidegger says of the approach of Descartes: In his Meditations Descartes does not ask only, and does not ask first, ti to on, what being is, in so far as it is. Descartes asks what that being is that is true being in the sense of the ens certum. For Descartes, the essence of certitudo has changed in the meanwhile, for in the Middle Ages certitudo does not signify certainty but the fixed delimitation of a being in that which it is. Certitudo here is still synonymous with essential … Certitudo becomes a fixing of the ens qua ens which results from the unquestionability of the cogito (ergo) sum for man’s ego. Thereby, the ego becomes the distinctive sub-jectum and thus the nature of man for the first time enters the realm of subjectivity in the sense of the ego. Out of the attunement to this certitudo the language of Descartes obtains the determination of a clare et distincte percipere. The tuning of doubt is the positive acquiescence in certainty. Henceforth, certainty becomes the determining form of truth.45

This epistemological quest for certain truth, the birth of modern philosophy, tends to continue today in Anglo-American, analytic philosophy, but in the phenomenology of continental philosophy it came to an end.46 Coming out of this phenomenological approach and with his Zen Buddhist or Taoist tinge, Heidegger endeavoured to get back to an experience of language itself. He writes: We would reflect on language itself, and on language only. Language itself is – language and nothing else besides. Language itself is language. The understanding that is schooled in logic, thinking of everything in terms of calculation and hence usually overbearing, calls this proposition an empty tautology. Merely to say the identical thing twice – language is language – how is that supposed to get us anywhere? But we do not want to get anywhere. We would like only, for once, to get just where we are already.47

Language is language. Language is not this or that through which we can subsequently represent and understand it and so turn it into another object, just as language itself is erroneously used to represent all else. When we do seek to represent and so understand language, we do so regardless of the fact that we are thereby moving away from language, and not to where we are already.

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Language speaks. Language itself is, says Heidegger, and nothing else besides. In another essay, Heidegger writes: ‘We speak of language, but constantly seem to be speaking merely about language, while in fact we are already letting language, from within language, speak to us, in language, of itself, saying its nature.’48

11.5 Etymology True to his word and true to the word, Heidegger adheres to his argument that language is language and that language speaks, and rather than speaking merely about language he seeks to let language speak from within language. He does this chiefly through etymology. For Steiner, etymology is ‘the most characteristic and disputed move in Heidegger’s method’.49 He says: This etymologising … becomes much more than an instrument. It is made the cardinal move in Heideggerian philosophy. One takes a common locution, or a passage in Heraclitus, in Kant, in Nietzsche. One excavates from individual syllables, words, or phrases their original, long-buried, or eroded wealth of meaning. One demonstrates that the occlusion of this meaning has altered and damaged the destiny of Western thought, and how its rediscovery, its literal restoration to active radiance, can bring on a renascence of intellectual and moral possibility.50

By adopting this etymological method, Heidegger appears to be doing two different things simultaneously. On the one hand he is wishing to hear and draw from the generative power of a word, seeking to accord with when it was first spoken as a phenomenological showing, as opposed to a representational designation. Steiner writes: The simple word, the antique vulgate will serve precisely because it contains (according to Heidegger) the greatest charge of initial and valid human perception. Thus the old and plain words are the richest in sense. It is we who have forgotten their fundamental incisiveness and existential witness. By pondering intensely, and with a sort of vehement probing, the etymology and early history of a word, the thinker can compel it to yield its formidable quantum of illumination and energy.51

For this reason Steiner also notes: ‘Justly, Gadamer tells of Martin Heidegger’s Wortgenie, of his “word-genius.” Heidegger can sense and follow the etymological “arteries into the primal rock of language.” ’52 Similarly, Ziarek says his

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etymology: ‘Needs to be understood as an opening of signs to the covered-over momentum of giving, to the “between” characteristic of what Heidegger calls the word (Wort).’53 In doing so, Heidegger allows a word to speak and therefore disclose itself, rather than speak for it and thereby ‘press up on the object of our enquiry some previous or ready-made analytic formula’?54 Heidegger’s deliberate attempt to speak from rather than about language, I believe, allows him to more readily achieve what we have seen is an overriding intention in his linguistics, namely, to bring language as language to language. On the other hand, through etymology, Heidegger is wishing to move away from the banal, hackneyed, humdrum, stale, platitudinous, trite, clichéd, vapid, stock and generally tired manner in which language is both heard and used. It is this that in part leads to the diminishment of words, leaving them seemingly worn out and used up. It is this that in part leaves us essentially homeless or destitute from the house of Being. In truth, the words themselves are not worn out and used up at all, but rather our own commonplace hearing and use of them has made them seem this way. At the beginning of Chapter 4, Heidegger was quoted to say: ‘There is no such thing as an empty word – only one that is worn out, yet remains full.’55 It is worn out, and yet remains full. Hence, for Heidegger, the language must be heard anew. In this way we may come to dwell once more in the house of Being. It is as though Heidegger’s etymologizing serves to renovate (literally, make new again) the remnants of a ruin. It is quite clear that Heidegger sees the significance of ‘etymology’ in a different light to most modern linguists, or indeed, even etymologists. Take the following sentence: ‘The sense in which the 17c poet Milton used it (“Etymology, or right wording, teacheth what belongs to every single word or part of speech”) is obsolete.’56 For Heidegger, this is not the case. In fact, the very notion that essential words or indeed etymology as ‘right wording’ can be obsolete (which literally means they have fallen into disuse) proves the need to renovate the house of Being. Heidegger might have been sympathetic to an older view that understood etymology to be the study of the etymon, namely, the true or literal meaning of a word. However, as John Ayto writes, ‘post-classical grammarians came to use this in the sense “root from which a particular word was derived,” as a result of which modern etymology, the study of etymons, deals with their history rather than their meaning’.57 This then is why etymology as it was understood by Milton is now considered obsolete. Heidegger, like Milton, uses etymology to deal foremost with the meaning and not the history of a word.58 It is for this reason

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that Heidegger would be guilty of what modern linguists call the ‘Etymological Fallacy’, namely ‘a term in linguistics for the view that the first recorded meaning of a word is or must be its correct meaning’.59 It is said to be a fallacy because the meaning of words changes with time, for example: ‘Horrid today has no semantic link with Latin horridus, bristling, from which it derives.’60 Heidegger would of course acknowledge that the meaning of words changes over time, but might also understand that this alongside their banal and trite use is what can lead to their diminishment. Words come to lose their primal charge of radical perception, or what Steiner above has referred to as their richest sense when they still contain their fundamental incisiveness and existential witness. The word etymon itself is a primitive word, and comes from the Greek etumos, meaning, ‘true’, ‘real’, and ‘actual’, which derives from etos, simply meaning ‘true’. This is in turn said to come from the Indo-European se-tó-s, which means ‘being’, ‘existing’, and therefore ‘true’, or simply, ‘that which is’. The word etymon is linked through its Indo-European root with both: ‘esse’, meaning, ‘being’ or ‘to be’, and ‘sooth’, meaning ‘truth’.61 According to the theory of language in Stoic philosophy, the etymon refers to the original and true form of a word. Moreover, a derivation of that etymon, of which modern etymology gives so much emphasis, was seen by the Stoics to be a degenerate descendant. Of the earlier Stoic understanding, the Oxford Companion to the English Language comments on how they held that all languages were in a slow state of decline from erstwhile perfection. They therefore looked for the etymon or true first form of a word. Their pessimistic view survives among those who insist that the best writers are long dead, and their belief in etyma continues among those who argue that the original meaning of a word has current as well as chronological priority over any later sense that it may develop.62

Is Heidegger one of those who argue that the original meaning of a word has priority over any later sense it may develop? It would seem so, but as ever with Heidegger it is not that simple. Prior to referring to etymology himself, he, for example, says: ‘Our older and richer language would have used words like … .’63 Yet such a view appears to contradict his own sense of historicity, and it is for this reason that I believe Heidegger does not simply view etymology as the Stoics did in our example above. He writes: The organizations for the purification of language and for defence against its progressive mutilation deserve respect. Nevertheless, through such institutions one finally demonstrates only more clearly that one no longer knows what

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language is all about. Because the fate of language is grounded in the particular relation of a people to Being, the question about Being will be most intimately intertwined with the question about language for us.64

What does Heidegger mean here when he says that the fate of language is grounded in the particular relation of a people to Being? In his essay, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, Heidegger suggests that the essence of all art is poiēsis, which in turn is the founding of truth. This founding is historical and changes according to epochs. The founding bestows as a refuting of what went before, grounds in terms of drawing from a historical people’s world, and begins as a historical thrust starts anew. This may in part explain why Heidegger’s etymological excavations are considered arbitrary and fanciful by some. And in this respect, we might ask, is he truly listening to language speaking? However, Haar writes: It is wrong to judge these language games according to the norm of etymological and philological exactness. What is at stake is to rediscover hidden possibilities in language, to ‘remain open to the force and range of its saying’. The repeated, mechanical, and sedimented employment of words without returning to the experience of the thing they point towards has weakened, exhausted, and made excessively banal those original words that have precisely lost their ‘apophantic’ capacity, their power to point out.65

Richardson’s elaboration of how Heidegger approaches etymology is similarly helpful: One important tactic for reviving the original sense of a word is to expose its etymology. Heidegger is often ridiculed for this. But his main point is not to assign these root senses to the word, but to locate the formative moment in which the root meaning is poetically converted into a new sense not analyzable into its root. Those root senses of course inflect the word, but only in helping us to have the experience the poet frames with the word. Etymologies can help us to regain that experience, and so to hear a word’s poetry again.66

Related perhaps to Heidegger’s use of etymology is his own unique style of language. Steiner refers to this as a ‘welding of words into uncouth chains of hyphenation … in a field of connotation and metaphor unique to Heidegger’.67 He adds: Heidegger’s philosophic speech becomes what linguists call an ‘idiolect’, the idiom of an individual. But in this case the individual aims to give to his private style of communication a universal bearing. Heidegger is perfectly aware of the implicit affront and paradoxicality of this proceeding … no aspect of

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Heideggerian thought can be divorced from the phenomenon of Heidegger’s prose style. To Heidegger’s detractors, this style is an abomination. It is nothing more than bombastic, indecipherable jargon.68

Some Heidegger scholars ape his terminology, and speak in what is referred to in a pejorative manner as Heideggerese. But in writing the way he does, Heidegger, it seems, is straining to hear and respond anew to what language itself says in order to recover its power of ontological nomination and bypass its routine and worn-out epistemic definitions. Hence he says: Words are not terms, and thus are not like buckets and kegs from which we scoop a content that is there. Words are wellsprings that are found and dug up in the telling, wellsprings that must be found and dug up again and again, that easily cave in, but that at times also well up when least expected. If we do not go to the spring again and again, the buckets and kegs stay empty, or their content stays stale.69

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12.1 The destitute time Do any of the points conveyed in previous chapters really matter? Is there any further import to these aside from questioning and rethinking the conventional view of language? For example, is the forgetting of Being and its connection with our relation to language any great concern? Do we need to see that language is the house of Being in which man dwells with a view to reoccupying that house? Do we really require a different sort of discourse, which instead of giving an ‘answer to’ Being, is ‘answerable to’ it? Does it matter that language is understood as logical assertion or idle talk, in place of a more authentic interpretive discourse? Likewise does it matter that natural language has been abandoned and replaced with a formalized language? Does it also matter that language is understood as a sign system, according to which words are ciphers or empty things that simply represent other things? And is there a problem in presuming to express ourselves by speaking language, instead of first listening and making answer to language speaking? For Heidegger, such points, and all the other areas we have discussed, do matter. They matter more than ever before. We have seen hitherto how Heidegger refers to the abandonment of Being by beings as ‘homelessness’. This homelessness is the symptom of the oblivion of Being, and has come to be in Heidegger’s view the destiny of the world. The word ‘homelessness’ is used because we have become unhoused from the house of Being in which we dwell, namely language. We are no longer in the house of Being as the home of human beings, because we are no longer at home in language. Heidegger argues that there is a ‘rapidly spreading devastation (Veröden) of language’.1 We are estranged from language’s essence, which means we are estranged from Being because as we have discussed, language is attuned to the Being of being. But more than

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this, unhoused from language as the house of the truth of Being, man is thereby estranged from his own essence as the creature that speaks being, and also estranged with disastrous consequences from the world. Heidegger writes: ‘Language surrenders itself to our mere willing and trafficking as an instrument of domination over beings.’2 In his essay, ‘What Are Poets For?’ (Wozu Dichter) Heidegger refers to our destitution.3 This reference to destitution, akin to our homelessness, comes from a line in Hölderlin’s elegy, ‘Bread and Wine’, that asks: ‘And what are poets for in a destitute time?’ Heidegger explains that for Hölderlin the destitute time is an era marked by the default of the gods, and since they have left the world: ‘The evening of the world’s age has been declining toward its night.’4 The grim consequence of this, says Heidegger, is that the ‘divine radiance’ has become extinguished in the world’s history. He continues: ‘The time of the world’s night is the destitute time, because it becomes ever more destitute. It has already grown so destitute, it can no longer discern the default of God as a default.’5 Heidegger tells us that owing to this default, the ground that grounds the world is absent. This ground is a reference for the most part to nature and to Being. The absence of this ground Heidegger calls the ‘abyss’, which our groundless world hangs in. We need to turn away from the abyss. But to turn away from this abyss and find ground again, assuming that this can still happen, means that there must be those who actually reach into the abyss. But why reach into the abyss? The reason, it seems, is to prepare the abode for the returning god. Heidegger writes: ‘How could there ever be for the god an abode fit for a god, if a divine radiance did not first begin to shine in everything that is?’6 The gods that were once here can only return when there has been a turn among men in the right place and in the right way. But at present, says Heidegger, our time is so destitute that the world’s night may even be approaching midnight: ‘Perhaps the world’s time is now becoming the completely destitute time. But also perhaps not, not yet, not even yet, despite the immeasurable need, despite all suffering, despite nameless sorrow, despite the growing and spreading peacelessness, despite the mounting confusion.’7 There needs to be a turn among mortal men, who can find the way to their own nature by reaching into the abyss. I have argued throughout that we find a way to our own nature through language, and Heidegger was for example quoted as saying: ‘An experience we undergo with language will touch the innermost nexus of our existence.’8 Who the mortals are who must reach into the abyss sooner

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than other mortals and otherwise than they, is anticipated by Hölderlin’s earlier question: ‘And what are poets for in a destitute time?’ It is the poets who must reach into the abyss, and know its marks as the traces of the fugitive gods. Heidegger writes: But who has the power to sense, to trace such a track? Traces are often inconspicuous, and are always the legacy of a directive that is barely divined. To be a poet in a destitute time means: to attend, singing, to the trace of the fugitive gods. This is why the poet in the time of the world’s night utters the holy. This is why, in Hölderlin’s language, the world’s night is the holy night.9

But Hölderlin’s poetry comes from another time, and it seems that his own philosophical light, along with the period of the manifestness of Being within metaphysics to which he belonged, may now in fact be the extreme oblivion of Being. For this reason, Heidegger asks if there is a modern poet in this destitute time whose poetry reaches into the abyss. He suggests that such a poet is Rainer Maria Rilke. This poet’s two great works, the Duino Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus, show that he realizes the destitution of the time. Drawing on the themes of these two poems, Heidegger writes: The time remains destitute not only because God is dead, but because mortals are hardly aware and capable even of their own mortality. Mortals have not yet come into ownership of their own nature. Death withdraws into the enigmatic. The mystery of pain remains veiled. Love has not been learned. But the mortals are. They are, in that there is language. Song still lingers over their destitute land. The singer’s word still keeps to the trace of the holy.10

Note that Heidegger now refers to language as ‘song’, a hint that he is speaking of language in a different way. In our destitute time the nature of pain, death and love is concealed in the abyss of Being, and yet one thing still remains, namely, language in the form of song. Rilke lives in the time where, according to Heidegger, metaphysics came to completion in Nietzsche. Heidegger writes: ‘Rilke has in his own way poetically experienced and endured the unconcealedness of beings which was shaped by that completion.’11

12.2 The closing of the open Heidegger looks at an unpublished poem of Rilke’s with a view to seeing ‘how beings as such and as a whole’12 showed themselves to him. The poem,

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titled ‘improvised verses’, contains references to: ‘the gravity of the pure forces’, ‘the ground’, ‘the centre’, ‘the draught’, ‘Nature’, ‘Life’, ‘the venture’ and ‘the widest orbit’. These, says Heidegger, all name what is as such the whole. It is, says Heidegger, what metaphysics also calls ‘Being’. Rilke, however, likes to refer to this with another term, namely, the ‘Open’. Heidegger writes: ‘In Rilke’s language, “open” means something that does not block off. It does not block off because it does not set bounds. It does not set bounds because it is in itself without all bounds. The Open is the great whole of all that is unbounded.’13 We have to be careful how we understand what Rilke means by the Open. He does not mean ‘open’ in the Heideggerian sense of the unconcealedness of beings that lets beings as such be present in the open of the clearing. Rilke in a curious way means the very opposite of this, because the unconcealed, the present, is now what is precisely closed up and unenlightened by conceptually objective representation. Heidegger explains: Where something is encountered, a barrier comes into being. Where there is confinement, whatever is so barred is forced back upon itself and thus bent in upon itself. The barring twists and blocks off the relation to the Open, and makes of the relation itself a twisted one. The confinement within the boundless is established by man’s representation. The oppositeness confronting him does not allow man to be directly within the Open. In a certain manner, it excludes man from the world and places him before the world – ‘world’ meaning here all beings as a whole. In contrast, what has the character of world is the Open itself, the whole of all that is not objective. 14

The Open is the subject of the eighth of Rilke’s Duino Elegies. For example, the elegy begins: With all its eyes, Creation looks on the Open. Only ours seem to have turned backwards and they appear to lay traps all around it as if to prevent its going free. What is really out there we only know by looking at the countenance of creatures. For we take a young child and force it to turn around, to see shapes and forms, and not the Open that is so deep in the face of an animal.15

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Heidegger also quotes a letter written by Rilke in the last year of his life, which records what he means by the term Open: You must understand the concept of the ‘Open’, which I have tried to propose in the elegy, in such a way that the animal’s degree of consciousness sets it into the world without the animal’s placing the world over against itself at every moment (as we do); the animal is in the world; we stand before it by virtue of that particular turn and intensification which our consciousness has taken. ... By the ‘Open’, therefore, I do not mean sky, air, and space; they, too, are ‘object’ and thus ‘opaque’ and closed to the man who observes and judges. The animal, the flower, presumably is all that, without accounting to itself, and therefore has before itself and above itself that indescribably open freedom which perhaps has its (extremely fleeting) equivalents among us only in those first moments of love when one human being sees his own vastness in another, his beloved, and in man’s elevation toward God.16

Unlike a plant, an animal, and even a child until taught otherwise, man is not admitted into the Open. Instead, he stands ‘before the world’. He stands over and against the world and is thus excluded from it. Even the sky and space are not the Open, but are framed in conceptual assertion. This, says Heidegger, is owing to the heightening of consciousness, the nature of which for modern metaphysics is ‘representation’. We restlessly relate back and forth to objects that stand before us through our conscious representation of the world. Nature for man is brought out into prominence by a ‘pre-positing’ that belongs to representation. Nature is therefore brought before man, like a subject is brought before a king. Heidegger writes: Man places before himself the world as the whole of everything objective, and he places himself before the world. Man sets up the world toward himself, and delivers Nature over to himself. ... By multifarious producing, the world is brought to stand and into position. The Open becomes an object, and is thus twisted around toward the human being. Over against the world as the object, man stations himself and sets himself up as the one who deliberately pushes through all this producing.17

Plant and beast do not bring the Open before themselves as an object. The Open is never for them the objective other. And it is by setting himself up as the one who pushes through all producing that man wills. This willing, says Heidegger, determines the nature of modern man: By such willing, modern man turns out to be the being who, in all relations to all that is, and thus in his relation to himself as well, rises up as the producer

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who puts through, carries out, his own self and establishes this uprising as the absolute rule. The whole objective inventory in terms of which the world appears is given over to, commended to, and thus subjected to the command of self-assertive production.18

Heidegger notes how in the mode of self-assertion, human willing forces everything under its control. Thus everything on earth and its atmosphere, including man, becomes raw material for self-assertive production.19 Heidegger argues that the nature of technology has produced modern science and the total state as its attendants. The same is true of public opinion and everyday ideas. Hence it is, for example, that a famous British physicist in the twenty-first century can proclaim that humanity must colonize space. And as a consequence of technology, man has become the subject and the world the object. Man, then, stands before the obstructed Open, and is not admitted into it as are plant and beast. The danger with this is that just like the things that he proposes and produces, man is likewise exposed to being turned ‘into mere material and into a function of objectification’.20 And has this not already happened? For just as farmed animals are accounted for as ‘livestock’, or worse, ‘units of production’, so too are many of us accounted for as ‘human resources’.21 Here our sense of selfhood is lost to unconditioned production. Heidegger writes: This self-assertion not only places man outside all care or protection; the imposition of the objectifying of the world destroys ever more resolutely the very possibility of protection. By building up the world technologically as an object, man deliberately and completely blocks his path, already obstructed, into the Open. Self-assertive man, whether or not he knows and wills it as an individual, is the functionary of technology. ... The man of the age of technology, by this parting, opposes himself to the Open. This parting is not a parting from, it is a parting against.22

From here, Heidegger now refers to what was earlier called the world’s night, as technological day. With an almost apocalyptic intensity, he calls this day the shortest day. And this shortest day threatens a single endless winter: Not only does protection now withhold itself from man, but the integralness of the whole of what is remains now in darkness. The wholesome and sound withdraws. The world becomes without healing, unholy. Not only does the holy, as the track to the godhead, thereby remain concealed; even the track to the holy, the hale and whole, seems to be effaced. That is, unless there are still some mortals capable of seeing the threat of the unhealable, the unholy, as such. They

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would have to discern the danger that is assailing man. The danger consists in the threat that assaults man’s nature in his relation to Being itself, and not in accidental perils. This danger is the danger. It conceals itself in the abyss that underlies all beings. To see this danger and point it out, there must be mortals who reach sooner into the abyss.23

12.3 The conversion of consciousness Heidegger quotes a line from Hölderlin that reads: ‘But where there is danger, there grows also what saves.’24 The quotation from Heidegger prior to this argued that there needs to be some mortals who are capable of discerning the danger that is assailing man. This danger jeopardizes man’s nature in his relation to Being. This is not any old danger, it is not one peril among other perils; it is the danger. And to point this danger out, there must be those who reach into the abyss. This means that the danger cannot be addressed within the realm of the unholy. There are catastrophes confronting humankind, and yet as a mark of our clueless destitution it is to science and technology that we go to for a solution. Heidegger writes: ‘Any salvation by makeshift, however well-intentioned, remains for the duration of his destiny an insubstantial illusion for man, who is endangered in his nature.’25 There must be those who reach sooner into the abyss. This is where the salvation, says Heidegger, must come from. The salvation must come from where there is a turn in the nature of mortals, who reach into the abyss of the destitute and its destituteness. These, argues Heidegger, are the most mortal of mortals, and are the most daring, the most ventured. The turn in the nature of mortals is a turn towards the Open with a view to entering it. It is thus a turn away from the objectification that lies in purposeful self-assertion, which, crucially, takes place in consciousness: What stands as object in the world becomes standing in representational production. Such representation presents. But what is present is present in a representation that has the character of calculation. Such representation knows nothing immediately perceptual. What can be immediately seen when we look at things, the image they offer to immediate sensible intuition falls away. … Purposeful self-assertion, with its designs, interposes before the intuitive image the project of the merely calculated product. When the world enters into the objectness of the thought-devised product, it is placed within the nonsensible,

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the invisible. What stands thus owes its presence to a placing whose activity belongs to the res cogitans, that is, to consciousness. The sphere of the objectivity of objects remains inside consciousness. What is invisible in that which standsover-against belongs to the interior and immanence of consciousness.26

This being the case the turn towards the Open, says Heidegger, must be the most invisible of the invisible, the innermost of the inner. In modern metaphysics the sphere of the invisible is the realm of consciousness in the form of Descartes’ ego cogito. However, Heidegger adds: At nearly the same time as Descartes, Pascal discovers the logic of the heart as over against the logic of calculating reason. The inner and invisible domain of the heart is not only more inward than the interior that belongs to calculating representation, and therefore more invisible; it also extends further than does the realm of merely producible objects. Only in the invisible innermost of the heart is man inclined toward what there is for him to love; the forefathers, the dead, the children, those who are to come.27

Pascal himself famously writes: ‘The heart has its reasons, of which reason knows nothing.’28 As the inner space where everything is beyond the arithmetic of calculation, it does not have the same boundaries as our customary consciousness. And being free of these boundaries, says Heidegger, it can more readily ‘overflow into the unbounded whole of the Open’.29 The turn towards the Open then must be a conversion in consciousness, which takes place within man’s inward and invisible nature, and therefore points to the innermost region of the interior. To begin with we must ‘turn the transient and therefore preliminary character of object-things away from the inner and invisible region of the merely producing consciousness and toward the true interior of the heart’s space, and there allow it to arise invisibly’.30 It will no doubt sound odd and even contradictory to read of turning things away from the invisible, and yet allowing them to arise invisibly. A clue to the meaning of this is revealed when Heidegger states we must turn towards the true interior of the heart’s space and allow it to arise invisibly. The reason the heart’s space is true, and the calculating reason not, is because the inner and invisible region of our producing consciousness makes object-things ‘visible’, but only in terms of representation. Heidegger quotes from a letter written by Rilke: ‘Our task is to impress this preliminary, transient earth upon ourselves with so much suffering and so passionately that its nature rises up again “invisibly” within us. We are the bees of the invisible. … (We ceaselessly gather the honey of the visible, to store it up in the great golden

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beehive of the Invisible).’31 Karen Leeder helps us to understand the significance of this new sense of the invisible: The central concern of the Elegies is humankind’s insecure place in the world and its fractured relationship to death. Caught between the unconscious surefooted animals and the angels pursuing their own purposes, oblivious to time and space, humankind remains alienated as an eternal observer, passive and awry. But the Elegies also enact a struggle of sorts: the struggle for humankind to accept its ultimate task – that of unifying transformation. The task of humankind is to sing, to praise the world, and thereby immortalize it, by translating visible things into invisible objects of language, the imagination, and spirit.32

12.4 More daring by a breath In, ‘What Are Poets For?’ Heidegger asks again, who among mortals is capable of the conversion of consciousness discussed above? It can only happen, says Heidegger, when man’s being is: adventurous more sometimes than Life itself is, more daring by a breath33

Life here is the Being of beings. What could be more daring than Life and the Being of beings? If Being is what is unique to beings, what can possibly surpass this? The answer, says Heidegger remarkably, is Being itself: Only by itself, only by its own, and indeed by expressly entering into its own. Then Being would be the unique which wholly surpasses itself (the transcendens pure and simple). But this surpassing, this transcending does not go up and over into something else; it comes up to its own self and back into the nature of its truth. Being itself traverses this going over and is itself its dimension.34

Heidegger notes that if we reflect on this, we may experience within Being itself that it has something more belonging to it, and something more daring may prevail than Being commonly understood in terms of particular beings.35 Heidegger then writes: Being, as itself, spans its own province, which is marked off (temnein, tempus) by Being’s being present in the word. Language is the precinct (templum), that is, the house of Being. The nature of language does not exhaust itself in signifying,

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nor is it merely something that has the character of sign or cipher. It is because language is the house of Being, that we reach what is by constantly going through this house.36

It is here that Heidegger is now able to show what those mortals dare, who are said by Rilke to be more daring by a breath. With reference to the temple and precinct of Being, those who are more daring by a breath dare language. Breath refers here to language. ‘All beings’, says Heidegger, ‘each in its way, are qua beings in the precinct of language.’37 And the return from the realm of objects and their representation to the innermost region of the heart’s space, Heidegger continues, is only achievable in this precinct. This is because, for Heidegger, the whole sphere of presence is present in saying. However, man’s saying is typically marked by metaphysics, in the sense that ‘he takes language from the start and merely as something he has in hand, like a personal belonging, and thus a handle for his representation and conduct’.38 But the more venturesome, in contrast to this way of seeing language, must dare the venture with language, they must dare the saying. Accordingly, the more venturesome ones venture Being itself, by daring to venture into language, the precinct, temple or province of Being. For this reason they are the sayers. However, these sayers do not merely say as most people say. Thus Heidegger writes: ‘The saying of the more venturesome must really venture to say. The more venturesome are the ones they are only when they are sayers to a greater degree.’39 The saying of such sayers more truly engages in saying. Heidegger writes: To be involved in saying is the mark of a saying that follows something to be said, solely in order to say it. What is to be said would then be what by nature belongs to the province of language. And that, thought metaphysically, is particular beings as a whole. Their wholeness is the intactness ... the sound wholeness of the Open.40

Those who say to a greater degree, argues Heidegger, say in the manner of the singer. The song of these singers is turned away from all purposeful self-assertion. It does not will in the form of desire. It is not solicitation or trade. Instead it comes unbidden upon the poet as a storm of inspiration that awakens nature, so that it bears the breath of the coming of the holy. The reference to storms comes from Hölderlin, but we will see below that it pertains to Rilke too. Such storms that awaken, says Heidegger, ‘grants to their word such an excess of meaning as can scarcely be uttered’.41 Alluding

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to the third sonnet in Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus, Heidegger states that ‘Song is existence’.42 To sing and thus genuinely say worldly existence is to belong to the precinct of beings themselves, and as the nature of language this precinct is Being. Heidegger writes: ‘To sing the song means to be present in what is present itself. It means: Dasein, existence.’43 But this song is rare, because it is hard to accomplish existence. It is not only difficult to form the work of language, namely, the song or poem, but it is also difficult to go over from ‘the saying work of the still covetous vision of things, from the work of the eyes, to the “work of the heart.” The song is hard because the singing may no longer be a solicitation, but must be existence.’44 Such singing is easy for Orpheus, says Heidegger, because he lives in-finitely in the Open. But it is not this easy for man. It is rare for our being to be song, a true singing that does not just seek to grasp something that can be gained, but is a singing where there occurs only what was sung itself. Thus at the end of the third sonnet of Sonnets to Orpheus, Rilke says: To sing in truth is another breath. A breath for nothing. An afflatus in the god. A wind.45

In a letter, Rilke says of his own poetry: ‘I am writing like a madman. What does it matter? You’ll sense I had no choice. The voice that uses me is greater than I. … I rustle like a bush in which the wind is stirring, and I must let it happen to me.’46 It appears that Rilke equates the voice that uses him with his rustling like a wind-blown bush, again making breath and language the same. The event of which Rilke speaks saw him produce twenty-five sonnets in three days, two elegies in one day, two more elegies the next day and a week later a final elegy. These elegies completed his famous work, The Duino Elegies, started ten years before, but delayed by ill health, war and crisis. Rilke writes: ‘Everything in a few days, it was an inexpressible storm, a hurricane in the spirit. … all the fibres and tissues in me groaned – there was no thinking about food, God knows who fed me.’47 This was followed by eight days of further intensive creativity, which produced another twenty-nine sonnets that together with the first set of twentyfive sonnets would become his Sonnets to Orpheus. Leeder writes: Rilke soon recognised that the two cycles, so different in form and conception, had grown out of the same impulses. Several years later in a letter to his Polish translator … he commented with satisfaction that it had been ‘the same breath’ that he had used ‘to fill these two sails: the little rust coloured sail of the Sonnets and the giant white canvas of the Elegies’.48

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With the intention of providing another reference to breath as language, Heidegger quotes the following passage from Herder’s Ideas on the Philosophy of the History of Man: A breath of our mouth becomes the portrait of the world, the type of our thoughts and feelings in the other’s soul. On a bit of moving air depends everything human that men on earth have ever thought, willed, done, and ever will do; for we would all still be roaming the forests if the divine breath had not blown around us, and did not hover on our lips like a magic tone.49

The sayers who are more daring by a breath dare the venture with language. They are, says Heidegger, the sayers who more sayingly say.50 Their breath is not just a saying of any sort, their saying is another breath: ‘A saying other than the rest of human saying.’51 This breath, Heidegger continues, is not solicitous for this or that objective thing, rather: ‘It is a breath for nothing.’52 Those who are more daring by a breath and who thus venture into language as the precinct, province, temple or house of Being are the poets. Not any old poets, but those poets whose saying returns to the Open. These poets do not will in the manner of purposeful selfassertion that objectifies the world. If this is willing, then they will nothing. They are in fact, says Heidegger, more willing precisely because they will nothing. They answer to the will, which is the venture of the Open. The willing nature of the more venturesome says more sayingly. Their saying is not a tool for purposeful self-assertion. It is not an activity of the ego cogito. It is a turn to the most invisible of the invisible, and innermost of the inner. This is the invisible innermost of the heart, the uncustomary consciousness beyond the arithmetic of calculation. Free of such boundaries, it overflows into the unbounded whole of the Open, from the unholy to the holy. Accordingly, the transient earth’s nature rises up again invisibly within the world’s inner space of the heart. The poets are the bees of the invisible, gathering the honey of the visible to store up in the great golden beehive of the invisible. Singing, praising and immortalizing the world, visible things are translated into invisible words. Hence Rilke writes: Earth, is it not this you want: to arise in our invisible sphere? – Is not this your dream, one day to be invisible? – Earth invisible! What is your urgent command, if it is not for transformation? Darling, earth – I will!53

It is through these invisible words that holiness appears in its divine radiance. The poet beckons and calls the holy in that he sings soundness and wholeness.

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In a destitute time, the poet attends, singing, to the trace of the fugitive gods by uttering the holy. The poet prepares the abode for the returning god. This abode is the divine radiance of the holy, the unbounded whole of the Open. It is the divine radiance that shines in everything that is. This same condition of language is surely what Rilke has in mind when he says in his Duino Elegies: Perhaps we are here to say: house, bridge, fountain, gate, jug, fruit tree, window – at most: column, tower ... But to speak them, you understand, oh, you are to say them with more intensity than things themselves ever dreamed they would be.54

A little further, Rilke continues: Here is the time for what can be said – here its home. So speak out and bear witness! More than ever, things that we might experience are falling away, and being elbowed aside and replaced by acts without images.55

12.5 Poetically man dwells Heidegger’s essay ‘Poetically Man Dwells’ (dichterisch wohnet der Mensch) borrows its title from a line of Hölderlin’s poetry. Heidegger notes immediately that this does not say ‘poetically poets dwell’. He assumes that poets do on occasion dwell poetically, but asks how is it that man (every man and all of the time) does so? And is not dwelling, he asks, incompatible with the poetic? Is not dwelling harassed by housing shortages, or work and the insecurity of hunting for gain and success? And is not spoken and written poetry preoccupied with aestheticizing where we do still set time aside to dwell in the poetic? Heidegger writes: ‘Poetry is either rejected as frivolous mooning and vaporizing into the unknown, and a flight into dreamland, or is counted as a part of literature.’56 He also notes ironically that the phrase ‘poetically man dwells’ comes from a mere poet who could not cope with life, for ‘it is the way of poets to shut their eyes to actuality. Instead of acting, they dream. What they make is merely imagined.’57 But Heidegger adds that if we attend to Hölderlin’s statement, it speaks of humanity’s poetic dwelling. It does not say that the poetic ‘exhausts

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itself in an unreal play of poetic imagination’,58 and dwelling does not refer to occupying houses. Rather the poet wants us to think of poetry and dwelling in terms of their essential nature. Heidegger insists that the statement ‘poetically man dwells’ means that ‘poetry first causes dwelling to be dwelling. Poetry is what really lets us dwell.’59 He continues: But where do we humans get our information about the nature of dwelling and poetry? Where does man generally get the claim to arrive at the nature of something? Man can make such a claim only where he receives it. He receives it from the telling of language. Of course, only when and only as long as he respects language’s own nature. Meanwhile, there rages around the earth an unbridled yet clever talking, writing, and broadcasting of spoken words. Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man.60

Poetically man dwells in language. But in saying this, Heidegger notes that the poetic taken as poetry brings with it the sense of belonging to the escapist realm of fantasy, which hovers fantastically above reality. But this misgiving is countered, says Heidegger, by Hölderlin telling us that poetic dwelling is a dwelling ‘on this earth’.61 This serves in protecting poetry from a misinterpretation, says Heidegger, and indicates the nature of poetry as that which ‘first brings man onto earth, making him belong to it, and thus brings him into dwelling’.62 Heidegger writes: The poet calls all the brightness of the sights of the sky and every sound of its courses and breezes into the singing word and there makes them shine and ring. Yet the poet, if he is a poet, does not describe the mere appearance of sky and earth. The poet calls, in the sights of the sky, that which in its very self-disclosure causes the appearance of that which conceals itself, and indeed as that which conceals itself.63

It is in this way that man’s poetic dwelling lets the earth be earth. And this is why Heidegger also argues that we attain a dwelling place through the building that is poetic creation.64 This is not the building of buildings, but the primal form of building where language presences being. In his essay, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, Heidegger captures the sense of this poetic creation when he says: Language, by naming beings for the first time, first brings beings to word and to appearance. Only this naming nominates beings to their Being from out of their Being. Such saying is a projecting of clearing, in which announcement is made of what it is that beings come into the open as. Projecting is the release of a throw by which unconcealment infuses itself into beings as such. This projective

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announcement forthwith becomes a renunciation of all the dim confusion in which a being veils and withdraws itself. Projective saying is poetry: the saying of world and earth, the saying of the arena of their strife and thus of the place of all nearness and remoteness of the gods. Poetry is the saying of the unconcealment of beings.65

Heidegger argues that the essence of all art is poetry (poiēsis), which points to it being the fundamental making and happening through which beings are first disclosed as beings, and the essence of all poetry, says Heidegger, is the founding of truth.66 Heidegger calls this poetry (poiēsis) in the essential (that is wide) sense. It is distinguished from poetry (poesie) in the narrow sense, which is verse as opposed to prose. Heidegger also refers to poetry in both the wide and narrow senses as Dichtung. However, we can discern from some of the above quotations that Heidegger refers to this essential and wide sense of poetry as language. Heidegger explains: ‘Language itself is poetry in the essential sense. But since language is the happening in which for man beings first disclose themselves to man each time as beings, poesy – or poetry in the narrower sense – is the most original form of poetry in the essential sense.’67 Put another way, poetry in the narrow sense as linguistic art or artistic language is the primal poetry in the essential sense, making poetry (in the narrow sense) the aboriginal language, and language the aboriginal poetry (in the essential sense). It can be further understood from this that on one hand poetry needs language in order to be poetry, but on the other hand it is poetry that makes language possible.68 Richardson writes: ‘Poetry is not a higher form of everyday language; the latter is forgotten and misused poetry.’69 Poetry in the narrow sense needs language to be poetry. That is obvious. Poets speak and write poetry through language. But it is poetry that also makes language possible. This means two things. First, that language as a projective and disclosive showing is poetry as making (poiēsis). Second, this happens originally through poetry (poesie). So in both senses language needs poetry. Thus in another essay, Heidegger says: First it became clear that poetry’s domain is language. The essence of poetry must therefore be conceived out of the essence of language. But it later became apparent that poetry is a founding: a naming of being and of the essence of all things – not just any saying, but that whereby everything steps into the open, which we then discuss and talk about in everyday language. Hence poetry never takes language as material at its disposal; rather, poetry itself first makes language possible. Poetry is the primal language of a historical people. Thus the

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essence of language must be understood out of the essence of poetry and not the other way around.70

But there are further implications here. Language needs poetry in both the essential and the narrow senses. Poetry, as poiēsis and poesie, makes language possible. Whenever this happens as a founding, a new epoch can occur for a historical people who attain a dwelling place through the building that is poetic creation.71 The word, build means ‘to dwell’. Its Indo-European root is bhu, which means ‘to exist’, ‘to be’, ‘to grow’. To build is to construct a house, a dwelling. Language as poetry builds the house of Being in which man dwells. Through this building we inhabit language. And poets as the sayers who more sayingly say need in a destitute time of homelessness to let language speak in their poetry. Heidegger writes: For, strictly, it is language that speaks. Man first speaks when, and only when, he responds to language by listening to its appeal. Among all the appeals that we human beings, on our part, may help to be voiced, language is the highest and everywhere the first. Language beckons us, at first and then again at the end toward a thing’s nature.72

Thus for poets to be the sayers who more sayingly say, they must first be the hearers who more hearingly hear (hearken) language speak. Heidegger argues that our human speaking is a listening to language and letting its Saying be said to it. What language says springs from the formerly spoken (and yet still unspoken) Saying that permeates language’s design. We listen to language (and are more daring by a breath) by letting it say its Saying to us. This can only happen because our human nature is already admitted and entered into Saying. We therefore hear it because we belong within it.73 Our obedient listening is simultaneously a belonging as a listening-belonging (Gehören). In this way we are claimed and appropriated as speakers by a transformation in our relation to language.74 Our listening-belonging response (Antwort) to language enacts a responsibility (Verantwortung). We do not simply give an answer to, but are answerable to, the voice of language’s appeal, thereby placing us in an ontological relationship with what is. Heidegger writes: The responding in which man authentically listens to the appeal of language is that which speaks in the element of poetry. The more poetic a poet is – the freer (that is, the more open and ready for the unforeseen) his saying – the greater is the purity with which he submits what he says to an ever more painstaking listening, and the further what he says is from the mere propositional statement that is dealt with solely in regard to its correctness or incorrectness.75

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Heidegger has a different sense of correctness in mind. In Chapter 2, I marked that language is attuned (accorder) to the Being of being. And only on the basis of the attunement does the language of correspondence obtain its precision, its tuning.76 This tuning or pitch stems from the word Stimmung and comes from the word Stimme, meaning ‘voice’. Stimmung in an intransitive sense also means: to be fitting, suitable, correct. The silent word gives the key to signs and tunes language, allowing for a movement of Stimmung to arise as the voice that sounds into spoken and written language. Ziarek writes: ‘Stimmung thus performs the tonalization of language in the complex sense of both setting the tone and giving “voice” to the soundless and signless pre-wording addressing itself to language.’77 Voice here is not sound, but tuning, coming into harmony with the One is All, or Being, gathered and preserved as logos. The attuned response that listens to the silent appeal of language speak as logos forms a dialogue, or what Heidegger elsewhere calls ‘good conversation’ that produces poetic language. He adds: ‘The counter-essence of good conversation is unpoetic babbling.’78 But does man dwell poetically? Presumably not, says Heidegger, rather we dwell together unpoetically. Does this mean Hölderlin is mistaken? No, says Heidegger: The truth of his utterance is confirmed in the most unearthly way. For dwelling can be unpoetic only because it is in essence poetic. For a man to be blind, he must remain a being by nature endowed with sight. A piece of wood can never go blind. But when man goes blind, there always remains the question whether his blindness derives from some defect and loss or lies in an abundance and excess.79

To dwell poetically in the manner explored above, language can no longer be subjective and so aimed at our own thoughts, feelings and intentions. When language speaks it comes from an inner space of the heart. This is a turn towards the sound wholeness of the Open, which lies far beyond the seemingly unbounded personal freedom of our own self-expression.80 When listening to language speak, poets do not use language as an instrument for their own speaking. It would in fact be more accurate to say that they are bespoken by language as its instrument. The poets who speak from language speak words of retrieval from out of its presencing reality. This is neither a dull everyday speech nor a fanciful heightened speech, but a disclosive speech where the truth of things shines through words. For like the Classical Greeks who dwelt in language, they are put in relation once more with the things themselves, for if we recall, what is said in language ‘is at the same time in an excellent way what

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it is called’.81 And when poets do this by listening to the appeal of language and entering into the seminal viewpoint of words, we listeners and readers of poetry are in turn able to vividly inhabit the experiences elicited by these memorable words that provide us with a new stance on life.82 By dwelling poetically in language as the house of Being, Heidegger hopes we may invoke an epochal other beginning, the inception of the future prepared for by engaging with the first beginning of the Greeks. This future does not refer to ‘progress’, which has no future, says Heidegger, but simply promotes the present further along its road.83 This other beginning is what poets are for in a destitute time. Our homelessness that results in the abandonment and oblivion of Being is re-housed. Let us close with the following words from Heidegger: Before he speaks man must first let himself be claimed again by Being, taking the risk that under this claim he will seldom have much to say. Only thus will the pricelessness of its essence be once more bestowed upon the word, and upon man a home for dwelling in the truth of Being.84

Conclusion

Mystical Heidegger We have seen that in the course of his thinking Heidegger argued that the fitting word for language was still lacking. And the fact that Heidegger was only able to reach either Being or language by resorting ultimately to tautology was a sign for many that his quest was ultimately vacuous and came to nothing. Heidegger is therefore seen to have failed to say what either Being or language is. Steiner, for example, writes: ‘Words failed Heidegger and, at a pivotal stage in his life and work, he failed them. The symmetries of immanence are cruel.’1 But this misperceived failure is more truly the very success of Heidegger’s quest and its point in my view. As Ziarek stresses: ‘The transformation Heidegger pushes toward will not be captured or performed by way of propositional statements: trying to define it would only effectuate the contrary by re-capturing within the tenor of metaphysical thinking what tries to breach its boundaries.’2 Heidegger was attempting to show that both Being and language are such that they cannot be captured or defined by any other words. What are seen as Heidegger’s tautological failings are only a failure in the light of that objectifying framework of thought that he carefully sought to challenge and move away from. It is only in the name of old metaphysical and logicalgrammatical prejudices that we are told tautological circularity as the ‘saying of the same’ is empty of meaning. Heidegger was not looking to define and objectify Being or language, and tautology represented Heidegger’s ‘strenuous refusal to allow the definitional dispersal of Being in beings’.3 And with respect to language, Heidegger is speaking from and not about language because in his view ‘language speaks’. As soon as we speak about Being, language, or anything else for that matter, its reality vanishes in the very move that sees us take a conceptual, objectifying position above or outside it. For Heidegger then language is not to be captured as an object. It is for this reason that Heidegger always resisted resorting to the use of a meta-language to describe or analyse Being and language. Heidegger sought to show that a subjective autonomy and

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self-sufficiency that allows us to picture ourselves as above or beyond the world was an illusion. Likewise we are not able as speakers ‘to adopt a position outside language and offer pronouncements about it’.4 Heidegger argues that the essence of language does not yield to our circumspection, because we can only say by saying after we have listened to language’s Saying, for the reason that we belong within it.5 Of metalinguistics he says: Analytical philosophy, which is set on producing this super language, is thus quite consistent when it considers itself metalinguistics. That sounds like metaphysics – not only sounds like it, it is metaphysics. Metalinguistics is the metaphysics of the thoroughgoing technicalization of all languages into the sole operative instrument of interplanetary information. Metalanguage and sputnik, metalinguistics and rocketry are the Same.6

Heidegger avoided seeing language as a wilful tool used to aid humankind’s subjective power.7 But aware of the continuing attempt of others to do so owing to old habits and prejudices, allowed him to see that his own phrase describing language as the ‘house of Being’ had already become in the eyes of others an objectifying catchword. But the word for the reality of what the West calls language, Heidegger maintained, should be a surprise born of a slowness resting on shy reverence, and so come, rather, by hints and hesitations.8 As Ziarek says: In the discussions of Heidegger situated between Continental and Analytical perspectives, the matter of language becomes telescoped into the problematic of ordinary language and/or logic, as though the aim was to try and domesticate Heidegger’s thought back into familiar and recognizable categories and terms. As a result, the latter approaches tend to evacuate precisely the very impetus of Heideggerian thought toward a transformation of our relation to language, a transformation that specifically requires changing the terms and the ways in which we experience language and ourselves in it.9

The perceived tautological and metaphorical failure to say what the nature of Being or language is does not point here to the commonly held view that language is unable to truly say what something is owing to the fact that it is deemed to be a mere sign or symbol, which only represents what it refers to and so at the same time obscures it. Heidegger, as we have seen, consistently argues the very opposite of this, for it is in fact language as unconcealment or revelation that first shows and so brings into existence things as things constituting the world. What seems like a failure on Heidegger’s behalf, or indeed language’s behalf, actually stays true to his un-wilful, un-subjective approach. Had Heidegger come to a

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definitive conclusion concerning what Being or language is, then he would have truly failed in his task. To say that Being is x and language is y would have been more of the metaphysical thinking that he was looking to avoid and overcome. We might compare Heidegger’s tautology to similar examples found in sacred texts and religious teachings – the ‘I am that I am’, for example, of the Old Testament, and Buddha being the answer to the question: What is Buddha? Heidegger says of tautology: ‘As soon as thought enters such a circular path, it is often, though not always, a sign that thought can linger in the vicinity of the essential, or at least approach its edges.’10 We have seen in Chapter 11 that while defending his use of tautology, Heidegger hypothetically anticipated and posed the critical question: ‘How is that meant to get us anywhere?’ He answered in a Zen-like fashion: ‘But we do not want to get anywhere. We would like only, for once, to get just where we are already.’11 Pattison writes: ‘As Heidegger said many times, it is the simplest things that are hardest to think, and the nearest things that are most remote – yet it is just these to which his philosophy wishes to lead us.’12 Heidegger refers to his tautology ‘language is language’ as an abyss, but this abyss, he says, does not leave us tumbling into emptiness, rather we fall upward to a height, and its loftiness opens up a depth.13 It is for this reason that Heidegger’s approach is also compelled, if it is to remain true to his thinking, to bring to both Being and language an apophatic or negative argument that is more common to mystical theology when speaking of God. This is perhaps in part why Charles Taylor refers to Heidegger’s ‘dark sayings’.14 In apophatic or negative mystical theology, language is seen ultimately to fail to say what God is as God, because God cannot be defined as (and so limited to) a grammatical object. Similarly in Hinduism there is the refrain, ‘not this, not this’ (neti neti) when attempting to speak of Brahman.15 Buddhism too has the following phrase: ‘All constructs are empty. The construct that all constructs are empty is empty. The construct that the construct that all constructs are empty is empty is empty.’16 But although Heidegger employs similar negative strategies when speaking of Being, in a radical and novel way he also uses these strategies in relation to language itself. That is, although for Heidegger language’s saying is responsible for bringing all things into their own as things, language itself cannot be spoken of in the same way as a linguistically engendered thing. Put simply, language can utter all things bar itself. This is because we are in the wheel ruts of language’s speaking, and cannot step or manoeuvre outside of these to say it. A major influence here mentioned in Chapter 10 must surely be the Taoist Tao Te Ching, which begins with the statement: ‘The Tâo that can be trodden

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is not the enduring and unchanging Tâo. The name that can be named is not the enduring and unchanging name.’17 This is often interpreted to mean that language cannot speak the truth of reality, but it is not this simple. The first line says that the Tâo cannot be spoken (the Way cannot be told). The next line says the Name also cannot be named. It is therefore hard not to equate what Heidegger means by Being and language with these two lines. The third line says that the nameless, that is, the Way and the Name, is the way of heaven and earth. While the fourth line says that the named is matrix of myriad creatures. Put another way, naming is the mother of all things. This opening section of the Tao Te Ching continues to say that the nameless and the named are identical and only differ in name. For Heidegger, language as poiēsis (Making-Happening), Sagen (Showing-Saying) and Ereignis (Owning-Event) is more accurately understood to be an it gives than an it is, and accordingly presences in absence. This is akin to saying that the Name that is matrix of myriad creatures cannot be named. And with regard to absence, we have seen that for Heidegger there is more to ‘nothing’ than the scientifically, logically orientated West allows. Importantly, Heidegger is concerned with what language ‘is’ in the sense of what it ‘does’, because for him language is what it does. Hence language speaks. And as we have seen, the emphasis in this important term is not solely on language as a subject, so that language speaks, but as much if not more on the verbal element telling us that language speaks. The nature of language is its doing. What language does is speak. The noun-verb split in the term ‘language speaks’ is of course there, but ultimately they are one, just as in the term ‘lightning flashes’, the lightning and the flash are really the same. That the nature of language is its doing is an incredibly original and refreshing stance, and to my mind gets closer to the truth of language than any of the endless theories from multiple disciplines that attempt to say what language actually and definitively is, while all the time supplanting language with something else. There are literally hundreds of scientific posters, academic articles, etc., that say ‘language is … (put in a concept)’. That Heidegger consistently resists such a move is what makes him so important in my view. And accordingly this is why he does not simply use language to speak his mind about language, but listens (especially through etymology) to language speak. Heidegger is aware that when speaking of either Being or language, he can only do so by following a faint trail, which he nevertheless endeavours to follow. It is this endeavour as a ‘way-making movement’ that is significant, more so than the destination. In his study of Heidegger’s poetics, Froment-Meurice writes:

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‘The phrase “the path to language” sounds like “the route to Compostela”: a pilgrimage with a precise goal. But if we can arrive at Compostela sooner or later, we cannot arrive at language.’18 In his ‘Dialogue on Language’, Heidegger writes: ‘The trail was an almost imperceptible promise announcing that we would be set free into the open, now dark and perplexing, now again lightning-sharp like a sudden insight, which then, in turn, eluded every effort to say it.’19 It is difficult not to equate this lightning-sharp opening to Heidegger’s famous (Zen Satori like) lichtung, or ‘lightning-clearing’. Again, it is language that permits this. Furthermore, this struggle to speak the essence of Being or language is why the figurative language of poets (for example, Hölderlin, Trakl, George, Rilke, Goethe, Novalis and Angelus Silesius) arguably comes to be more important to Heidegger than the technical language of philosophers. This also helps explain his frequent use of agrarian and sylvan metaphors. But to his detractors, such metaphors are as much a sign of failure as his tautologies. And this is without even mentioning his reference to gods. The above considered, it might seem fair to say, as some indeed have, that Heidegger was a ‘language mystic’ or ‘meta-theologian’, and that Heideggerianism is a cult of language.20 But as I hope to have shown such terms, derogatory or otherwise, should not be seen to pin down and sum up what Heidegger is. Definite categorization is, I believe, even when meant positively, always a mistake with Heidegger, and still more of the very thinking he was endeavouring to challenge. Heidegger for sure has many influences and is aware of different traditions, but owing to his sense of historicity he wants arguably to instigate a new epochal shift, or perhaps return to a pre-Socratic one. According to Heidegger’s former student and lover, Hannah Arendt, Heidegger was a fox who took without cunning a trap for a den. My own playful take on this is that Heidegger deliberately sought to transform what had become a trap back into a den. I am thinking here in particular of Heidegger’s reference to language as the ‘house of Being’. This to my mind is what compels him to say, for example: ‘This manifold thought requires, however, not a new language but a transformed relationship to the essence[-ing] of the old one.’21 Arendt also asserts that Heidegger the fox had spent so much of his youth in other people’s traps that he no longer had any fur. I would take this analogy even further, subverting it in the process, and say that Heidegger the fox (as foxes are apt to do) tried to chew off his own limbs so as to escape these traps. In this way Heidegger seemed to move further and further away from philosophy, almost to the point of creating from a Western stance an anti-philosophy. But I realize

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that saying this is as fraught with misinterpretation as the claims discussed in the Introduction that Heidegger is anti-humanistic or anti-subjectivistic. Perhaps non-philosophy, and a return to thinking, is better. In terms of method, perhaps Heidegger again has affinities with certain apophatic mystics. Hence ‘Deconstructionism’ that owes as much to Heidegger as it does to negative theology. And in terms of traps, I disagree with Rorty when he says that Heidegger has only succeeded in giving us another language-game, which is ‘simply one more in a long series of self-conceptions. Heideggerese is only Heidegger’s gift to us, not Being’s gift to Heidegger.’22 I would argue that Heidegger has achieved much more than we might think, but we are yet to reach this conclusion because we are still apt to dealing with it objectively. One of the overriding aims of this book has been to draw to the reader’s attention what Heidegger was attempting to do, why he was attempting to do so, and what he finally achieved. James Legge says that to understand the Tâo, one must be partaker of its nature.23 The same I think is true of language in Heidegger’s view, which is why the great poets come closer to realizing this than anyone else.

Heidegger and the logos In terms of the true role and significance of language that Heidegger sought to restore, this is perhaps best spoken of with reference to the logos. The logos principle is arguably central to Heidegger’s challenge to linguistics or philosophy of language. Although language has indeed been important to the history of the logos, which incidentally is typically translated as meaning ‘Word’, the logos has been more commonly understood to mean ‘reason’ or ‘ratio’, typically divine reason or human rationality. And as we have seen, for Heidegger, on human terms logos came to mean: reason, judgement, concept, definition, ground and relation. Understood as language, logos merely addressed and communicated reason, judgement, etc., in the form of assertions. This in part explains why the ‘outer’, that is, spoken or written logos in Western philosophy and theology, namely language, is generally deemed to be subservient to the ‘inner’ logos, that is, reason or ratio. Heidegger challenges and even appears to invert this one-sided view of the logos principle, arguing that logos was more originally discourse or saying. In so doing he claims to be returning to the ancient Greek view of language. In the process he counters the conventional belief that reason, mind or thought precedes language, and argues that language came first. This

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challenges the more typical understanding of Aristotle’s definition of the human being as zoon echon logon. This is usually translated as ‘rational animal’, whereas Heidegger interprets it as ‘animal possessing logos’. But by logos he means language, so that humans are foremost language animals.24 But rather than, say, ‘animal possessing logos’, it would, I think, be more in line with Heidegger’s thinking to say ‘animal possessed by logos’. However, as clear as the inversion that puts language before reason often seems in Heidegger’s reflections, it is not this simple. This is because Heidegger consistently refers to a ‘still’ and ‘silent’ saying that precedes speaking. This stillness is the origin of language, in which all things find rest because they are made stable through the lasting framework or enduring structure of the house of Being. It is here that ‘language speaks’, but this is clearly no spoken or written word. Ziarek suggests that it is: A soundless (lautlose) word: word before sounds and letters, word before sign, word giving in(to) sign. It is nothing but the movement into signs that gives ‘being’ to what exists, naming and signifying it is signs, in human language. In Das Ereignis word is described by Heidegger as both Vor-wort and An-wort, at once a pre-word or fore-word and a to- or on-word. As that which gives (being), the word precedes words (as signs), it fore-words them. As pre-word, it is not, however, a something that exists before or prior to signs. Rather, the word happens by to-wording, by having always already arrived into and as signs. The word is neither identical nor different from the sign, since it is not of the order of signs, that is, of beings.25

Heidegger’s focus on logos remains chiefly with language as Saying rather than any form of intelligence or reason, but it is a Saying unlike any human saying. We might call logos language to be, the original Word that says, but not yet spoken by man. Language Saying as logos, says man who only subsequently speaks. Richardson writes: ‘The essence(-ing) of original Language has want of human language and by reason of this want ap-propriates to man what is proper to himself in order to ap-propriate him to itself in the process of its presenc-ing.’26 A key importance, I believe, of Heidegger’s reflections on language is that he has expanded the perimeters of what language is and what it does. Where customarily it has been understood to derivatively express and subserviently communicate logos as reason, we have seen that to Heidegger’s thinking language means much more than this. And this includes a more primordial interpretation of logos as the gathering of One is All (in a word, Being), which as a silent Saying is now understood to be a significant aspect of language.

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But on what grounds does Heidegger say that logos means ‘Saying’ rather than ‘reason’? Is this an arbitrary retranslation, a philosophical sleight of hand in order to align with his thinking? The answer we saw lies with the fact that some of Heraclitus’ fragments refer to our ‘hearing’ the logos. For example: ‘The Logos, which is as I describe, proves incomprehensible, both before it is heard and even after it is heard.’27 And also to our ‘listening’: ‘Listening to the Logos, and not to me, it is wise to agree that all things are One.’28 It seems then that logos refers to something audible, aligning it with utterance, discourse and word. However, logos and its root legein do not originally mean to tell, say, talk, but rather to gather, collect, assemble. Logos reveals itself as the measuring space for the One is All. However, the actual problem, Heidegger argues, is that people do hear words. They hear words, but they do not hear logos as the One is All. Hence Heraclitus was quoted to say: ‘Fools when they do hear are like the deaf; of them, does the saying bear witness that they are absent when present.’29 And Heidegger was shown to argue that while humans do hear audible words, they do not hearken what is not audible like words, namely, logos. Thus while logos means discourse and saying, this is not its essence and so logos in this sense is actually opposed to discourse. Heidegger, with echoes of Gerede as ‘idle-talk’, writes: Correspondingly, genuine hearkening as Being-obedient is opposed to mere hearing and keeping one’s ears open. Mere hearing strews and scatters itself in what one commonly believes and says, in hearing, in doxa, in seeming. But genuine hearkening has nothing to do with the ear and the glib tongue, but instead means obediently following what logos is: the gatheredness of beings themselves. We can truly hear only when we are already hearkening. But hearkening has nothing to do with earlobes. Whoever is not hearkening is already always distant from logos, excluded from it, regardless of whether he has already heard with ears or has not heard.30

It was argued how such people who hear, but do not hearken, are absently present because they are in the midst of things yet away from them. They are donkeys, says Heraclitus, for ‘donkeys like chaff better than gold’.31 The gist then, for Heidegger, is that saying and hearing are only properly saying and hearing when directed towards logos as One is All – in short, Being. It is this that makes our speaking, Word. Heidegger writes: ‘Only where the self-opening Being of beings is apprehended does merely keeping one’s ears open become hearing.’32 It is, Heidegger adds, only the poets and thinkers that are capable of this. It is for these reasons then that, like hearkening from hearing, saying can very subtly be distinguished from speaking. Heidegger writes, for example:

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‘To say and to speak are not identical. A man may speak, speak endlessly, and all the time say nothing. Another man may remain silent, not speak at all and yet, without speaking, say a great deal.’33 Elsewhere Heidegger writes: ‘What is spoken is never, and in no language, what is said.’34 This distinction between saying and speaking would appear to contradict the argument made above, that the term ‘language speaks’ unifies the subject and the verb. But this is not the case. For Heidegger, it is language that truly speaks as saying. Here, the subject ‘language’ is identified with the verb ‘speak’. Thus language speaks. Man, however, only speaks by first listening and then responding to language speaking as saying. Put another way, the speaking of language takes place as a saying, which determines and so is distinguished from man’s speaking after. But language’s silent ‘saying’ of Being is still not to be read as an out-and-out idealizing, reifying or hypostasizing of language, owing to language’s needed usage of man to speak. In this respect language as logos is neither a complete unity of subject and verb, nor is it a complete distinction between saying and speaking. For as a two-fold oneness it is rather, as was explored, a distinction-in-unity like the ontological dif-ference it occasions. In terms of approaching the essence or nature of language in Heidegger’s thought, we get closest it seems through poiēsis (Making-Happening), Sagen (Showing-Saying) and Ereignis (Owning-Event). But there is also the word, logos itself. This logos as (Gathering-Preserving) ‘One and All’ is everything, and yet because unspeakable it is nothing. When he interprets a poem by Stefan George, Heidegger insists that we lack the word for the Being of language, and yet he also refers to logos as the word for Being and Saying. Is the logos not, therefore, the word for language? It might be concluded that the logos both is and is not a word for the Being of language. If this does not seem helpful, the key point is that for Heidegger the quest for the Being of language becomes the language of Being. For Heidegger none of the words for language (even ‘language’ itself) seem to say what language is as language. Like God, and indeed Being, language cannot be had or understood in this way. Again, as ‘Event’ it is not (an) it is, but (an) it gives. And where Heidegger wants to bring language as language to language, he does not want to in a word. Not even the word logos. For the Being, nature or essence of language is more truly the revelatory language of Being. Heidegger argues that we cannot know the nature of language in terms of cognition and representation, and that this fact is not a defect in our thinking. To pursue in thought the nature of language and to say what is its own, we have to transform our relation or kinship

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to language, says Heidegger. We do this by recognizing our relation to it. Our saying is always an answering to and for this reason is always relational. The experience of this, says Heidegger, might awaken in us that all thinking is poetic, and all poetry thinking.35

Final thoughts I have argued that according to Heidegger the forgetting of Being brings destitution, and that this is primarily on account of the homelessness that results when we no longer inhabit the house of Being in which humans dwell as the witness of Being. But is humanity destitute? In Chapter 12, I have hinted at a famous British physicist who has proclaimed that humanity must colonize space. This is deemed to be life insurance given the fragility of the earth owing to risks posed by, for example, artificial intelligence, human barbarity and asteroid strikes. These risks aside, my contention is that the proposed solution, space colonization, is part and parcel of our destitution. We saw that for Heidegger, the evening of the world’s age is approaching night and that this night is a destitute time. It is so destitute, says Heidegger, that it cannot see the default of the gods as a default. It is well-known that when interviewed in 1966 by the news magazine, Das Spiegel, Heidegger stated: ‘Only a god can still save us.’36 Salvation, he adds, can only come by preparing a readiness for the appearance of the god through thinking and poeticizing. Heidegger, if we recall, has been quoted in Chapter 12 as saying that to prepare the abode for a god a divine radiance must first begin to shine in everything that is, and that there has to be a turn among men in the right place and in the right way.37 But until then he tells us that evening has become the world’s night and night is approaching midnight. There is in the world, claims Heidegger writing just after the Second World War, immeasurable need, nameless sorrow, spreading peacelessness and mounting confusion. Could we say that it is any different now? Who could possibly deny what horrors man is still doing to man, to other creatures and to the earth? We must remind ourselves that, for Heidegger, destitution and the need to build in order to dwell do not refer to material concerns such as housing shortages, even though this is an incessant mantra on the lips of politicians. Rather our destitution points to something more primal, and maybe even more urgent. We tend to think that our troubles originate from what we have done and are doing to the world, but these are simply the consequences. These

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consequences stem from our relation to the world, to the earth and ultimately to Being. There is a barrier between us and the world, says Heidegger. There is an oppositeness confronting man that excludes him from the world. It places us before the world so that we stand over and against it. We are apart from it. It is not just a parting from, but a parting against. And from this position we act. The world appears as an objective inventory, subject to the command of our self-assertive will forcing everything under its control. Everything on earth (and even in space) is raw material for our self-assertive production. If we listen to the word ‘destitution’, it speaks of forsaking or abandoning. Destitution means that we have placed ourselves, the earth and the world alone. This deprivation is our poverty. To read the philosophy of Bacon, Descartes, Locke, Hume, Kant, Hobbes, etc., is to see this deprivation formulated and justified. Man plunders for gain, and deprives himself in the bargain. Destitution is not the result of our actions; it is behind our actions and explains their nature. The world’s night, says Heidegger, is now technological day, and this shortest day threatens an endless winter. Modern science and the total state are technology’s attendants. The same is true, says Heidegger, of public opinion and everyday ideas. But even if we accept this entrenched and fundamental destitution facing humanity, how on earth can Heidegger begin to think that language is essential to its solution? Is this not more grist to the mill for those people who think of him as a naive romantic, nebulous mystic or inscrutable charlatan? This is likely to be so if you think language is no more than a vehicle for transporting the thoughts of things already known. Yet for Heidegger language is the reason why things are known at all. The name makes known. The showing of saying brings to light. The word endows a thing with being. It builds a people’s world that arises from the earth. Language is the house of being in which man dwells. And we reach what is by going through this house. And what is? Being is.

Notes

Introduction 1 Martin Heidegger, What is Called Thinking?, tr. J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), 200. 2 Jeffrey Powell, ‘The Way to Heidegger’s “Way to Language” ’, in Heidegger and Language, ed. Jeffrey Powell (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2013), 183. 3 That Heidegger sees humanism in this particular way is a point made by Charles Taylor in, ‘Heidegger on Language’, A Companion to Heidegger, ed. Hubert L., Dreyfus and Mark A. Wrathall (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 449. 4 Charles Taylor, ‘Heidegger on Language’, in A Companion to Heidegger, ed. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Mark A. Wrathall, 433–55 (Malden USA and Oxford UK: Blackwell, 2005), 452. 5 Ibid., 433. 6 See Michel Haar, Heidegger and the Essence of Man, tr. William McNeill (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 80. 7 For Augustine, the point where the metaphors of inwardness and ascent intersect is the same point where God and self intersect. See Augustine’s Confessions. For a thorough exploration of these themes, see, Denys Turner, The Darkness of God (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), chaps. three and four. 8 Haar, Heidegger and the Essence of Man, 76. 9 See, Richard Rorty, ‘Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and the Reification of Language’, in The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, ed. Charles Guignon (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 340. 10 We should note that to ‘distinguish’ is not the same as to ‘separate’. 11 Rorty, ‘Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and the Reification of Language’, 342. 12 Ibid. 13 Martin Heidegger, ‘The Way to Language’, tr. Peter D. Hertz, in On The Way To Language (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 125. 14 For a more focused study of ‘A Dialogue on Language’, see Robert Mugerauer, Heidegger’s Language and Thinking (Humanities Press International Inc, 1988) chap. two, 19–62. 15 Martin Heidegger, ‘A Dialogue on Language’, in On the Way to Language, tr. Peter D. Hertz (Harper San Francisco, 1971), 19.

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16 Ibid., 33. 17 Ibid. 18 We will see, for example, that Heidegger distinguishes between language (Sprache) and discourse (Rede), and in his later work between words (Worte) and terms or signs (Wörter). 19 Robert Mugerauer, Heidegger’s Language and Thinking (New Jersey and London: Humanity Books, 1988), 54. 20 In a course of thirteen lectures given at Freiburg in 1955–6, and later published as The Principle of Ground (Der Satz vom Grund), Heidegger knew that the mystical poetry of Angelus Silesius he was drawing from had in turn been drawn from Eckhart’s thinking. 21 Quoted from, Thomas Clearly, No Barrier: Unlocking the Zen Koan (Fulham, London: The Aquarian Press, 1993), 195. For a slightly different translation, see John Ferguson, An Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Mysticism (London: Thames and Hudson, 1976), 214. 22 Mugerauer, Heidegger’s Language and Thinking, 53. 23 Martin Heidegger, ‘The Thinker as Poet’, in Poetry, Language, Thought, tr. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 3. 24 Michael Inwood, A Heidegger Dictionary (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 1999), 1. 25 For a discussion of Heidegger’s use of hyphens, see, Krzysztof Ziarek, ‘Giving Its Word: Event (as) Language’, in Heidegger and Language, ed. Jeffrey Powell (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2013), 102–18. 26 I have paraphrased George Pattison, The Later Heidegger (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 17. 27 Haar, Heidegger and the Essence of Man, 103. 28 See Mary Anne Perkins, Coleridge’s Philosophy: The Logos as Unifying Principle (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 41. 29 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in Perkins, Coleridge’s Philosophy, 28. 30 See George Steiner, Heidegger (Hassocks, Sussex: Fontana Press, 1978), 7. 31 This is taken from the preface written by Heidegger in 1962, for Father William J. Richardson’s book, Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought (The Hague: Martinis Nijhoff, 1974), XXII. 32 See Heidegger, DL, 36. 33 Perkins, Coleridge’s Philosophy, 41. 34 Coleridge, in Perkins, Coleridge’s Philosophy, 41. 35 Martin Heidegger, in Inwood, A Heidegger Dictionary, 245. 36 Inwood, A Heidegger Dictionary, 245. 37 Throughout his later works Heidegger often critiques elements of his earlier work, despite also referring to its importance in relation to the later work. See, for example, a number of instances of this in ‘A Dialogue on Language.’

Notes 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47

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See, Rorty, ‘Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and the Reification of Language’, 350. Pattison, The Later Heidegger, 5. Heidegger, in Richardson, Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought, XXII. See, Martin Heidegger, ‘Letter on Humanism’, in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (London: Routledge, 1993), 265. See Steiner, Heidegger, 7. Heidegger, ‘The Poem’, Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry, tr. Keith Hoeller (New York: Humanity Books, 2000), 215. Heidegger, WCT, 16. See Heidegger, DL, 6. Ibid., 7. Ibid., 8. Richardson writes: ‘According to the students who followed the course, Heidegger declared that his purpose was not to explain conventional logic but to shake it to its foundations in an attempt to develop a new and more original type of thought. This could be done by probing the essence of language.’ In William J. Richardson, Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought, 490–1. Heidegger, in Pattison, The Later Heidegger, 174.

Chapter 1 1 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘Existence’, in The Friend II, xi.; in Steiner, Heidegger, 157–8. 2 Steiner, Heidegger, 157–8. 3 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, tr. Joan Stambaugh (Albany and New York: State University of New York Press, 1996), 9. 4 Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, tr. Gregory Fried and Richrad Polt (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000), 1. 5 It is often noted that Leibniz similarly asked ‘why is there not nothing?’ in his 1697 essay, ‘On the Ultimate Origin of Things’. Leibniz was not, however, the first to ask this question, but was, as Steiner remarks, ‘posing the authentic question as it had been first voiced by Parmenides and by Heraclitus’. Steiner, Heidegger, 69. 6 Heidegger, IM, 35. 7 See footnote 25; IM, 35. 8 Steiner, Heidegger, 34–5. 9 Plato, Theaetetus, 155, tr. Benjamin Jowett, The Dialogues of Plato (Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1875). 10 Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book I, 982b, tr. W. D. Ross. 11 Heidegger, What is Philosophy?, tr. Jean T. Wilde and William Kluback (Albany, NY: NCUP, 1956), 81–3.

186 12 13 14 15

16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45

Notes Steiner, Heidegger, 27. Ibid., 28. Heidegger, LH, 232. In a lecture series titled Logic: Heraclitus’ Teaching on Logos (Logik: Heraklits Lehre vom Logos) delivered in 1944, Heidegger refers to a division of three sciences, namely: physics, ethics and logic. He then asserts that this whole division arises as metaphysics. More specifically, he refers to ‘logic’ as the metaphysics of the logos. See, ‘Logos and Language’, in The Heidegger Reader, ed. Günter Figal, tr. Jerome Veith (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2009), 240. Inwood, A Heidegger Dictionary, 127. Ibid., 149. Josef Pieper, Guide to Thomas Aquinas (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986), 142. Heidegger, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, in Poetry, Language, Thought, 15–88, tr. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 76–7. Martin Heidegger, ‘Four Seminars’, in Braver, Later Heidegger, 8. Heidegger, DL, 20. Ibid., 34. Lee Braver, Heidegger’s Later Writings (London and New York: Continuum, 2009), 9. Heidegger, LH, 217. Heidegger, IM, 37. Ibid., 37–8. Ibid., 38. Ibid., 32. Ibid., 34. Ibid., 33. We will explore the word ‘what’ in more detail in the next chapter. Heidegger, LH, 238. Ibid. Steiner, Heidegger, 38. Ibid., 40–1. Homer, The Iliad, lines 68–72, tr. Martin Hammond (London: Penguin Classics, 1987), 52. See David Halliburton, Poetic Thinking: An Approach to Heidegger (Albany: The University of Chicago Press, 1981), 163. Halliburton, Poetic Thinking, 162–3. Steiner, Heidegger, 69. Ibid., 153. Martin Heidegger, ‘The Basic Problems of Phenomenology’, in Braver, Later Heidegger, 6. Heidegger, BT, 4. Heidegger, LH, 242. Heidegger, DL, 30. Ibid., 33.

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Chapter 2 1 Martin Heidegger, ‘The Onto-Theo-Logical Constitution of Metaphysics’ (Die onto-theo-logische Verfassung der Metaphysik), in Identity and Difference (Identitat und Differenz), tr. Joan Stambaugh (New York: The University of Chicago Press, 1969), 73. Note that ἔστιν γἀρ είναι is commonly translated as, ‘for being is’ or, ‘for there is being’. 2 Heidegger, IM, 53. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid., 54. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid., 60. 7 Steiner, Heidegger, 46. 8 Heidegger, IM, 64. 9 Ibid., 67. 10 Ibid. 11 Heidegger, LH, 238. 12 See, Monier Monier-Williams, A Sanskrit-English Dictionary (Clarendon: Oxford University Press, 1899), 117. See also, Charles Rockwell Lanman, A Sanskrit Reader (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1940), 122. 13 See Monier-Williams, A Sanskrit-English Dictionary, 760. Also Lanman, A Sanskrit Reader, 208. 14 Heidegger, IM, 75. 15 Steiner, Heidegger, 48. 16 Ibid. 17 Heidegger, IM, 78. 18 Heidegger, WIP, 49. 19 Heidegger, LH, 230–1. 20 Heidegger, WIP, 35–7. 21 The Greek word aner tends to mean ‘a male human being’. 22 Heidegger, WIP, 47. 23 Ibid., 47–9. 24 Ibid., 51. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid., 51. 27 Ibid., 51–3. 28 Ibid., 57. 29 Ibid. 30 Heidegger, LH, 221. 31 Steiner, Heidegger, 29. 32 Heidegger, WIP, 77. 33 Steiner, Heidegger, 56.

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34 35 36 37 38 39 40

Ibid., 56–7. Ibid., 80. Heidegger, WIP, 77. Heidegger, LH, 237. Heidegger, IM, 86. Steiner, Heidegger, 50. This is usually contrasted with ‘Realism’, which asserts the reality of universals. A notion similar to ‘Nominalism’ is ‘Conceptualism’, which holds that universals only exist as entities in the mind, and have no extra-mental existence. This is usually seen to stand between the two extremes of ‘Realism’ and ‘Nominalism’. Heidegger, IM, 85. Heidegger, LH, 234. See Heidegger, DL, 33. Heidegger, BT, 4. Steiner, Heidegger, 65. Ibid., 67. In Steiner, Heidegger, 52. Richardson, Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought, 541.

41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48

Chapter 3 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Heidegger, LH, 217. Ibid., 242. Ibid., 243. Ibid., 262. Thomas Kelly, Language and Transcendence: A Study in the Philosophy of Martin Heidegger and Karl-Otto Apel (Berne and New York: Peter Lang, 1994), 118. I have paraphrased John Richardson, Heidegger (London and New York: Routledge, 2012), 291. Kelly, Language and Transcendence, 145. The New Standard Encyclopaedia (London: Odhams Press Limited, 1932), 765. The Oxford Companion to the English Language, ed. Tom McArthur (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 572. Heidegger, ‘The Way to Language’ (Der Weg zur Sprache), 116. The book was published in 1836, a year after Wilhelm von Humboldt’s death, by his brother Alexander. In what follows, I depend on Heidegger’s citations of this work. For the text in its entirety, see Wilhelm von Humboldt, On Language: On the Diversity of Human Language Construction and its Influence on the Mental

Notes

11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

25 26 27

28 29 30 31

32 33 34

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Development of the Human Species, tr. Peter Heath, 2nd edn, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). See Heidegger, WL, 117. Ibid., 118. Ibid. Taylor, ‘Heidegger on Language’, 433. Ibid., 433–4. Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct (New York: Morrow, 1994), 19. Taylor, ‘Heidegger on Language’, 435. Ibid. I have paraphrased Taylor, ‘Heidegger on Language’, 437. Taylor, ‘Heidegger on Language’, 439. This is surely analogous to the demiurge as found in Plato’s Timaeus. Ex. 4.10, KJV. Ex. 6.12, KJV. The phrase ‘void of words’ is translated by C. D. Yonge, who in a footnote writes: ‘It is not possible to give the exact force of the original here. The Greek word is Alogos, which usually means ‘irrational’, as derived from logos, ‘reason’, which word has also the sense of ‘a word’, ‘speech’. C. D. Yonge, ‘The Worse Attacks the Better’, The Works of Philo (Peabody, MS: Hendrickson Publishers, 1993), footnote 14, 116. Stoicism is said to have gained its definitive characteristics through Chrysippus around 280 BC. Philo, ‘The Worse Attacks the Better’, 116. Augustine, Lectures or Tractates on the Gospel According to St John, XXXVII. 4, tr. John Gibb and James Innes, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, ed. Philip Schaff (New York, 1888), in Perkins, Coleridge’s Philosophy, Note 96, 71–2. Meister Eckhart, ‘Sermon Twenty Nine’, Meister Eckhart: Sermons and Treatises, vol. 1, 215. Benedetto Croce, Guide to Aesthetics (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1965), 34. Ernst Cassirer, Language and Myth (New York: Dover Publications, 1946), 28. Alan Watts, Vedanta for Modern Man (London: George Allen and Unwin, The Vedanta Society for Southern California), 22. In Anne Bancroft, Twentieth Century Mystics and Sages (London: Arkana, 1976), 26. Simeon Potter, Our Language (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: A Pelican Book, 1950), 106. Joseph J. Kockelmans, ‘Language, Meaning, and Ek-sistence’, in On Heidegger and Language, ed. Joseph J. Kockelmans (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1972), 7. Cassirer, Language and Myth, 7.

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Chapter 4 1 Heidegger, IM, 53. 2 Walter Biemel, ‘Poetry and Language in Heidegger’, in On Heidegger and Language, ed. Joseph J. Kockelmans (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1972), 83. 3 Richardson, Heidegger, 285. 4 Heidegger, IM, 83. His point here is that the word ‘Being’ does actually retain its naming force, despite the blurring and blending discussed hitherto. 5 We will explore how words either present Being or represent things in more detail in the ensuing chapters. 6 Richard Kearney, Modern Movements in European Philosophy (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1994), 31. 7 Heidegger, BT, 154. 8 See 154–5 of John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Malden USA and Oxford UK: Blackwell, 1962) and likewise Joan Stambaugh (Albany: State University of New York, 1996). 9 Heidegger, BT, 155. 10 Kearney, Modern Movements, 45. 11 Steiner, Heidegger, 89. 12 Heidegger, BT, 159. This is telling in that much later in his career, as we will explore, Heidegger argued that words are not things. 13 Kearney, Modern Movements, 45. 14 Richardson, Heidegger, 291. 15 Heidegger, BT, 157. 16 Steiner, Heidegger, 90. 17 Ibid. 18 Michael Inwood, Heidegger: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 47–8. 19 Heidegger, BT, 158. 20 Ibid. 21 Kearney, Modern Movements, 46. 22 When speaking of a hankering for presuppositionless knowledge, Gadamer has the enlightenment’s rationalism in mind, and more especially formalism’s desire to apply universal rules. 23 Steiner, Heidegger, 95. 24 My discussion of Gerede will follow a more typical interpretation, but for a more focused and nuanced discussion of this see, Jeffrey Powell, ‘The Way to Heidegger’s “Way to Language” ’, 180–200. 25 Kearney, Modern Movements, 47. Dasein refers to the existential ‘being there’ of each human being. 26 Heidegger, BT, 128.

Notes 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37

38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50

51

52 53

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Steiner, Heidegger, 92. Heidegger, BT, 168. Ibid. See Inwood, A Heidegger Dictionary, 114. Steiner, Heidegger, 95–6. Kearney, Modern Movements, 47. Heidegger, BT, 168. Ibid., 168–9. See Steiner, Heidegger, 95. Heidegger, BT, 173. Steiner, Heidegger, 94. In another of his books, Steiner makes comments that are arguably relevant to what Heidegger says above concerning ‘scribbling’ and ‘reading’. He says of secondary and tertiary discourse in academia (and I am all too aware that it includes this very work) that ‘the very methodologies and techniques which would restore to us the presence of the source, of the primary, surround, suffocate that presence with their own autonomous mass. The tree dies under the hungry weight of the vines.’ George Steiner, Real Presences: Is there Anything in what We Say? (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1989), 47. And again: ‘The secondary is our narcotic. Like sleepwalkers, we are guarded by the numbing drone of the journalistic, of the theoretical, from the often harsh, imperious radiance of sheer presence.’ Steiner, Real Presences, 49. Heidegger, BT, 169. Ibid. Ibid., 170. Kearney, Modern Movements, 48. See BT, 170. Inwood, Heidegger: A Very Short Introduction, 49–50. And we can add to this another type of abstract speech in the form of idle talk. Heidegger, BT, 162–3. Despite using the context of my friend and snow, I have also paraphrased Kearney’s example of rock here, see, Modern Movements, 45–6. Kearney, Modern Movements, 46. Heidegger, BT, 162. Note that mitda-sein means ‘being-there with’. Heidegger, DL, 7. Daniel O. Dahlstrom, ‘Heidegger’s Ontological Analysis of Language’, in Heidegger and Language, ed. Jeffrey Powell (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2013), 13. Heidegger, BT, 161. Note that ‘attunement’ (Befindlichkeit) is translated as ‘state-ofmind’ by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. Others sometimes translate it as ‘disposition’. Inwood, A Heidegger Dictionary, 208. Ibid.

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54 Dahlstrom, ‘Heidegger’s Ontological Analysis of Language’, 14–15. 55 Ibid., 17. 56 Heidegger, BT, 87. To this passage Stambaugh adds the note: ‘Untrue. Language is not imposed, but is the primordial essence of truth as there (Da).’ Ibid. 57 Dahlstrom, ‘Heidegger’s Ontological Analysis of Language’, 24. 58 Heidegger, BT, 165. 59 Françoise Dastur, ‘Heidegger and the Question of the “Essence” of Language’, in Heidegger and Language, ed. Jeffrey Powell (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2013), 230.

Chapter 5 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

Heidegger, BT, 165. Ibid., 155. See note three in Macquarrie’s and Robinson’s translation of Being and Time, 25. I am drawing from Inwood, A Heidegger Dictionary, 121. See Heidegger, BT, 32. Ibid. Inwood, A Heidegger Dictionary, 21. Ibid. Heidegger, BT, 33. Ibid. Ibid., 34. Ibid., 165. Ibid., 166. Ibid. Heidegger, LL, 245. Richard Geldard, Remembering Heraclitus: The Philosopher of Riddles (Edinburgh: Floris Books, 2000), 156. Ibid., 39. Heidegger, LL, 245. Ibid. Ibid., 245–6. Ibid., 247–8. See Heidegger, WIP, 49. Ibid., 53. Heidegger, LL, 248. Ibid., 250. Ibid., 250–1. Ibid., 251.

Notes 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36

37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47

193

Ibid. Ibid. Heidegger, WL, 124. Ibid., 124–5. First published in 1953 based on lectures from 1935. Heraclitus, Fragment 34, Clement of Alexandria, Stromaa, V, 115, 3. and Preparation for the Gospel, XIII, 13, 42. tr. John Burnet, 1912. Heidegger, IM, 136. Ibid., 137. I cannot help finding a similarity here with Jesus who says, ‘He that has ears to hear, let him hear.’ Matthew 11.15. The Greek word meaning ‘ears’ used here is ous, which can mean both the physical and the mental ear. Jesus speaks his word to all, and while many hear the words they do not grasp the meaning. See footnote 32, IM, 138. Ibid., 140. See Heidegger, BT, 169. Heidegger, IM, 179. Ibid., 183. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 184. Potter, Our Language, 106. Ibid. Heidegger, WIP, 45. To a degree this appears to contrast with the view of language put forward in Plato’s dialogue, Cratylus. Socrates is asked to intervene between Cratylus and Hermogenes who have been arguing about names. Cratylus is of the view that names have an intrinsic relation to the things they signify and are therefore natural and true. Whereas Hermogenes believes that names only relate to the things they signify in an arbitrary fashion on account of convention or custom. This is to say that ‘man’ could just as well have been called ‘horse’. Ultimately, Socrates comes to reject the position of Cratylus that names are naturally related to those things they signify, and further that they are correct because of divine origin. Benjamin Jowett says of Plato: ‘He is covertly satirising the pretence of that or any other age to find philosophy in words.’ Benjamin Jowett, The Dialogues of Plato (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1875), vol. 2, 192. The point being that why learn of words when you can learn of things themselves? Heidegger does find philosophy in words and is questioning the notion that you can learn of things themselves. But another point should be made, and this is that anyone who takes the time to read the dialogue Cratylus will see that Plato does not speak with any degree of certainty. Acknowledging the complexity of language, there is, I believe, a sense of hesitation throughout. I should also add that to my knowledge Heidegger does not argue that

194

48

49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58

Notes words have an intrinsic relation to the things they signify and are therefore natural and true in the sense meant by Cratylus. Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy, quoted from Daniela Vallega-Neu, ‘Heidegger’s Poietic Writings: From Contributions to Philosophy to Das Ereignis’, in Heidegger and Language, ed. Jeffrey Powell (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2013), 128. Ziarek, ‘Giving Its Word’, 106. Taylor, ‘Heidegger on Language’, 439. The line, ‘Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose’ comes from Stein’s poem, ‘Sacred Emily’, written in 1913, and published in Geography and Plays, 1922. Both of these essays are in On the Way to Language, tr. Peter D. Hertz (New York: Harper and Row, 1971). Martin Heidegger, ‘The Nature of Language’, in OWL, 97. See also, WL, in OWL, 114. Heidegger, NL, 97. Martin Heidegger, WL, 115. See Heidegger, ‘Words’, in OWL, 141. See Ziarek, ‘Giving Its Word’, 106. Braver, Heidegger’s Later Writings, 107–8.

Chapter 6 1 See Heidegger’s preface to Richardson’s, Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought, X. 2 Heidegger quoted from, Haar, Heidegger and the Essence of Man, 102. See, Heidegger, Hebel der Hausfreund, Neske (Pfullingen: Neske, 1991), 25. 3 Heidegger, IM, 15. 4 Heidegger, ‘What are Poets For?’, in Poetry, Language, Thought, tr. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 132. 5 Richardson, Heidegger, 282. 6 Heidegger, IM, 133. 7 Heidegger, OWA, in PLT, 73. We will explore this in more detail in Chapter 7. 8 Cassirer, Language and Myth, 24. 9 Heidegger, IM, 15. 10 Kearney, Modern Movements, 43. 11 I have paraphrased Taylor here, ‘Heidegger on Language’, 446. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid., 448. 15 Brian Hodgkinson, The Essence of Vedanta: The Ancient Wisdom of Indian Philosophy (London: Arcturus Publishing Limited, 2006), 31. 16 See Hodgkinson, The Essence of Vedanta, 31–2.

Notes 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42

43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52

195

Heidegger, WL, 126. Hodgkinson, The Essence of Vedanta, 31. Ibid., 180. Martin Heidegger, ‘As When On Holiday ...’ (Wie Wenn Am Feiertage …), in Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry, tr. Keith Hoeller (New York: Humanity Books, 2000), 98. Halliburton, Poetic Thinking, 85. Heidegger, AWH, in EHP, 75. Ibid., 78. Ibid., 79. Ibid., 80. Ibid., 81. Ibid., 82. Ibid., 84. Ibid., 89. Ibid., 85. Ibid., 84. Ibid., 85. Friedrich Hölderlin, Selected Poems and Fragments, tr. Michael Hamburger, ed. Jeremy Adler (London: Penguin Classics, 1994), 79. Heidegger, AWH, 93. Ibid., 94–5. Ibid., 98. See Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott, Greek-English Lexicon (Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1843), 1912. Kearney, Modern Movements, 39. Heidegger, WL, 126. See Liddell and Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, 1964. Halliburton, Poetic Thinking, 144. Note that Taylor’s most recent book as I write is titled The Language Animal: The Full Shape of the Human Linguistic Capacity (Cambridge, MA and London, England: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2016). Taylor, ‘Heidegger on Language’, 445. Heidegger, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, in BW, 313–14. Ibid., 314. Ibid., 316. Ibid. Ibid., 317. Plato, Symposium, tr. Jowett, 205b. Inwood, A Heidegger Dictionary, 138–239. Steiner, Heidegger, 31–2. See Heidegger, LH. Heidegger refers to our ‘guardianship’ of Being throughout this essay, 217–65, and to our being the shepherd of Being on 245.

196

Notes

Chapter 7 1 I have paraphrased Biemel, ‘Poetry and Language in Heidegger’, 76. 2 The word, lēthē, usually refers to ‘forgetfulness’ or ‘oblivion’. Related Greek words refer to ‘secretly’ or ‘by stealth’, and ‘to be hidden.’ It is cognate with the Latin, latére, meaning, ‘to lie hid’. Hence the English ‘latent’. See Ernest Klein, Klein’s Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the English Language (Amsterdam, Oxford and New York: Elsevier, 1971), under Lethe, 418. See also, Liddell and Scott, Greek-English Lexicon, 1044. The older form, lēthein, means ‘to escape notice, be unseen, unnoticed’. See Inwood, A Heidegger Dictionary, 13. 3 Jan, A. Aertsen, Nature and Creature: Thomas Aquinas’s Way of Thought (Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 1988), 152. 4 Paraphrased from W. L. Reese, Dictionary of Philosophy and Religion: Eastern and Western Thought (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1980), 24. 5 Heidegger, ‘The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking’ (Das Ende der Philosophie und die Aufgabe des Denkens), tr. Joan Stambaugh, in BW, 442. 6 Ibid., 442. 7 I have paraphrased Inwood, A Heidegger Dictionary, 238. 8 Heidegger, EP, 441–2. 9 Heidegger, OWA, 54. 10 Inwood says: ‘Heidegger is more concerned with our large-scale ways of viewing things and with changes in them than in particular truths.’ See Inwood, A Heidegger Dictionary, 239. 11 Kelly, Language and Transcendence, 113. 12 Halliburton, Poetic Thinking, 202. 13 Werner Marx, ‘Poetic Dwelling and the Role of the Poet’, in On Heidegger and Language, 235–59, ed. Joseph J. Kockelmans (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1972), 241. 14 Richardson, Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought, 9. 15 Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes, Off the Beaten Track (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), ix. 16 Heidegger, note on Holzwege, tr. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes, in Off the Beaten Track, unnumbered front matter. 17 Heidegger, OWA, 73–4. 18 Ibid., 74. 19 Heidegger, NL, 98–9. 20 Ibid., 99. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid.

Notes 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61

197

Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 99–100. Ibid.,101. Inwood, A Heidegger Dictionary, 137. See Heidegger, IM, 134/147. Heidegger, DL, 23. Ibid. Ibid., 23–4. Ibid., 28. Ibid., 45. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 14. Ibid., 45. Ibid., 47. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Heidegger, WL, 124. Heidegger, DL, 49. This is the essay titled ‘Language’, that subsequently appears in Poetry, Language, Thought. Heidegger, DL, 49. Ibid. Ibid., 48. Ibid., 5. Ibid., 50. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 51. Ibid., 53. Ibid., 54. Ibid. Mugerauer, Heidegger’s Language and Thinking, 60. Heidegger, DL, 54. Mugerauer, Heidegger’s Language and Thinking, 60–1.

198

Notes

Chapter 8 1 2 3 4

5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32

See Klein’s Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the English Language, 453. We will explore this in more detail in the section of Chapter 9 titled ‘The Guide-Word’. Heidegger, OWA, 74. Halliburton, Poetic Thinking, 41–2. In Heidegger’s later work this dichotomy between earth and world is superseded by what he calls the ‘fourfold’, namely, earth, sky, mortals and divinities. Halliburton, Poetic Thinking, 80. Heraclitus quoted from Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 8.2 1155b4. Heidegger, IM, 139–40. In terms of this distinction-in-unity, Heidegger was also influenced by Hölderlin who saw it as an ‘intimacy’ (innigkeit). Hippolytus, Refutation, 9.9.2. Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, Vol. I (London: Nisbet, 1953), 220–1. Heidegger, ‘Remembrance’ (Andenken) in EHP, 171. Heidegger, ‘Language’ (Die Sprache), in PLT, 202. Richardson, Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought, 578–9. David Farrell Krell, editor’s note, OWA, in Basic Writings, 188. Heidegger, OWA, in PLT, 63. Heidegger, WL, in Basic Writings, 407–8. Note: In his translation of the same essay, Hertz uses the Latin equivalents of Riss and ritzen, he writes: ‘The “sign” in design (Latin signum) is related to secare, to cut – as in saw, sector, segment. To design is to cut a trace.’ See, Heidegger, WL, in OWL, 121. Heidegger, L, 194–5. Ibid., 196–7. Ibid., 197–8. Ibid., 198. Ibid. Ibid., 199–200. Ibid., 200. We will explore the full significance of this in Chapter 12. Heidegger, L, 200. Ibid., 201. Ibid. They are also a different way of referring to Being and beings. Heidegger, L, 202. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 203. Ibid., 204.

Notes 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47

199

Ibid. Ibid., 205. Ibid., 206–7. Inwood, A Heidegger Dictionary, 175. Kelly, Language and Transcendence, 153. Vallega-Neu, ‘Heidegger’s Poietic Writings’, 127. Kelly, Language and Transcendence, 153–4. Heidegger, L, 207. Kelly, Language and Transcendence, 154. Heidegger, L, 207. Ibid., 207–8. Ibid., 209. Ibid., 210. Heidegger, WL, 124. Ibid.

Chapter 9 1 For example, in the Gospel of Luke it says of the two debtors: ‘And when they had nothing (mé) to pay, he frankly forgave them both’ (Lk. 7.42, KJV). The ‘nothing’ here is the Greek mé, because the ‘nothing’ is relative only to the debtors. However, it also says in Luke: ‘For nothing (οu) is secret that shall not (οu) be made manifest. (Lk. 8.17, KJV). Here the words translated as ‘nothing’ and ‘not’ are the Greek οu, because the ‘nothing’ and the ‘not’ are in each case absolute. 2 Heidegger, ‘What is Metaphysics?’ (Was ist Metaphysik?), in BW, 95. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid., 96. 5 Ibid., 97. 6 Also translated as the ‘nothing nothings’ or the ‘nothing nihilates.’ 7 Heidegger, WM, 104. 8 Ibid., 109. 9 Ibid. 10 Rudolf Carnap, ‘The Elimination of Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of Language’, in Logical Positivism, ed. A. J. Ayer, tr. Arthur Pap (New York: Free Press, 1959), 70. 11 Meister Eckhart, for example, says: ‘Masters of little subtlety say God is pure being. He is as high above being as the highest angel is above a midge. I would be as wrong to call God being as if I were to call the sun pale or black.’ Eckhart, Sermon Sixty-Seven, in Sermons and Treatises, Vol. II, 150. However, just as we are led

200

12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

Notes to believe that God, according to Eckhart, is not a being, or is not pure being, he then says: ‘But when I have said God is not a being and is above being, I have not thereby denied Him being: rather I have exalted it in Him.’ Ibid., 150–1. Steiner, Heidegger, 154. See Heidegger, DL, 19. Ibid. Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, Vol. 2 (London: Nisbet, 1957), 22. Heidegger, NL, 81. Ibid., 93. Heidegger, L, 198–9. Heidegger, NL, 88. Kearney, Modern Movements, 39. Ziarek, ‘Giving Its Word’, 106. Heidegger, NL, 93. Ibid., 94. Ibid., 94–5. Ibid., 95.

26 Ibid., 96.

Chapter 10 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

Heidegger, L, 189. Ibid., 210. Farrell Krell, BW, 394. Heidegger, DL, 12. Ibid. Heidegger, WL, 111. Ibid., 112. See WL, 112. Heidegger, WL, tr. David Farrell Krell, in BW, 398. Braver, Heidegger’s Later Writings, 106–7. Ibid., 107. Ibid., 108. Heidegger, WL, 112–13. Ibid., 119. Heidegger, NL, 57. Ibid. Heidegger, IM, 57. Heidegger, NL, 59.

Notes

201

19 Robert Bernasconi, The Question of Language in Heidegger’s History of Being (Humanities Press International Inc, 1985), 65. 20 Kelly, Language and Transcendence, 170. 21 Heidegger, WL, 129. 22 Ibid., 129–30. Note wëgen is literally ‘waying’, and ‘way-making’ is Be- wëgen. 23 Heidegger, NL, 91. 24 Ibid., 91–2. 25 Ibid., 92. 26 Lao Tze, Tao Te Ching, tr. James Legge (Mineola and New York: Dover Publications Inc, 1997), 1. 27 Heidegger, WL, 130. The notion of ‘appropriation’ will be explored in chapters 11 and 12. 28 Ibid., 131. 29 Heidegger, NL, 59. 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid., 60. For a different translation of this poem, see Bernasconi, The Question of Language, 50. 32 Ibid., 67. 33 Ibid., 61. 34 Ibid. 35 Ibid., 68. 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid., 68–9. 38 Ibid., 69. 39 Ibid., 62. 40 Ibid., 65. 41 Ibid., 63. 42 Ibid., 80–1. 43 Ibid., 59. 44 See, Peter Hanly, ‘Dark Celebration: Heidegger’s Silent Music’, in Heidegger and Language, ed. Jeffrey Powell (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2013), 253. 45 See Sartre, Being and Nothingness, tr. Hazel E. Barnes (London: Routledge, 1958), 9.

Chapter 11 1 Inwood, A Heidegger Dictionary, 54–5. 2 Farrell Krell, BW, 395–6. 3 Heidegger, ID, 36.

202 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36

Notes Ibid. Ibid., 37–8. Heidegger, WL, 127. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Kelly, Language and Transcendence, 160. Heidegger, WL, 128. Richardson, Heidegger, 283. Heidegger quoted from Taylor, ‘Heidegger on Language’, 449. Taylor, ‘Heidegger on Language’, 442. Ibid., 449. See Heidegger, WL, tr. Peter D. Hertz, in OWL, 129, and, WL, tr. David Farrell Krell, in BW, 417. Farrell Krell, BW, 417. Heidegger, DL, 30. Ibid., 32. Ziarek, ‘Giving Its Word’, 108. Heidegger, WL, 111. ‘Novalis’ is another name for the German poet Friedrich Von Hardenburg. Ibid., 131. Ibid., 132. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 133. Ibid., 111. Ibid., 134. Ibid. Marc Froment-Meurice, That Is To Say: Heidegger’s Poetics, tr. Jan Plug (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 79. Heidegger, L, 191. Ibid. Haar, Heidegger and the Essence of Man, 106. Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, tr. Francis Golffing (New York: Anchor Books, 1956), 178–9. This appears to anticipate what Heidegger wishes to say about language. However, we should also note that Nietzsche tells us any separation of subject and verb occurs because language presents it this way. He continues to say that when the natural scientists tell us ‘energy moves’ or ‘energy causes’, they are still

Notes

37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46

47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61

62

203

the dupe of linguistic habits, and have never yet got rid of those changelings called ‘subjects’. See, Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, 179. I have here paraphrased Steiner, Heidegger, xviii. Heidegger, L, 191. Heidegger, WP, 137. Heidegger, LH, 222. Ibid., 222–3. Heidegger, L, 190. Heidegger, DL, 22. Heidegger, BT, 163. Heidegger, WIP, 85–7. Although we could argue that Husserl’s phenomenology began as an epistemological quest for certainty, but was forced to question the validity of this quest on account of its findings and conclusions. Heidegger, L, 190. Heidegger, NL, 85. Steiner, Heidegger, 21. Ibid., 8. Ibid., 7–8. Ibid., xiii. Ziarek, ‘Giving Its Word’, 107. Steiner, Heidegger, 21. Heidegger, IM, 83. See, ‘Etymology’, The Oxford Companion to the English Language, edited by Tom McArthur (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 384. Ayto, Bloomsbury Dictionary of Word Origins, 208. Paradise Lost is, I believe, a supreme example of the poet drawing from the etymological meaning of words. See ‘Etymological Fallacy’, The Oxford Companion to the English Language, 384. Ibid. See, Liddell and Scott, Greek-English Lexicon, 704; Klein, Klein’s Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the English Language, 260; W. W. Skeat, Etymological Dictionary of the English Language (Oxford at the Clarendon Press,1879–82), 201; Eric Partridge, A Short Etymological Dictionary of Modern English (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1958), 188; Ernest Weekly, An Etymological Dictionary of Modern English (New York: Dover, 1967), 527; Ayto, Bloomsbury Dictionary of Word Origins, 208, Robert, K. Barnhart, ed. Chambers Dictionary of Etymology (Edinburgh and New York: Chambers, 1988), 346; and C. T. Onions, ed. Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology (Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1966), 329. See, ‘Etymology’, The Oxford Companion to the English Language, 384.

204 63 64 65 66 67 68 69

Notes Heidegger, WP, 103. Heidegger, IM, 54. Haar, Heidegger and the Essence of Man, 103–4. Richardson, Heidegger, 310. Steiner, Heidegger, 9. Ibid. Heidegger, WCT, 130.

Chapter 12 1 Heidegger, LH, 222. 2 Ibid., 223. 3 In terms of the reference to a ‘destitute time’, we should perhaps be mindful that this was written in 1946, following the collapse of Germany, nevertheless Heidegger is referring to humanity’s plight generally. 4 Heidegger, WP, 91. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid., 92. 7 Ibid., 93. 8 Heidegger, NL, 57. 9 Heidegger, WP, 94. 10 Ibid., 96. 11 Ibid., 98. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid., 106. 14 Ibid., 106–7. 15 Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies, tr. Martyn Crucefix (London: Enitharmon, 2006), 63. Although every animal sees the Open, some are paralysed by captivity as Rilke’s well-known poem, ‘The Panther’, testifies. 16 Heidegger, WP, 108. 17 Ibid., 110. 18 Ibid., 111. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid., 115. 21 And lest we forget, the Nazis put numbers on Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, the mentally disabled, etc., thereby turning them into things as opposed to humans. 22 Heidegger, WP, 115–16. 23 Ibid., 117. 24 Hölderlin quoted from WP, in PLT, 118.

Notes 25 26 27 28

29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46

47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57

205

Heidegger, WP, 118. Ibid., 126–7. Ibid., 127–8. ‘Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît pas.’ This is a widely quoted line of Blaise Pascal, French mathematician, physicist and theologian. It begins verse 277, section IV, ‘Of the Means of Belief ’, found in his Pensées, which were compiled posthumously and published in 1670. Heidegger, WP, 128. Ibid., 130. Rilke quoted from WP, in PLT, 130. Karen Leeder, Rainer Maria Rilke: Duino Elegies (London: Enitharmon Press, 2006), 10. Rilke quoted from WP, in PLT, 131. Heidegger, WP, 131. Ibid.,132. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 133. Ibid., 137. Ibid., 137–8. Heidegger, AWH, 88. Heidegger, WP, 138. Ibid. Ibid., 138–9. Rilke quoted from Heidegger, WP, in PLT, 139. Rilke, Letter to Princess Furstin Marie Von Thurn und Taxis, 12 January 1912, Quoted from, Ralph Freedman, Life of a Poet: Rainer Maria Rilke (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1996), 325. Rilke, Briefe aus Muzot 1921-1926, Leipzig, 1940, 114–15, quoted from Leeder, Duino Elegies, 10. Leeder, Duino Elegies, 10. Johann Gottfried Von Herder, quoted from Heidegger, WP, in PLT, 139. Heidegger, WP, 140. Ibid. Ibid. Rilke, Duino Elegies, 73. Ibid., 71. Ibid., The phrase ‘acts without images’, can also be translated, ‘action without symbol’. Heidegger, ‘Poetically Man Dwells’, in PLT, 213. Ibid., 214.

206

Notes

58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66

Ibid. Ibid., 215. Ibid. Ibid., 218. Ibid. Ibid., 225. Ibid., 215. Heidegger, OWA, 73–4. Founding is understood here in three ways. See section 5 of Chapter 11, and Heidegger, OWA, 75. Heidegger, OWA, 74. The emphasis is mine. I am drawing here from, Biemel, ‘Poetry and Language in Heidegger’, 81. Richardson, Heidegger, 310. Heidegger, ‘Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry’ (Hölderlin und das Wesen der Dictung), in EHP, 60. See Heidegger, PMD, 215. Ibid., 216. See Heidegger, WL, 124. I have drawn in part from Powell here, ‘The Way to Heidegger’s “Way to Language” ’, 196. Heidegger, PMD, 216. See Heidegger, WIP, 77. Ziarek, ‘Giving Its Word’, 109–10. Heidegger, R, 148. Heidegger, PMD, 228. I have in part paraphrased Taylor, ‘Heidegger on Language’, 451. Heidegger, WIP, 45. I have paraphrased Richardson, Heidegger, 304–5. Heidegger, CP, sourced from Inwood, A Heidegger Dictionary, 79. Heidegger, LH, 223.

67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84

Conclusion 1 2 3 4 5 6

Steiner, Heidegger, xxi. Ziarek, ‘Giving Its Word’, 115–16. Steiner, Heidegger, xviii. Powell, ‘The Way to Heidegger’s “Way to Language” ’, 194. See Heidegger, WL, in OWL, 134, and BW, 423. Heidegger, NL, 58.

Notes 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37

207

Paraphrased from Mugerauer, Heidegger’s Language and Thinking, 28. See Heidegger, DL, 27–8. Ziarek, ‘Giving Its Word’, 103. Heidegger, LL, 240. Heidegger, L, 190. Pattison, The Later Heidegger, 5. See Heidegger, L, 191. See, Taylor, ‘Heidegger on Language’, 442. The phrase, neti, neti is employed in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad. The Holy Teaching of Vimalakirti, tr. R. F. Thurman (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1976), quoted in Michael A. Sells, Mystical Languages of Unsaying (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 4. Lao Tze, Tao Te Ching, 1. Froment-Meurice, That Is To Say, 60. Heidegger, DL, 41. Pattison says rhetorically that Heidegger might be counted as a ‘secular prophet’, ‘quasi-mystical poet’ or ‘latter-day sophist’. Pattison, The Later Heidegger, 20. Heidegger, in Richardson, Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought, XXII. Rorty, ‘Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and the Reification of Language’, 353. James Legge, Tao Te Ching, 1. Paraphrased from Taylor, ‘Heidegger on Language’, 443. Ziarek, ‘Giving Its Word’, 109. Richardson, Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought, 578. Quoted from Geldard, Remembering Heraclitus, 156. Ibid. Heraclitus, Fragment 34, Clement of Alexandria, Stromaa, V, 115, 3. and Preparation for the Gospel, XIII, 13, 42. tr. John Burnet, 1912. Heidegger, IM, 137. Quoted from Heidegger, IM, 141. Ibid., 140–1. Heidegger, WL, 122. This is a point to be taken, perhaps, in relation to Heidegger’s silence concerning the Nazi atrocities. Heidegger, TP, 11. See Heidegger, WL, 134–6. Heidegger, ‘Das Spiegel Interview’, in The Heidegger Reader, tr. Jerome Veith (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2007), 326. See Heidegger, WP, 92.

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Index

Note: Page locators followed by ‘n’ indicate notes section abyss 154, 159 Advaita Vedanta 82–3 approach, of Heidegger 5–8 appropriation 137–9, 142 ‘as Owning-Event’ 138–9 Aquinas, Thomas 15, 91 Arendt, Hannah 175 Aristotle 14, 48, 64, 74–5, 88, 91, 177 assertion, language as 47–52 logical 54, 57, 58 logos and 64, 66 representative 50 Ayer, A. J. 120 Ayto, John 149 being. See also Being Beingness of 15 etymological roots of 27 of language, in terms of Saying 3–4 Being 190 n.4 and being 9, 16, 161 ontological difference between 4, 22–3, 108, 123 forgetting of Beingness of Being 17–21 ontotheology 14–17 guardianship of 196 n.52 of language 129 linguistic considerations 25–8 question of 34 as reality of realities 35 significance of 8–10 Being and Time 8–10, 13, 22, 34, 59–61, 65, 140, 146 Bernasconi, Robert 129, 201 n.31 Biemel, Walter 47, 206 n.68 Brahman 83 Braver, Lee 16, 126 breath, as language 161–5

Carnap, Rudolf ‘The Elimination of Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of Language’ 120 Cassirer, Ernst 46, 79 Language and Myth 45 chalk, Being of 18–19 Chandogya Upanishad 82 Chrysippus 189 n.25 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 7, 8, 13, 87 collectedness 70 Conceptualism 188 n.40 Condillac, Etienne 40–2 consciousness, conversion of 159–61 “constitutive” theory, of language 39–40 Contributions to Philosophy (Beiträge zur Philosophie) 73 co-respondence 30–1 Croce, Benedetto 45 Dahlstrom, Daniel O. 59–61 Dasein 52–3, 55, 63, 72, 137, 163, 191 n.25 Das Spiegel 180 Dastur, Françoise 61 Descartes, René 40, 90, 160 Discourse on Method 52 Meditations 147 destitute time 153–9, 204 n.3 desynonymization 7 ‘A Dialogue on Language’ (Aus einum Gespräch von der Sprache) (Heidegger and Tezuka) 4, 6, 8, 10, 16, 96, 98, 99, 175, 184 n.37 dif-ference, significance of 9, 107–17 distinction-in-unity 106, 107, 109, 122, 198 n.7 Eckhart, Meister ego cogito 160

6, 44, 200 n.11

216

Index

emptiness 120 enframing theory 39–41, 45, 64, 74 etymological fallacy 150 etymology 8, 27–8 formalization 142 fourfold 198 n.4 Froment-Meurice, Marc

143, 174

Gadamer, Hans-Georg 52, 191 n.22 gatheredness 69–70, 73 Gelassenheit, meaning of 6 Geldard, Richard 66 George, Stefan 110, 135, 179 ‘The Word’ (Das Wort) 133 Gerede, significance of 52–4 logical assertion and 54 Goethe 140 Maxims and Reflections 92 Golffing, Francis 203 n.36 Haar, Michel 2, 7, 144, 151 Halliburton, David 21, 87, 93, 106 Haynes, Kenneth 197 n.16 Heideggerese 7, 152, 176 Heraclitus 42, 43, 66–71, 78, 106–7, 178, 185 n.5 Hertz, Peter D. 74, 194 n.52, 198 n.15 Hobbes, Thomas 40, 42 Hobbes-Locke-Condillac (HLC) form of theory 40, 42 Hodgkinson, Brian The Essence of Vedanta 81–2 Hölderlin, Friedrich 85–6, 98, 105, 110, 155, 159, 162, 165, 166, 198 n.7 ‘As When On a Holiday … ’ (Wie Wenn Am Feiertage …) 83, 84 ‘Bread and Wine’ 95, 154 ‘Germania’ 95 ‘The Poet’s Vocation’ 86 ‘Remembrance’ 107 ‘Walk in the Country’ 95 homelessness 11, 149, 153, 168 and house of being 37–46 house of being 11, 78, 47, 59, 63–76, 78, 90, 96, 98–100, 103, 115, 121, 125, 146, 147, 170 foundations to 63–76 and homelessness 37–46 Husserl, Edmund 127, 203 n.46

idea, notion of 14 idiolect 151 idle talk 52–5, 72, 178, 191 n.44 instituted sign 40–1 Introduction to Metaphysics (Einführung in die Metaphysik) 13, 71 invisible 160–1, 164 Inwood, Michael 6, 8, 51, 53, 57, 59, 64, 192 n.4, 196 nn.2, 10 John the Apostle 42 Jowett, Benjamin 89, 194 n.47 Kearney, Richard 48, 49, 51, 55, 80, 87, 123, 191 nn.25, 46 Kelly, Thomas 38, 115, 116, 130 Klein, Ernest 196 n.2 Krell, David Farrell 125, 126, 140 Kuki, Count 98 language breath as 161–5 conventional view of 42–6 and discourse 59–61 essence of 32, 65, 72–3, 108, 109, 124, 128, 130–3, 145, 146, 167–8, 172, 179, 185 n.47 and Heidegger 8–10 as house of Being 11, 78, 37–47, 59, 63–76, 78, 90, 96, 98–100, 103, 115, 121, 125, 146, 147, 162 as idle talk 52–5 as interpretive discourse 55–8 as language 145–8 as language, to language 125–30, 136 as logical assertion 47–52 as Owning-Event 139 peculiarity of 141–5 as Saying 83, 93, 95, 96, 98–103, 106–8, 124, 131, 177 as sign system 37–8 speaking of 141, 143–4 theories of 39–42 as ultimate Event 139 way-making movement and 130–3 Lao Tze 131 Leeder, Karen 161 Legge, James 176 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 185n. 5 Leitsatz (guide-word/guiding

Index principle) 124 ‘Letter on Humanism’ (Brief über den Humanismus) 17, 33, 37, 90 lichtung 92 Being as 94 Liddell, Henry 196n. 2 linguistic concern 32–5 linguistic considerations 25–8 linguistic difference, between language speaking and human speaking 4 Locke, John 40, 42 Logic: Heraclitus’ Teaching on Logos ( Logik: Heraklits Lehre vom Logos ) 186 n.15 logos 63–7, 115, 123, 169, 176–80 assertion and 64, 66 as discourse 65 language as 4, 10, 12, 42–3, 67–77 meaning of 63–4 reason and 64–5 as Saying 102 ‘Logos and Language’ 65 Macquarrie, John 192 n.51 manifestation/creation 77–83 Marx, Werner 93 mediacy, law of 83–6 mediation 105 metalinguistics 172 metaphysics 15, 16, 49, 186 n.15. See also individual entries Milton, John 149 Mugerauer, Robert 5, 6, 102, 183 n.14 Natural Attitude 127, 129 natural language 142 ‘The Nature of Language’ (Das Wesen der Sprache) 74, 94, 128 neologism 7 The New Standard Encyclopaedia 38 Nietzsche, Friedrich 15, 144, 155, 203 n.36 Nominalism 188n. 40 nothing, significance of 119–21 Novalis 142–3, 202 n.22 Monologue 141 objectiveness 51 occasioning, irruption of 86–90 Off the Beaten Track (Holzwege) 93

217

ontological difference 107, 123 between Being and being 22–3, 108, 123 two-fold of 141 ontotheology 14–17, 48, 83 Open, concept of 157–60 ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ 151, 166 ossified language 7 Owning-Event appropriation and 137–9 etymology and 148–52 humanity and 139–41 language is language and 145–8 language peculiarity and 141–5 Oxford Companion to the English Language 38, 150 pain 114 Parmenides 68, 185 n.5 Pascal, Blaise 160, 205 n.28 Pattison, George 9, 173, 207 n.20 Perkins, Mary Anne Coleridge’s Philosophy 7 Phenomenological Attitude (phänomenologische Einstellung) 127 Philo Judaeus 42, 43 phusis, significance of 26, 27, 79, 87, 89, 96 Pieper, Josef 15 Pindar Isthmians V 112 Pinker, Steven 40 The Language Instinct 40 Plato 14, 48, 92, 189 n.21, 193–4 n.47 Symposium 89 ‘Poetically Man Dwells’ 98, 165 poiēsis 87–9, 91, 96, 151, 167, 174 polemos 106, 107, 114 Potter, Simeon 45, 73 Powell, Jeffrey 1, 191 n.24, 206 n.74 prelinguistic consciousness 41 The Principle of Ground (Der Satz vom Grund) 184 n.20 Realism 188 n.40 reflective thinking 131 Richardson, John 78 Richardson, William J. 9, 35, 47, 49, 108,

218

Index

139, 151, 167, 184 n.31, 185 n.47, 194 n.1, 207 n.82 Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought 77 rift-design 108–9 Rilke, Rainer Maria 2, 110, 157, 160, 162, 164, 205 n.15 Duino Elegies 155, 156, 163, 165 ‘improvised verses’ 156 Sonnets to Orpheus 155, 163 Robinson, Edward 192 n.51 Rorty, Richard 2–4, 9, 176

Tezuka, Professor 4, 10, 22, 96–102, 120, 125, 140, 146 Thomas, Dylan 87 threshold 113–14 Tillich, Paul 107, 121 Trakl, Georg ‘A Winter Evening’ 110, 112, 114, 117 Turner, Denys 183n. 7 two-fold 140–1, 179 oneness 22–3 significance of 4–5 type A entities 3

St. Avicenna 91 Saying 3–4, 99, 117, 122–4, 168, 130–3, 135, 137, 140–3, 168, 172, 178, 179 language as 83, 93, 95, 96, 98, 100, 101, 106–8, 124, 131, 177 Logos and 67–73, 102 natural language and 142 as showing 82, 87, 91, 138, 139 and way-making movement 132–3 scientific dissertation 101 Scott, Robert 196 n.2 self-assertion 158, 159, 162, 181 Silesius, Angelus 184 n.20 Socrates 193–4 n.47 Stambaugh, Joan 192 n.56 St Augustine 44, 91, 183 n.7 Stein, Gertrude 74, 194 n.51 Steiner, George 8, 9, 15, 20, 22, 26, 30, 31, 33, 53, 90, 120, 148, 150, 151, 171, 185 n.5, 191 n.37 Stoicism 189 n.25 Stoics 42, 43 streit (conflict/tension) 105, 106 subjectivity 1, 2, 9, 38, 45, 46, 48, 74, 80, 81, 119, 123, 127, 146, 147, 169, 171, 172 human 39, 42

Vallega-Neu, Daniela 116 von Herder, Johann Gottfried 40, 41, 45 Ideas on the Philosophy of the History of Man 164 von Humboldt, Wilhelm 39, 40, 42, 127, 189 n.10 ‘On the Diversity of the Structure of Human Language and its Influence on the Intellectual Development of Mankind’ 39

Tao Te Ching 173–4 Taylor, Charles 2, 39–42, 74, 80–1, 88, 139, 173, 195 n.11, 196 n.42 ‘Heidegger on Language’ 39

Watts, Alan 45, 79 way-making movement 130–3, 143 ‘The Way to Language’ (Der Weg zur Sprache) 74, 125, 126, 138, 141, 189 n.10 ‘What Are Poets For?’ (Wozu Dichter) 154, 161 ‘What is Metaphysics?’ 16, 119, 120 ‘What is Philosophy?’ (Was ist das -die Philosophie) 73 whatness, of what 28–30 Williams, Duane 192 n.4, 193 n.36, 194 n.11, 196 n.7, 206 n.68, 74, 207 n.80 world and things 113 Yonge, C. D. 189 n.24 Young, Julian 197 n.16 Ziarek, Krzysztof

141, 148–9, 169, 171,

172, 177, 184 n.25