Heidegger and Language

Introduction

1 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. Manyoftheaboveconcernsandmorehavebeenjoinedtothequestion oflanguageforthesimplereasonthatthetwentiethcenturyhasbeencharacterized 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 ,beganwithSaussure.Theanalytictraditionwasparticularlyintense as evidenced by Russell, Frege, and Wittgenstein. Within the continental tradition,thequestionoflanguageoccupiedthecenterofdebatebeginning with Husserl’s Logical Investigations, and it remains either at the center or inthebackgroundofvirtuallyeverydebatetoday.Grantedtheimportance 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 2 · jeffrey L. Powell lecture-coursesthatservedasitstrialgrounds.InBeing and Time, therole 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 constituentmomentsintheanalysisofthebeingofthe dainDasein,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,Heideggeraddresseslanguageina morestraightforwardway.However, despitemuchthatisexcitinginthediscussion—thegroundingoflanguage 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 termswithwhatHeideggerhastosayaboutlanguage afterBeingandTime. To do so is to both inform our understanding of Being and Time, to fill in thegaps,asitwere,asdotheessaysbyWalterBroganandDanDahlstrom, 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 ideaofa consistentviewhasbeensecondarytothemannerinwhichwhatever 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 twoangles—theapophantical-asandthepropositionontheonehand,and editor’s Introduction · 3 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 methodandsystem.Thatis,whatisnotguaranteedistheontologicalvalue that the...