Heidegger and Unconcealment by Wrathall Mark A

Author:Wrathall, Mark A.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2011-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

The same catastrophic move is in effect for “language” in the slogan. Heidegger does not assume an everyday, commonsense notion of language but sees it as an idea to be developed on the basis of an understanding of being:

the phrase “house of being” does not supply any concept of the essence of language, to the annoyance of philosophers who are vexed to find yet another corruption of thinking in such phrases.

(GA 12: 112)6

But the “catastrophe” does not amount to a mere reversal in which being now functions as a metaphor for language, since being is not something about which Heidegger thinks we can ever have a thematic understanding. We are not in a position to apply our understanding of the properties of being to our conception of language. “We are therefore,” Derrida concludes, “no longer dealing with a metaphor in the usual sense, nor with a simple inversion permutating the places in a usual tropical structure” (“The Retrait of Metaphor,” p. 25).

The catastrophic–metaphoric structure of the slogan, in other words, compels us to rethink how it is that language functions, and thus directs our renewed attention to thinking about how language could be the house of being. We undergo the promised experience with language when the slogan focuses us squarely on the question how we can talk about or name being, which is not a thing, but rather a nothing. Without a thing to refer to, the normal functioning of simple assertions, whether literal or metaphorical, is undermined.

Thus we are not meant to plug a preexisting conception of language into Heidegger’s claims about language, as too many commentators on Heidegger are prone to do. Heidegger warns us that “the reflective use of language cannot be guided by the common, usual understanding of meanings” (GA 12: 186/“Nature of Language,” p. 92), a warning repeated in some form in each of his essays on language. Rather, as we accompany Heidegger in his reflections on language, the word “language” is meant to come to function differently than it did when we first set out. As Heidegger explains, quoting Wilhelm von Humboldt, “time often introduces into [language] an enhanced power of thought and a more penetrating sensibility than it possessed hitherto. . .. It is as though a variant sense occupies the old husk, something different is given in the unaltered coinage, and a differently scaled sequence of ideas is intimated according to unchanged syntactical laws” (GA 12: 257/“Way to Language,” p. 426). Heidegger’s hope is that, as we think through his account of language, we will suspend our presuppositions about what language is, thus allowing a new sense to occupy the old husk. Or, as Heidegger prefers to think of it, we will allow an older but nearly lost sense to emerge from hiding to reanimate the word.

Heidegger uses the slogan and other “guide words” (like “the essence of language is the language of essence,” or “to bring language as language to language”) in order to “beckon us away from current notions about language” (GA 12: 191/“Nature of Language,” p.

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