Language and Being by Duane Williams

Author:Duane Williams
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

8

The Dif-ference that Tears and Bears

8.1 A division in the middle

In Chapter 6, I have briefly touched upon Hölderlin’s understanding of the Word as the Law of Mediacy. This chapter will focus in more detail upon the meaning and significance of language as mediation. We more usually understand ‘mediation’ in terms of an intervening act of arbitration. Accordingly, the emphasis is placed upon the middle in a division. Thus mediation frequently refers to the intervention of the ‘go-between’. We can see this at work if we consider, for example, the role of the US president as the arbitrator between Israel and Palestine, or the mediating third party helping to settle disputes between divorcing parties. However, the etymology of the word ‘mediation’, coming from the Latin mediātiō, does not mean the middle in a division, but rather a division in the middle. 1

Understood as a division in the middle, it is the middle that generates the division, rather than being merely placed between an already existing divide. An example that serves to illustrate the difference between the middle in a division and a division in the middle is a river. More usually when looking at a river we tend to assume that it has come to flow between the two banks. The river is therefore seen to be the middle in a division. And to the eye this is of course the case. But if we reflect a little, it is more likely that the banks are in fact there because of the initial cut of the river. The river is more truly a division in the middle.

In Chapter 1, we briefly discussed the contrast between Being per se and beings. This, it was stated, is known as the ‘ontological difference’. As the primordial act of mediation, language calls from out of Being what subsequently become things in the world, as the world of things. Thus language is seen to be the disclosing scene of Being’s hiddenness. Concealed Being comes into the radiant open when bodied forth by language, and thus shown as this or that thing. Being is called forth and thus disclosed by language, which only is as this disclosure of Being. 2 Being and beings each rely upon the other in a joint dependence that serves to bring them both to fulfilment. It is this relation that first allows things to exist, that is, to ‘stand out’ of Being per se so as to become ‘this’ example of being, and ‘that’ example of being. Thus language’s act of bodying forth being from out of Being effects an ontological difference between Being (as it is in itself) and beings. In so doing, language’s Saying is a division in the middle, which is to say, language is like the river that occasions the two banks between which the river only appears to sit subsequently. Banks then first arise from the river’s cutting surge.

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