Heidegger, Language, and World-Disclosure (review)

Interpreting Martin Heidegger’s ideas has been a credo for linguists and philosophers more than once, providing a plot and background for both individual studies and schools with long-lasting research traditions. This new volume by Christina Lafont is a valuable contribution to the field. It continues the series of work in modern philosophy on schools of thought prominent in the Kantian and post-Kantian European tradition. The discussion focuses on the most interesting philosophical problem which gained a dramatic importance in the last quarter of the twentieth century: the idea of language as world disclosure. This basic concept is characteristic of the German tradition of the philosophy of language which evolved during the course of engagement with Kant by authors such as Johann Georg Hamann, Johann Gottfried von Herder, and Wilhelm von Humboldt and which had been further developed by Heidegger.

In her attempt to bridge the gap between analytic philosophy and Continental philosophy, the author tries to find her way among the diversity of commentaries and possible interpretations of Heidegger’s work. L analyzes the philosophically relevant features of linguistic paradigm shift from the philosophy of consciousness to the philosophy of language in the Hamann-Herder-Humboldt tradition. In Part 1 (11–178) L explores the Heideggerian conception of language in depth and points out that Heidegger, indeed, had developed one of Hamann and Humboldt’s core concepts: overcoming the philosophy of consciousness by taking into account the symbolically structured character of the world. Looking into Heidegger’s understanding of language as world disclosure, L found out that Heidegger was unable to determine what kind of being corresponds to language in general, saying that the necessary holistic character of the system of meaning makes it impossible to differentiate between factual knowledge and linguistic knowledge. L gives a brief characterization of Heidegger’s hermeneutic turn in his ‘Being and time’ and finds it possible to extract the basic elements responsible for both the continuity and the break between this new hermeneutic approach and transcendental philosophy.

In Part 2 (179–289), L draws our attention to recent work of direct reference (Hilary Putnam, Keith Donnellan, Saul Kripke, et al.) to reveal the limitation of Heidegger’s views and to show how language shapes our understanding of the world without making learning impossible. Part 2 mainly considers Heidegger’s thesis that world disclosure as a ‘happening of being’ determines all intra-worldly truth. On the one hand, with his interpretation of the ontological difference, Heidegger is taking for granted the constructivism expressed in Kant’s highest principles of synthetic judgments. On the other hand, his interpretation leads to understanding the essence of the objects of experience as only the plurality of linguistic world disclosures resulting from the historical process of projecting meaning for interpreting the world. L examines the foundations of these theses in Heidegger’s conception and draws the conclusion that it might lead to an explicit linguistic relativism completely foreign to Kant’s philosophy. More than that, in L’s opinion it leads to an obvious reification of language. Regardless, the conclusion sounds optimistic as L states that the danger of linguistic idealism and relativism that arises with the linguistic turn is not a consequence of this paradigm shift as such. Rather it results only from an absolutization of the world-disclosure function of language and a corresponding misinterpretation of its designative function.

L’s approach is an interesting consideration of many possible variations in understanding one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century; that is why it should be heartily welcome. The book is really well-done, the amount of research truly amazing, and the language as clear as philosophical discourse can allow. The book will certainly appeal to a broad range of students and professionals in philosophy and in other humanities as well.