Heidegger and Language , livre ebook

HEIDEGGER AND LANGUAGE
STUDIES IN CONTINENTAL THOUGHT
John Sallis, editor
CONSULTING EDITORS
Robert Bernasconi
Rudolph Bernet
John D. Caputo
David Carr
Edward S. Casey
Hubert Dreyfus
Don Ihde
David Farrell Krell
Lenore Langsdorf
Alphonso Lingis
William L. McBride
J. N. Mohanty
Mary Rawlinson
Tom Rockmore
Calvin O. Schrag
Reiner Sch rmann
Charles E. Scott
Thomas Sheehan
Robert Sokolowski
Bruce W. Wilshire
David Wood
Heidegger and Language
EDITED BY JEFFREY POWELL
Indiana University Press
Bloomington Indianapolis
Fran oise Dastur s essay was originally published in French under the title Heidegger et la question de l essence du langage in Alter: Revue de ph nom nologie 19 (2011).
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Heidegger and language / edited by Jeffrey Powell.
p. cm. - (Studies in Continental thought)
Includes index.
ISBN 978-0-253-00740-7 (cloth : alk. paper) - ISBN 978-0-253-00748-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) - ISBN 978-0-253-00760-5 (electronic book) 1. Heidegger, Martin, 1889-1976. 2. Language and languages-Philosophy. I. Powell, Jeffrey, date
B3279.H49H3417 2013
193-dc23
2012031187
1 2 3 4 5 18 17 16 15 14 13
CONTENTS
Introduction Jeffrey L. Powell
ONE Heidegger s Ontological Analysis of Language Daniel O. Dahlstrom
TWO Listening to the Silence: Reticence and the Call of Conscience in Heidegger s Philosophy Walter Brogan
THREE In Force of Language: Language and Desire in Heidegger s Reading of Aristotle s Metaphysics William McNeill
FOUR The Secret Homeland of Speech: Heidegger on Language, 1933-1934 Richard Polt
FIVE The Logic of Thinking John Sallis
SIX Giving Its Word: Event (as) Language Krzysztof Ziarek
SEVEN Heidegger s Poietic Writings: From Contributions to Philosophy to Das Ereignis Daniela Vallega-Neu
EIGHT Poets as Prophets and as Painters: Heidegger s Turn to Language and the H lderlinian Turn in Context Robert Bernasconi
NINE Truth Be Told: Homer, Plato, and Heidegger Dennis J. Schmidt
TEN The Way to Heidegger s Way to Language Jeffrey L. Powell
ELEVEN Is There a Heidegger-or, for That Matter, a Lacan-Beyond All Gathering? David Farrell Krell
TWELVE Heidegger and the Question of the Essence of Language Fran oise Dastur
THIRTEEN Dark Celebration: Heidegger s Silent Music Peter Hanly
FOURTEEN Heidegger with Blanchot: On the Way to Fragmentation Christopher Fynsk
CONTRIBUTORS
INDEX
HEIDEGGER AND LANGUAGE
Introduction
It is well known in many quarters that Martin Heidegger s long encounter with the question of language was not restricted to a kind of linguistics or a traditional philosophy of language. This is not to say, however, that Heidegger s writings concerning language had nothing to contribute to those approaches to language and many others. Quite the contrary; Heidegger s influence on those interested in the question of language has been far and wide. To that end, the essays in this collection speak to many disciplines and many concerns, including but not limited to metaphysics, poetry, the political, logic, and the very possibility of philosophy.
Many of the above concerns and more have been joined to the question of language for the simple reason that the twentieth century has been characterized as the century of language. The beginning of the century was especially fruitful in this regard. Linguistics in its contemporary form, as well as a proliferation of French discourses with different yet related concerns, began with Saussure. The analytic tradition was particularly intense as evidenced by Russell, Frege, and Wittgenstein. Within the continental tradition, the question of language occupied the center of debate beginning with Husserl s Logical Investigations, and it remains either at the center or in the background of virtually every debate today. Granted the importance of Husserl, it is nevertheless Martin Heidegger who has shaped and given force to the question of language throughout the twentieth century and now into the twenty-first. The power of this question, as launched by Heidegger, was first formally introduced with the publication of Being and Time in 1927, although it was already present in a number of the earlier lecture-courses that served as its trial grounds. In Being and Time, the role of language is absolutely crucial for each and every analysis. As preparatory for raising the question of being, language exists as one of the three constituent moments in the analysis of the being of the da in Dasein, along with understanding ( Verstehen ) and attunement ( Befindlichkeit ). What makes the question of language even more important is that both understanding and attunement are determined through the being of language, which is discourse, says Heidegger: Attunement and understanding are equiprimordially determined by discourse. 1 Six sections later, in section 34, Heidegger addresses language in a more straightforward way. However, despite much that is exciting in the discussion-the grounding of language in discourse, the grounding of discourse in silence, discourse and the outside, and so forth-it leaves one wishing for more, much more. To satisfy that wish, and to round out Being and Time a bit more, one must come to terms with what Heidegger has to say about language after Being and Time. To do so is to both inform our understanding of Being and Time, to fill in the gaps, as it were, as do the essays by Walter Brogan and Dan Dahlstrom, and to radicalize the thinking that begins with Being and Time. This collection attempts to make some modest progress in that direction.
It is difficult to attribute a singular meaning to the question of language in the thought of Martin Heidegger. From the very beginning, the idea of a consistent view has been secondary to the manner in which whatever shows itself does indeed show itself, and language is no exception. That this is the case is certainly contrary to all philosophical method, and it is even contrary to the appearance of a consistent view of language by Heidegger. While Heidegger was indeed a philosopher, and in many regards a very traditional one, he does not, in the end, offer a philosophy of language, even in the midst of a sustained treatment of the question of language. Despite the inconsistency, however, the importance of the question of language was for Heidegger never in doubt, an importance that might well account for the attempt to collect all the many meanings of language into one consistent view. This is not an attempt to insert a strategical trick to avoid any possible critique of Heidegger. Quite the contrary; it is simply to highlight two phenomena encountered in the reading of Heidegger. First, while Heidegger engages in a relatively consistent deconstruction of the history of the concern for language, and this from at least two angles-the apophantical-as and the proposition on the one hand, and the content of what is said by the they in Gerede -language as a, so to speak, positive phenomenon does not show the same consistency. Second, from early on, Heidegger was engaged in a slightly different deconstruction, one that attempted to overcome the obsession with method and system, both of which were comprised from out of the demand for consistency. This began with his critique of Husserl s obsession with phenomenological method and continued through the 1930s with a concerted critique and abandonment of all need for system, especially with regard to German Idealism. While both method and system might guarantee or validate a kind of certainty-more specifically, that achieved through calculation ( Rechnung )-the certainty guaranteed is limited to method and system. That is, what is not guaranteed is the ontological value that the method or system sets out to represent. In the case of language, it does not serve to represent the objects of the world or beings as a whole, but rather it is a means through which the world reveals itself. Thus, language is not reducible to a propositional logic or theory of judgment concerning beings as a whole, Speaking is being with the world, it is something primordial, and is in place prior to judgments. 2
This insight regarding language occurs amidst an encounter with a text to which Heidegger returned again and again when confronting the question of language. That is, it was frequently the case that when Heidegger directly treated the question of language, the treatment occurred in the midst of an analysis of Aristotle s 3 Indeed, one might even track the changes in Heidegger s treatment of language through his treatment of this little Aristotle treatise, perhaps even through the various manners in which Heidegger translated the treatise. It is indeed remarkable that the encounter with Aristotle s treatise both begins and ends or fulfills the thinking of language, beginning in the early 1920s and ending in the very last reflection on language in 1959. All the more reason to address Heidegger s encounter with language in the years in between, as this collection attempts to do. Heidegger s analysis of Aristotle establishes a certain determin