John T. Lysaker
The heart of Heidegger’s thoughts on language are gathered in On the Way to Language, volume twelve of his Collected Edition (GA 12). English translations are distributed among three volumes. Peter D. Hertz translated most of On the Way to Language (as OWL) excepting the essay “Language”, which appeared in Poetry, Language, Thought, translated by Albert Hofstadter (PLT). (“The Way to Language” was re-translated by David Krell for the revised edition of Basic Writings [BW].) Language also arises as a key theme in other published works such as §34 of Being and Time (BT), “The Origin of the Work of Art” and “Letter on Humanism” (both in BW), as well as in many lecture courses and unpublished manuscripts.
Because I regard Heidegger as an unstinting phenomenologist who aims to disclose various phenomena as they show themselves from themselves (as opposed to how they conform to existing knowledge paradigms), I shall not recount these various explorations by way of a chronological textual analysis. Such a reading, while informative, sets aside Heidegger’s philosophical project in favour of a historical one that focuses on an evolving “view”. This not only diverts attention from the phenomenon of “language”, but it also fails to heed Heidegger’s own insistence: “The report of a new view about language matters little. Everything depends upon learning to dwell in the speaking of language” (PLT 210 = GA 12: 30). Engaging Heidegger on language thus cannot be a matter of tracking views, but of thinking how, in our very approach to him, we might “dwell in the speaking of language”, or at least take steps towards accomplishing this task. Said otherwise, in engaging his texts, one should not presume one is already sufficiently attentive to the speaking of language.
In place of presumptions, Heidegger “would like to bring us to the possibility of having an experience with language. To experience something, whether a thing, a human, or a god, means that something befalls us, strikes us, comes over us, overwhelms and transforms us” (OWL 57 = GA 12: 149). I find this passage from “The Essence of Language” instructive.1 It suggests that we are out of step with regard to language, and to the degree that we need to establish conditions for the possibility of an experience of what seems intimately at our disposal. It is as if, even as words and sentences are written and read, we are not fully attending to what is transpiring, to how we are addressed by and respond to language. And this strikes me as apt. In all but the least likely moments, I address language on the way to something else: sending an e-mail, refining models of self-experience in schizophrenia, letting my wife, Hilary, know that I love her, or trying to provoke students. It is not that my reflective stance towards language is afflicted with infelicities, although it may be. Rather, the charge is that we take language for granted and thus fail to experience its full dimensionality.
Of course, if we take language for granted, being out of step is not a matter of lacking access to some object whose nature lies on the far side of cognition. Rather, language is very much with us. In fact, it seems, “We are always speaking in one way or another” (PLT 187 = GA 12: 9). I note this because exploring the phenomenon of language does not require us to transcend our human situatedness. Rather, the task involves returning to our selves in a more originary manner. In Heidegger’s words: “But we do not want to arrive somewhere else. We only would like, for once, just to get to where we ourselves already reside” (PLT 188 = GA 12: 10).
But where do we already reside with regard to language? This is the phenomenon Heidegger seeks to articulate. Recall the remark “We are always speaking in one way or another”. The point is not that people chatter on every second of every day. Rather, the speaking Heidegger has in mind need not be verbal. In may involve reflective thinking, reading, writing, and so on. Heidegger’s concern is thus: how is it that, when we pause to think, speak or write, language arises, and without our having to summon it? But let us be more concrete. Right now, explain aloud why you are reading this chapter. Did you choose your sentence word by word, or did your thoughts, throat, lungs and mouth find themselves already bound to words and phrases? And as you read this, do you have to decide whether the ink on the page is language, or is it the case that even when a sentence confuses, it confuses as a “sentence”? I hope you now grasp Heidegger’s concern. What is our relation to language such that we find ourselves already bound to it by the time we explicitly render a thought, word or sentence?
Although it is not obvious at first, the question of how language claims us is also a question of the essence of language. As I noted before, “essence” concerns the character with which a phenomenon occurs. Heidegger’s observation is that language comes to pass by pre-reflectively informing thought and speech. He thus does not render language into an object in order to ascertain its essential features. Rather, he seeks its essence in its occurrence, and he locates that occurrence in how language claims human thought and speech.
Permit me a third thought regarding the passage from “The Essence of Language”. In seeking the possibility of an experience with language, Heidegger proceeds with caution. On the one hand, this simply observes the nature of experience. Wanting to have one does not guarantee that one will. I may want to hear fugue structures in Bach, but until I have the ears (and possibly the fingers) for them, I will not. Moreover, fugues need to be available, even if I am prepared to hear them. With regard to an experience with language, the philosophical task is thus one of establishing conditions for the possibility of having an experience with language, not simply willing it to happen. On the other hand, at this point, infelicitous reflective stances may prove a problem. They may establish conditions that render an experience with language unlikely, perhaps even impossible. In preparing us for an “experience” with language, Heidegger thus relies on the term Erfahrung, a word he develops in terms of a kind of “suffering” (Erleiden) wherein we “comply with/submit to” language (ihm sich fügen). In other words, rather than translating things into familiar categories, “experience”, in this sense, overtakes us.
But how does one proceed? Heidegger’s approaches are multiple. On the one hand, he attempts to displace precisely those intuitions about the nature of language that undermine our ability to have an experience with language. Secondly, through unusual locutions such as “language speaks” (die Sprache spricht), he works to attune us to how language addresses us (PLT 188 = GA 12: 10). And he often engages particular poems and parts of poems on the supposition that the language of the poem addresses us in a particularly rich, even exemplary, manner, at least with regard to how language speaks. In what follows, we shall initially consider some displacements, then one of Heidegger’s more unusual locutions, and, finally, we shall explore poetry’s place in our effort to learn to dwell in the speaking of language.
Before considering displacements, one more preliminary is in order. According to Heidegger, learning to dwell in the speaking of language is not some avocational pursuit for those curious about esoterica. Rather, it concerns our very nature and the nature of being itself. “Letter on Humanism” opens:
Thinking accomplishes the relation of being to the essence of human beings. It does not make or cause the relation. Thinking brings this relation to being solely as that which is handed over to thought from being. Such offering consists in the fact that in thinking, being comes to language. Language is the house of being. In language’s housing, human beings dwell. Thinkers and poetizers are the guardians of this housing. Their guardianship accomplishes the manifestation of being insofar as they, in their saying, bring this manifestation to and preserve it in language.
(PM 239 = GA 9:313)
This passage raises the stakes marked out by the request that we learn to dwell in the speaking of language. If language is the house of being, then, on Heidegger’s terms, learning to dwell in the speaking of language is tantamount to: (i) preparing for or cultivating a kind of thinking and/or poetizing, which (ii) brings being to language and preserves (i.e. houses) it there, (iii) thereby accomplishing the manifestation of being itself, which in turn (iv) engages the essence of human beings. Of course, none of this stands a ghost of a chance if we are unable to find conditions for the possibility of an experience with language. But should that possibility find us, should it steal upon us, then we might be able to come to terms with our relation to being itself, which no doubt includes in some sense our relation with ourselves, one another, with whatever is there to be experienced.
One key to Heidegger’s many responses to the phenomenon of language lies with efforts to displace views that undermine genuine experiences of language. For example, he insists that we should not compile information about language, say through comparisons of various grammars (OWL 58 = GA 12: 150). Why not? Heidegger’s goal is to think about how we belong to language, and prior to our deciding to speak or read or even reflectively consider something. And no amount of information about various languages will expose the character of that relationship. In fact, such enquiries, in using language to explore language, unconsciously inhabit that relation rather than explore it. Nor will any presentation of features that all languages share, what Heidegger terms a “metalanguage” (in the sense of a universal language), give us what we seek. In focusing on the ways in which languages function and the elements they contain, it too will only enact (rather than explore) how language claims us, thereby leaving the essence of language unthought. That is, in establishing language as an object to be empirically addressed, one looks past the address of language that funds one’s own enquiry. Here then is the more general point. What Heidegger seeks is not some fact about language, but our relation to language such that we can propose “facts”.
Another displacement expands on a point already ventured. Heidegger is insistent that the essence of language should not be thought in terms of human communication. More specifically, the claim is that language does not originally occur as a medium whereby human beings express something through representations, a phenomenon evident in the following. “I’m furious with you for leaving my MP3 player at mother’s”. This remark expresses the speaker’s anger with a sibling, and with reference to something (an MP3 player) and some action (leaving the MP3 player), which occurs somewhere (their mother’s house). The remark is thus an intersubjective action, which expresses a subjective state of affairs (anger), which in turn is explicitly related to worldly affairs (an object, an action, a place).
Now, Heidegger’s point, which he offers in “Language” (PLT 190 = GA 12: 12), is not that we should not think about language in this manner. Rather, his claim is that such an account misses our basic relation with language. Each of its key notions (expressing thoughts and feelings, representing things and events, and addressing others) evidence a relation with language wherein a feeling, an action and even another appear as already tied to language, namely as “anger”, an “MP3 player”, and as a “you” that can be addressed. But isn’t that relation precisely what we wish to understand? How is it that such phenomena are given to us already bound to language, and without our having explicitly chosen words, grammar, kinds of speech acts or sentences for the purpose of communication? In other words, communication evidences rather than explains our basic relation with language. And that leads me to the more general point of this displacement. Our basic relation to language is not the result of some human decision to represent, express and/or address. Rather, most human decisions presume this relation, and thus Heidegger would prefer to say, it is less that we speak language than that “Language speaks”.
Heidegger terms the phrase “language speaks” a Leitsatz, a “leading sentence”. Its initial work is negative. It leads us to consider that human beings are not the initial speakers, but language. But what could this mean? Let us return to our own speaking. As we have discussed, when we address another or think, we find ourselves already claimed by language, which is to say, we find ourselves thinking with and uttering words, phrases and sentences. As Heidegger writes in “The Way to Language”, “Every spoken word is already a response – a reply, a saying that goes to encounter, and listens” (BW 218 = GA 12: 249). To paraphrase Nietzsche’s claim about thinking (Beyond Good and Evil §17): it is not that I elect words and phrases but, rather, they come to me. In this sense, human language use is a response to the address of language, which entails the appearing of words and phrases in thought and speech. Not that we ever explicitly observe or even acknowledge this address. Rather, the event of this address and our response has already transpired by the time reflective acts come to pass.2
We should now have some sense of why Heidegger says that language speaks. But his claim needs to be heard in a particular manner. If the speaking of language is never present to us as an event, let alone an object to observe, then language comes to pass in a way that cannot stand as a proper subject for conceptual representation. Instead, we have already been addressed by and responded to language by the time we are able to formulate something like a concept of language. The language in which we think the essence of language will thus be unusual. Yes, it might employ concepts, as “language speaks” does, but the phrase itself should not be taken to name some “essence of language”. Instead, we need to read it along the lines of a reflective exercise, even a kind of yoga in the sense of a discipline to be practised. Along these lines, “language speaks” works by turning our attention back to what our everyday speaking presumes but overlooks, namely, the fact that in our speaking, language has already addressed us and we have responded.
Here is how Heidegger puts the thought in “The Way to Language”.
Speech, taken on its own, is hearing. It is listening to the language we speak. Hence speaking is not simultaneously hearing, but is such in advance. Such listening to language precedes all other instances of hearing, albeit in an altogether inconspicuous way. We not only speak language, we speak from out of it. We are capable of doing so only because in each case we have already listened to language.
(BW 411 = GA 12: 243)
Language speaks in that it addresses us with words and phrases that pre-reflectively claim our thinking and speaking. And so our speaking and thinking is, at the outset, a listening response to the claim of these words and phrases, a claim that indicates or exposes the essence of language.
In trying to make sense of the leading sentence, we have found ourselves thinking about the very language that orients our efforts. In other words, en route to the essence of language, we have been fussing with a language of essence, to employ Heidegger’s turns of phrase from “The Essence of Language”. And as we have seen, a language of essence can only accomplish its task if it forgoes naming essence, even speaking about it, but works instead to indicate or point out what has always already transpired in its own saying. And in providing us with such a tensely coiled, reflexive indication, it opens us to the manner in which we dwell in language. That is, a proper language of essence accomplishes what Heidegger seeks. “But we do not want to arrive somewhere else. We only would like, for once, just to get to where we ourselves already reside” (PLT 188 = GA 12: 10).
Now, you might wonder why finding our way into a language of essence requires such a torturous degree of reflexivity. On Heidegger’s reading, the riddle lies with the essence of language. In its speaking, language does not simply address us and then supply us with a word, phrase or sentence that allows us to express ourselves to others with regard to things, actions and events. Rather, these events are of a piece. In Heidegger’s words, “The essential unfolding of language is saying as pointing” (BW 410 = GA 12: 242). In short, language addresses us as it provides us with words and phrases in and for our dealings with others, the world and ourselves. The “pointing” of language thus directs us away from language’s own initial address, that is, away from a fundamental facet of its essence, and towards what that essence enables, namely, an articulate life. We thus need a language of essence in order to come back to ourselves at the very site where language both situates our factical, particular selves but also turns us away from an essential facet of our selves, namely, our belonging to language.
Thus far we have explored how humans belong to language. By indicating aspects of our world (self, other, thing, place, etc.), language claims us prior to any willing or doing on our part. But this means that by learning to dwell in the speaking of language, we are also learning to dwell in the site/event where beings are disclosed or unconcealed, where they appear as something to be desired, known, resisted, worked on, and so on, a site/event that Heidegger recurringly indicates with the word Sein, “being”. But let us be more precise.
In “Language”, Heidegger claims that (a) beings always appear to us within a world, within a context of meanings that wash over things, and (b) a world, while more than the sum of its parts, nevertheless only exists in and through the interrelation of things. In Heidegger’s words, “The luster of the world grants to things their essence. Things bear the world. World grants things” (PLT 202 = GA 12: 21). But that is not all, for in order for the relation of world and thing to come to pass, each must differ from the other, and in a way that nevertheless permits relation. Heidegger names this third the “dif-ference”. Now, the difference is not itself another thing, nor could it be without yet another world contextualizing it, within which it would come to pass, which in turn would require yet another dif-ference, and so on. Rather, the dif-ference names the opening of a world wherein beings come to pass (or are gathered) in relation to one another (say a host of eco-social relations in a rainforest or the bustle of bodies along a crowded city street), thus arranging the world or giving it lustre. (Recall or imagine the feel of walking beneath a dense canopy of Douglas Firs or of charging up Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue at noon.)
In recalling us to the site/event where thing and world are disclosed or appear, both in their belonging together and their dif-ference, language, presuming we have learned to dwell in its speaking, exposes the basic scene of human being-in-the-world. There we find ourselves always ex-sisting, that is, praxically oriented towards beings bound to rich contexts, and in a manner whereby they appear as such, which is to say, they come to pass as the appearance of a particular kind of being in a particular kind of way in a world lit with a particular lustre. And in being appearances, these beings bear with them not only the world, but the dif-ference that allows things to belong to a world while coming to pass in their own manner (that is, according to an essence of their own).
We are ready to take up Heidegger’s claim that language is the “house of being” by way of another passage from “Letter on Humanism”: “But the human being is not only a living creature who possesses language along with other capacities. Rather, language is the house of being in which the human being ex-sists by dwelling, in that he belongs to the truth of being, guarding it” (PM 254 = GA 9: 333). In terms we assumed from “Language”, the truth of being is marked by dif-ference as it enables (a) beings to appear within a world and (b) worlds to shine with the lustre of interrelating beings. This multi-dimensional site/event is the truth wherein human beings dwell, and this is the truth that language houses in the speaking that pre-reflectively claims us and to which our own words and sentences are responses.
It is crucial that we do not read Heidegger’s claim within the confines of social constructivism, which, in this context, would propose that the identity of beings is a result of how they are represented in language. In “Language”, Heidegger states that language’s “naming does not hand out titles, it does not apply terms, but it calls into the word” (PLT 196 = GA 12: 18). I take this to mean that in claiming human being, the speaking of language does not construct a thing like some quasi-Kantian category. Rather, in calling a being “to word”, language calls it into the scene of worldly appearing that language opens, arranges and thereby indicates. As to its traits (let us say it is smooth, black and more or less round on its top and bottom), or its capabilities (it can glide along ice), or its many possible uses (for example, in a hockey game), none of these are “constructed” by language. Instead, language specifies and preserves the many ways in which things appear, thus allowing them to become explicit or for-us in a conspicuous fashion. This is why Heidegger writes in a relevant page from “The Origin of the Work of Art”, “language alone brings beings as beings into the open for the first time” (BW 198 = GA 5: 61). But language does not somehow manufacture beings, as if words or even entire languages were ideal forms superimposed on the raw materiality of nature.
Let us return to the thought that language is the house of being. In allowing beings to become conspicuous in their appearing, language does not erase the appearance-reality distinction. Instead, language employs it. In giving us the name “hockey puck”, language gathers together our experiences of the hockey puck (many of which, e.g. when it strikes my thigh, are more than mere functions of the system of signifiers associated with hockey). And because those encounters are gathered in this manner, each is rendered as an appearance of what is irreducible to any one of them, let us call it the “hockey puck” that can address us in manifold ways, including ways that have little to do with hockey. Language is thus the house of being because, in claiming us, it houses and makes manifest the fact that beings appear to us, engage us. Or, to put the matter more precisely, language is the house of being because, if we attend to its originary speaking, it preserves for us the truth of being, that is, the unconcealment of beings, as the fundamental scene of our existence (see Chapter 8 for an extended engagement with the “truth of being”).
In “Language”, Heidegger claims: “What is purely spoken is the poem” (PLT 192 = GA 12: 14). “The Origin of the Work of Art” claims that the language of the poem preserves the original essence of language, which is also a kind of poetry, although in a broader sense, namely that of poesis, thought in terms of a making (or letting-be) unconcealed (BW 199 = GA 5: 62). In the text entitled “… Poetically Dwells the Human …” we find: “But the responding in which human being authentically listens to the appeal of language is that saying that speaks in the element of poetizing” (PLT 214 = VA 184). Finally, in “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry”, Heidegger refers to poetry as an Ursprache, an “originary language” (EHP 60 = GA 4: 43). He does so because he believes that poetry, Hölderlin’s in particular, provides us with language felicitously attuned to the originary speaking of language, that is, the truth of being and our relation to its disclosures (and concealments). In fact, he claims:
Poetry is nothing other than the elementary coming-to-word, that is, the becoming uncovered of existence as being-in-the-world. With what is thereby articulated, the world first becomes conspicuous for those who earlier were blind.
(BPP 171–2 = GA 24: 244)
Poetry is founding, the effectual grounding of what endures. The poet is the grounder of being. What we call the real in the everyday is, in the end, unreal.
(GA 39: 33)
A great deal could be said about (a) how the language of the poem comes to address us in this manner, (b) how one should read poems for founding moments and (c) what Heidegger’s poetics have to do with formal analysis, metaphor theory and so on. Here, however, I shall limit myself to a discussion of poetic founding after first providing a brief list of Heidegger’s main engagements with poetry.
Heidegger’s engagement with poetry spans his career. In many cases, his work explicitly engages a particular poet. In other cases a poet, usually Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843) is engaged in order to think through a particular subject, as is the case of “Building Dwelling Thinking”, “… Poetically Man Dwells …” (both in PLT), “Language”, and “The Essence of Language”. Among explicit engagements, the cardinal texts are three lecture courses on Hölderlin (volumes 39, 52, and 53 of his Gesamtausgabe, with only volume 43, Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister“, available in English in Will McNeil and Julia Davis’s translation [HHI]), a collection of essays on Hölderlin (volume 4 of the collected works, translated by Keith Hoeller as Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry), an essay on Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) (published in Holzwege and translated in PLT as ”What Are Poets For?“ and in OBT as ”Why Poets?“), another on Georg Trakl (1887–1914) (published and translated as ”Language in the Poem“ in OWL) and several writings, most brief, on the poet Johann Peter Hebel (1760–1826) (gathered in volume 13 of the Gesamtausgabe, some of which have been translated for journals). Heidegger also exchanged letters with the literary critic Emil Staiger (1908–87) concerning Eduard Mörike’s (1804–75) ”On a Lamp“ (likewise collected in volume 13 and translated as a journal article). Volume 13, From the Experience of Thinking, also collects short pieces on poets such as René Char (1907–88) and Arthur Rimbaud (1854–91), which Andrew Mitchell has translated.
As noted, Heidegger finds remarkable import in the language of the poem. Some poems, he holds, unfold an originary language, which grounds being by figuring the event of unconcealment. They do so with a language of essence, which dramatizes the event of essence or the manner in which beings occur. Again, this is not an event of construction. “This never means that language, in any old meaning picked up at will, immediately and definitively supplies us with the transparent essence of the matter like some object ready to be used” (PLT 214 = VA 184). Rather, by way of figures that establish the lustre of the world, an originary language founds and grounds by exposing us to the differential dimension of world and thing.
For example, whereas the lustre of the medieval world bathed everything in the light of a divine creation, such that every being shone as an ens creatum, a “created thing”, Hölderlin, as read by Heidegger, founds a fourfold world, a dimension marked out by earth and sky as well as mortals and divinities (the latter present as absent). Such a world is bound to things, of course, and thus Heidegger refers to figures such as jugs and bridges, underlining how the fourfold (das Geviert) is woven through the site they inhabit, individually and collectively (see Chapter 15). In other words, as a language of essence the fourfold bathes every occurrence. One thus never encounters just isolated jugs and bridges, but rather always encounters them on the earth, beneath the sky, in relation to one’s mortal being and in a presently desacralized (which is not to say desecrated) milieu.
Now, poetic founding is a historical event and thus subject to historical decisions that do not flow from individual or aggregate human choices. In fact, it could very well prove that our world belongs to a poesis altogether un-poetic in the sense of the language of the poem. Here I have in mind global technology, what Heidegger names Ge-stell, the “en-framing” (see Chapter 13). I term it “un-poetic” because, as Heidegger argues in “The Question Concerning Technology”, Ge-stell, which presents every being as energy to be organized according to productive apparatuses such as the global marketplace, erases its own poiësis. Rather than present itself as a way of revealing, thereby exposing the dif-ferential dimension of world and thing and the event of unconcealment in which the whole unfolds, global technology presents itself as the simply real, thus suppressing the truth of being even as it presents beings in manifold ways.
I close with Heidegger’s thoughts on technology for two reasons. First, they remind us of the historical struggle to which his work belongs. Many of his engagements with poetry contrast his own poetic thinking with the calculative thinking of global technology, distinguishing them precisely at the point at which each attends to the truth of being. Secondly, the failure of global technology to know itself in a genuine manner underscores precisely what allows the language of the poem (or of certain poems) to offer a language of essence; such language recoils on itself and figures its own essence. In the language of Heidegger’s lecture on Hölderlin’s poem “The Ister”, poetic founding must “poetize the essence of the poet” if it is to enable us to dwell in the speaking of language, exposed to the dif-ferential play of world and thing in the truth of being, a manifold play that is as much a matter of our essence as anything else (HHI 165 = GA 53: 203).
1. Hertz translates Wesen as “nature”, whereas I favour “essence”, in the sense of how a being comes to pass or the character of its happening. I prefer “essence” because Wesen is historically associated with “essence” and Heidegger is clearly involved in a critical, transformative dialogue with that history.
2. Heidegger uses several different terms to mark the initial address of language, for example Heißen, which Hoftstadter translates as “bidding” (PLT 206 = GA 12: 26), and Sagen, which both Hertz and Krell translate as “Saying” (OWL 93 = GA 12: 188; and BW 410 = GA 12: 242).
See Heidegger’s Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister”; On the Way to Language; “Language”, in Poetry, Language, Thought; “The Way to Language” and “The Origin of the Work of Art”, in Basic Writings; and “Why Poets?”, in Off the Beaten Track.
See Bernasconi (1985); F. Dastur, “Language and Ereignis”, in Sallis (1993), 355–69; Fóti (1992); Lysaker (2002); J. Sallis, “Poetics”, in Sallis (1990), 168–89; and Spanos (1979). See also Research in Phenomenology 19 (1989); and P. de Man, “Heidegger’s Exegeses of Hölderlin”, in his Blindness and Insight, 246–66 (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1983).