The essays collected in this volume take a new look at the role of language in the thought of Martin Heidegger to reassess its significance for contemporary philosophy. They consider such topics as Heidegger's engagement with the Greeks, expression in language, poetry, the language of art and politics, and the question of truth. Heidegger left his unique stamp on language, giving it its own force and shape, especially with reference to concepts such as Dasein, understanding, and attunement, which have a distinctive place in his philosophy.
The essays collected in this volume take a new look at the role of language in the thought of Martin Heidegger to reassess its significance for contemporary philosophy. They consider such topics as Heidegger's engagement with the Greeks, expression in language, poetry, the language of art and politics, and the question of truth. Heidegger left his unique stamp on language, giving it its own force and shape, especially with reference to concepts such as Dasein, understanding, and attunement, which have a distinctive place in his philosophy.
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Overview
The essays collected in this volume take a new look at the role of language in the thought of Martin Heidegger to reassess its significance for contemporary philosophy. They consider such topics as Heidegger's engagement with the Greeks, expression in language, poetry, the language of art and politics, and the question of truth. Heidegger left his unique stamp on language, giving it its own force and shape, especially with reference to concepts such as Dasein, understanding, and attunement, which have a distinctive place in his philosophy.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253007605 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 02/07/2013 |
| Series: | Studies in Continental Thought |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 296 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Jeffrey Powell is Professor of Philosophy at Marshall University. He is currently translating (with William McNeill) Heidegger's History of Beyng (IUP, forthcoming).
Read an Excerpt
Heidegger and Language
By Jeffrey Powell
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2013 Indiana University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-00760-5
CHAPTER 1
Heidegger's Ontological Analysis of Language
Daniel O. Dahlstrom
Language occupies a central position in Heidegger's later thinking, from his controversial yet telling pronouncements that "language speaks" and "language is the house of being" to his insistence on thinking through the language of poets, sensitive to how our very access to things hangs on our words. Much attention is thus rightly devoted to the interpretation of Heidegger's mature views of language. Yet 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. Precisely in this respect, interpretation is faced here with the familiar Herculean task of being generous, critical, and reflexive. The interpretation must find its own words to supplement Heidegger's remarks, with a view to examining the meaning of language for his thinking, both early and late. In other words, the interpretation must think and speak for itself as it attempts to say not simply what is unsaid by Heidegger himself about language but what he was or, better, should have been trying to say.
By no means do I have any pretensions of accomplishing this task in the following essay. Its aim is simply to make a start in this direction by presenting some central themes of Heidegger's discussion of language in Sein und Zeit, with a requisite supplementation where necessary and with an occasional sidelong glance at the bearing of that early account on his later formal treatments of language. The first section is a sketch of Heidegger's early ontology of language, that is, his account of language in the context of the project of fundamental ontology. The sketch is made with a view to motivating the question of what differentiates discourse from language. In the second section I look to his accounts of assertions and discursive meaning for part of an answer to that question. By way of conclusion, I briefly address two relatively underdetermined senses of "equiprimordiality" with respect to discourse, namely, the equiprimordial status of communication within the constitution of discourse and the equiprimordial status of discourse as a basic existential.
Discourse and the Use of Language
In Sein und Zeit, Heidegger famously distinguishes language (Sprache) from discourse (Rede). The distinction falls neatly into the ontological economy that he uses to navigate his existential analysis, namely, the difference between being on hand, being handy, and being-here (Vorhanden-, Zuhanden- and Da-sein). Discourse pertains only to being-here and vice versa; that is to say, discursiveness and being-here are not identical but they are equivalent. In Heidegger's terminology, discourse is an existential, a constitutive way of being-here that is disclosive of our being-here. To say that we exist as discursive beings is to say that, in and through our discursiveness, the meaning of being (i.e., being this or that, including ourselves) discloses itself to us, no less fundamentally than it does in the ways we find ourselves emotionally disposed in the world and in the ways we understand (project and work on) possibilities in our everyday lives. Indeed, Heidegger characterizes discourse as a basic existential, that is, the sort of existential that, like our disposed understanding (befindliches Verstehen) or mindless absorption in our world (Verfallensein), underlies and inflects being-in-the-world in its entirety, including its ontic comportments, that is, its concrete, empirical ways of behaving.
By contrast, again according to Sein und Zeit, language is discourse that has been voiced (hinausgesprochen). 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 artifacts, from ancient hieroglyphics to contemporary texting, fertile soil for sciences of language such as philology, linguistics, psycholinguistics. Whether these sciences study the remains of dead languages or the objectifiable patterns of living forms of communication, they suppose the use of language by its users. Language as used is not simply on hand but handy (zuhanden), and this use of language as ready-to-hand supposes discourse or, as Heidegger also puts it, flouting his own distinction, "existential language" (SZ 161).
In this way Heidegger differentiates three distinct ontological levels or aspects of language: existential language, language as use, and language as something on hand. To appreciate the difference between language as use and as something on hand, consider the difference between reading a poem and analyzing the language of the poem. The analysis dissects the linguistic parts of the text (juxtapositions, word-choices, grammar, and the like). By contrast, when we read or recite the text, we use those parts, configured as they are, without paying any more attention to them than we do to the page on which they are printed or the glasses on our face. To be sure, the uses of words are multifarious and highly context- and user-dependent and adults sometimes clumsily try to teach children how to use them by breaking with normal usage and calling attention to the words themselves (e.g., saying "ball" while holding the ball in front of her or pointing to it). But the endgame, of course, is mastery of usage, and children learn very early the art of adroitly moving back and forth between attending to the words themselves and simply using them (aping the behavior of other users).
There is much more to be said about this difference between language as an object or cultural artifact on hand in our environment and language as a handy means of manipulating things in that environment. Indeed, there is something uncanny about the difference since these modes of being and their phenomenologies, that is, the ways they afford themselves to us, are so radically distinct. We experience something like a gestalt shift when we stop to examine our use of a word, often leaving us more than a little uneasy about the success of capturing through such analysis the significance of that use. Yet this very uneasiness underscores the difference between the use of language and the analysis of it as something already used and simply on hand.
The difference between discourse and language use is not as perspicuous as that between the use of language and its objective presence in nature and culture. The former distinction is perhaps the more elusive one because both discourse and language use alike are something that we do (in contrast to something we find on hand in nature and culture). What precisely is the existential character of discourse that distinguishes it not merely from language as something on hand but from language as use? In other words, how are we to distinguish discourse as a fundamental way of being-here from the handiness of language?
It should be evident how much rides for Heidegger on this distinction. If discourse proves to be nothing but use of language, then the very distinctiveness of being-here, over against things on hand and handy, is called into question. Moreover, if that distinctiveness becomes questionable, then so does the very project of fundamental ontology that the existential analysis is supposed to yield. Thus, any ontology, that is, any examination of what it means for entities to be is said to rest upon fundamental ontology, the foregoing analysis of what it means for us to be-here (da zu sein). Accordingly, on Heidegger's account, inasmuch as discourse is one of the basic, constitutive ways for us to be here, it both underlies and limits our ability to understand and use language as a cultural artifact. So the question becomes all the more pressing: what is it about discourse's difference from language in use that explains how it grounds that use (and thereby the objectifiable remnants of that use, the stuff of sciences such as linguistics, psycholinguistics, and linguistic anthropology)?
From one interpretive vantage point, the question of the difference between discourse and language use may seem trivial. Trivial because, on this interpretation, the difference between language use and discourse amounts simply to the difference between a description of the actual use of language and the ascription of it to its user (in this case, Dasein). Just as we can distinguish the practice of medicine from its practice qua ascribed to the doctor engaged in the practice, so we can distinguish the actual use of language from its use by a particular speaker or from a particular speaker's experience of using it. On this interpretation, discourse just is language insofar as it is in actual use and attributable to Dasein, the user of the language.
But this way of interpreting the difference between discourse and language use takes its bearings from the handiness (Zuhandenheit) of language, that is, language in use or, as we might also put it, from the pragmatics of language, rather than from the allegedly existential distinctiveness of discourse. Moreover, far from understanding discourse as constitutive of Dasein's manner of being, this line of interpretation takes discourse to be a tool, distinct from Dasein, that Dasein can pick up and put down at will (hence, my coupling of language use with the pragmatics of language in the previous sentence). Such an interpretation also runs the risk of smuggling into the account a substantialist ontological framework whereby Dasein is defined as the substance who has and uses language ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]) a theme against which Heidegger repeatedly rails in his later writings (though he gives it a positive spin in his early lecture on Aristotle's Rhetoric). So construed, discourse is not only conflated with language use, but in traditional terms is also reduced to an accident—not even a property—of Dasein, one that hardly defines what it means for Dasein to be.
The Truthfulness of Discourse
There is more to discourse than the use of language precisely because the use of language presupposes the disclosiveness of discourse, that is, 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, that is, 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. In general terms then, it is the disclosiveness or, as we might also put it, the truthfulness of discourse that distinguishes it (existential language) from the use of language, even while grounding that use. In Sein und Zeit Heidegger specifies this existential distinctiveness of discourse through analyses of (1) assertions as a form of discourse, (2) discursive meanings and sense, and (3) discourse's communicative dimension.
ASSERTIONS, ABOUTNESS (REFERENCE), AND PREDICATION
The very theme of Heidegger's existential analysis, namely, being-in-the-world, undermines traditional modern, epistemological debates over realism and idealism. Both emotions and practical know-how, Heidegger maintains, testify to ways of relating to things in the world and not to mere mental representations of them. In similar fashion, his account of discourse as a basic existential thwarts any attempt to motivate quandaries over the referentiality of our discourse. Our being-in-the-world means, among other things, that any analysis or self-analysis must take its bearings from the fact that we are always already with things and others. The same underlying phenomenon holds for discourse generally and assertions in particular. It is not, however, as though assertions piggyback on some foregoing phenomenon of being exposed and evolved with things within the world. Rather, as forms of discourse, assertions are themselves essential to the very fabric of our being-in-the-world, constituting at once both how we are with others and things within the world and how they are with us. In other words, assertions are part of the existential status of discourse.
This observation helps explain the early Heidegger's confidence in the scientific and theoretical character of fundamental ontology. At least in Sein und Zeit, he did not think that a theoretical assertion necessarily overdetermines the ontological status of its reference, such that, by virtue of being the object of an assertion, it is something simply on hand, available for observation. Were this the case, there could be no assertions about being handy (ready-to-hand), let alone being-here (Da-sein). Yet, while he lost his confidence in the appropriateness of scientific assertions for his thinking, he arguably never surrenders the idea that language is, in the terminology of Sein und Zeit, fundamentally discursive. That is to say, in the terminology of his later work, that language is an essential part of the revealing ground (Seyn) of the relation between being and being-here, between the world and human beings. "Language is the house of being" is, after all, an assertion, an assertion that he makes because it reveals something about being.
In the present section, I have been suggesting that the import of Heidegger's account of discourse for a philosophy of language significantly parallels the import of existential analysis for a philosophy of knowledge. Left to its own devices or taken as foundational, epistemology can generate the pseudo-problem of knowledge of the external world or the irresolvable problem of putting subject and object together, the moment it abstracts from the underlying phenomenon of being-in-the-world. Analogously, a philosophy of language can concoct hopeless riddles of reconciling meanings and references, words and things, language and the world, the moment it abstracts from discourse as a fundamental way of being-in-the-world.
Heidegger's early views of the fundamentally revelatory character of assertions is, he would be the first to acknowledge, hardly novel. He draws extensively upon Aristotle's account of assertions, signaling this source by identifying this character with the apophantic nature of assertions. The correspondence theory of truth, where truth is taken to be a property of an assertion, is derivative of the originally apophantic character of assertions, that is, their capacity to enable things to reveal themselves to us for what they are (a capacity that is in turn ontologically grounded, as discussed more below). As Heidegger puts it in Sein und Zeit, glossing this capacity of assertion:
Asserting is a being towards a thing itself insofar as it is.... The very entity that is meant shows itself just as it is in itself, that is to say, that it is in the same way as it is pointed out, uncovered as being in the assertion ...
The assertion is true means: it uncovers the entity in itself. It asserts, points out, "lets be seen" ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]) the entity in its uncoveredness.
Assertions may mislead or even deceive, but these possibilities rest upon their fundamental function of letting something show itself from itself (apo), that is to say, as it is or as it presents itself on its own terms. Typically, if a friend says: "You look pale today," the friend is calling attention to your appearance, not to be confused or conflated with how you look to her specifically. Similarly, the weatherman's report "The skies are clear today" states a fact and not a belief about the skies. To be sure, very early on we learn how to manipulate such statements, justifying a certain amount of healthy skepticism about factual statements. But those manipulations (including exaggerations, tendentiousness, lies, and so on) live off that fundamentally apophantic character, namely, off the fact that assertions consist in acknowledging and calling attention to the way things present themselves for what they are.
At the same time, it is important to note that Heidegger places assertions squarely within understanding and interpretation. We understand, that is to say, we meaningfully employ implements as part of our understanding of our world. Interpretation elaborates this understanding, bringing the ready-to-hand implement explicitly into view. Thus, we ask what something is "for" (Wozu?), precisely because it is "always already" accessible in such a way that what it is taken "as" can be set in relief. This "as" character constitutes the interpretation. For example, on the basis of what wheels are for, namely, for turning the axle, we interpret them as devices for turning. Assertions build precisely on this as-structure. That is to say, they are ways of making explicit what something is taken (interpreted) as, which in turn is based upon what it is for, that is, how it is understood. For example, the assertion "The wheels turn" is a way of making more explicit the interpretation of them as (als) turning, based upon the understanding that they are for (zum) turning.
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
Introduction\Jeffrey Powell
1. Heidegger's Ontological Analysis of Language\Daniel O. Dahlstrom
2. Listening to the Silence: Reticence and the Call of Conscience in Heidegger's Philosophy\Walter Brogan
3. In Force of Language: Language and Desire in Heidegger's Reading of Aristotle's Metaphysics \William McNeill
4. The Secret Homeland of Speech: Heidegger on Language, 1933–1934\Richard Polt
5. The Logic of Thinking\John Sallis
6. Giving Its Word: Event (as) Language\Krzysztof Ziarek
7. Heidegger's Poietic Writings: From Contributions to Philosophy to Das Ereignis\Daniela Vallega-Neu
8. Poets as Prophets and as Painters: Heidegger's Turn to Language and the Hölderlinian Turn in Context\Robert Bernasconi
9. Truth Be Told: Homer, Plato, and Heidegger\Dennis J. Schmidt
10. The Way to Heidegger's "Way to Language"\Jeffrey L. Powell
11. Is There a Heidegger—or, for That Matter, a Lacan—Beyond All Gathering?\David Farrell Krell
12. Heidegger and the Question of the "Essence" of Language\Françoise Dastur
13. Dark Celebration: Heidegger's Silent Music\Peter Hanly
14. Heidegger with Blanchot: On the Way to Fragmentation\Christopher Fynsk
Contributors
Index
What People are Saying About This
A volume that reappraises the role of language in Heidegger's thought is a welcome addition to the literature.
The volume addresses a topic that is of great importance to philosophers today as Heidegger's views on language are a point of contact between the continental and analytic traditions of philosophy, as well as a central part of his own thinking of being.
A volume that reappraises the role of language in Heidegger's thought is a welcome addition to the literature.