Tool-Being by Harman Graham;

Author:Harman, Graham;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Court
Published: 2011-08-18T16:00:00+00:00

§16. Language and the Thing

But the counterposing of world and en-framing is not only a present-at-hand and therefore representable opposition between present-at-hand objects. (Heidegger, 1949)112

The surprising Alain Badiou, by no means a Heideggerian, fuels his vigorous book on Deleuze with the following remark: “When all is said and done, there is little doubt that the [twentieth] century has been ontological, and that this destiny is far more essential than the ‘linguistic turn’ with which it has been credited.”113 It is to be hoped that Badiou will seem increasingly clairvoyant in the decades to come. But he stands far from the mainstream, and the mainstream in both analytic and continental philosophy still regards “language” as Big Man on Campus. From Frege and Russell on one side of the tracks to Habermas and Derrida on the other, there is no denying that something resembling a “linguistic turn” has left a deep imprint on all of our recent major thinkers. Still, this is not to say that the linguistic paradigm deserves an infinite lifespan, nor even that the later Heidegger is best read as a philosopher of language. Indeed, the claim to be developed briefly at the end of this section is that Heidegger’s theory of language is subordinate to a theory of objects, to a further articulation of the inner dynamics of tool-being.

Among those likely to disagree with this aspect of the present book, Richard Rorty is one of the most prominent. In his widely cited essay “Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and the Reification of Language,”114 we find an entertaining summary of his reading of Heidegger’s career. As usual when it comes to Rorty, the great value of this essay stems from its author’s willingness to make bald-faced and daring assertions in clear English at precisely those points where others tend to hedge their bets behind tortured professional jargon.

In the case at hand, Rorty sets the table by criticizing some of the previous versions of the linguistic turn in analytic philosophy. As he sees it, the ancien regime in the philosophy of language was heir to a Kantian philosophical program: its mission was to mark off an a priori sphere of inquiry that would remain untouched by the monthly vacillations of empirical science. Simply put, it was an attempt to remodel transcendental philosophy into a philosophy of language.115 Although Rorty himself was once a firebreathing advocate of this very species of philosophy, he is so no longer, and it shows. Against any attempt at a transcendental philosophy, he now recommends a specific form of pragmatism; on the basis of this new standpoint, Rorty suggests a fresh interpretation of Heidegger and Wittgenstein. According to this interpretation, Heidegger began his career as a pragmatist but eventually lost his nerve, relapsing from Being and Time into a philosophy that restores a concealed transcendent reality to the throne. The case of Wittgenstein, says Rorty, was just the opposite. Whereas the Tractatus appealed to a realm of ineffable atomic facts, divorced from all contaminating relations, the Philosophical Investigations came to recognize the pragmatic-relational character of meaning as “use.

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