Heidegger: “On The Way to Language”

March 16, 2005

“Now I am tempted to say that the right expression in language for the miracle of the existence of the world, though it is not any proposition in language, is the existence of language itself.”

                        -Wittgenstein

Language is the most important theme of twentieth-century philosophy.  The analytical and continental traditions are divided in their ways of handling and discussing it, but in their twentieth-century versions they agree that innovation in philosophy requires a deep reconsideration of the nature of language.  We have already heard some of Heidegger’s suggestive remarks about language and its importance, remarks that show that his path of thinking will lead us to an entirely new view of language and our relation to it: “Language is the house of Being.  In its home man dwells.”  Now we are prepared to understand Heidegger’s thinking about language.  In so doing, we will also encounter, and discuss, some of the most prominent alternative views of language in twentieth-century philosophy.  Heidegger calls his investigation of language “The Way to Language” (Unterwegs zur Sprache); he does not consider his thought to be a static doctrine or theory, but rather the definition or tracing of a path, much like the way or path that language – as the handwritten line or the spoken sound – makes as it traces out meaning.  We’ll try to follow this path for ourselves, noting the places at which it runs parallel to or intersects with other paths towards language.

Heidegger first sets out to question or reinterpret an ancient and traditional understanding of the essence of language.  It is very much the same picture that Wittgenstein finds, in the first section of his Philosophical Investigations, in the autobiographical description given by St. Augustine of his own process of learning language:

When they [my elders] named some object, and accordingly moved towards something, I saw this and I grasped that the thing was called by the sound they uttered when they meant to point it out.  Their intention was shewn by their bodily movements, as it were the natural language of all peoples: the expression of the face, the play of the eyes, the movement of other parts of the body, and the ton of voice which expresses our state of mind in seeking, having, rejecting, or avoiding something.  Thus, as I heard words repeatedly used in their proper places in various sentences, I gradually learnt to understand what objects they signified; and after I had trained my mouth to form these signs, I used them to express my own desires. (Augustine, Confessions, I. 8)

 According to this picture, a word or a sign stands for or represents a thing in virtue of that word or sign’s meaning.  Abstracting from complications, each word means just one thing, and it does so in virtue of a meaning that we can think of or understand.  Language is, then, the communication of meanings from one person to another in the package of a sign: to communicate with you, I encapsulate my intended meaning within the appropriate sign, and then give you the sign in speech or writing, whereupon you “decode” it again, supplying the meaning for the sign I have given.  To speak language, then, is to imbue dead signs with life, to breathe air into the otherwise mute forms of signs.  Language is thought of as the breath of life animating lifeless form, as the soul of meaning infusing and animating the body of signs.   Hence Aristotle discusses language as the showing of the soul’s “affections”:

Now, whatever it is [that transpires] in the creation of sound by the voice is a showing of whatever affections there may be in the soul, and the written is a showing of the sounds of the voice.  Hence, just as writing is not identical among all [human beings], so too the sounds of the voice are not identical.  However, that of which these [sounds and writing] are in the first place a showing are among all [human beings] the identical affections of the soul; and the matters of which these [the affections] form approximating presentations are likewise identical.  (pp. 400-401).

Insofar as Aristotle’s picture construes language as a kind of showing, Heidegger will agree with much of it.  But taken to its metaphysical limit, Aristotle’s picture implies that language is a mere instrument for the expression of inner intentions or thoughts.  At this limit, the picture will imply that the relationship between signs and the thoughts they express is purely arbitrary or (to use the term favored by Carnap and other logical positivist philosophers) “conventional;” language is a system of arbitrary correlations of signs to common meanings. 

The traditional picture of language, found in Augustine, Aristotle, and the logical positivists, also has deep connections with the metaphysics of subjectivity that Heidegger discussed in “The Letter on Humanism.”  On this traditional picture, the sign stands for an object, but it is also the sign for a concept or image in the speaker’s mind.  The concept, or mental image, is a representation in the speaker’s mind or brain.  Even though we can exchange signs in communication, we can never be sure, on the traditional picture, that we are successful in communicating the mental representations, concepts, or images that go with them.  The connection between a particular sign and the mental image that it evokes is the connection between something public and communicable, and something essentially private and incommunicable.

How can we rethink language and meaning, outside the traditional picture, in a way that reveals its essence as a showing, rather than misportraying it as a conventional correlation of signs to meanings, a mere instrument for the expression and communication of thoughts?  For Heidegger, to rethink the essence of language, we must attempt to “bring language as language to language.”  This means to bring the essence of language to itself, to speak in language its own essence.  It is in this sense that Heidegger hears the words of the German poet Novalis: “Precisely what is peculiar to language – that it concerns itself purely with itself alone – no one knows.”  (p. 397).  Bringing language as language to language, we will make our own way to language; we will make our way into that place where we speak language in language, thereby bringing into its own our own essence, which itself is language.  This suggests, as well, an interpretation of some of Heidegger’s inventions of new language and new ways of using old words.  What these innovations attempt to do is to bring language to itself, perhaps for the first time, outside an understanding of language that reduces it to a subservient tool of meaning.  By speaking in new and nontraditional ways, they try to bring language itself to a new kind of consciousness of itself, an explicit awareness of its own powers of shaping world and revealing Being.

“To bring language as language to language” sounds at first circular, as if it gives us no independent way to understand what we are supposed to do.  This circularity Heidegger calls the “weft” of language; language is something woven, a web.  Our formula “to bring language as language to language” moves within this web, but our relentless pursuit of it can also allow us to break into the web.  Breaking in in this way, we might one day, Heidegger suggests, be able to hear what language says wordlessly and silently, passing over into an “a soundless intimation, an intimation that enables us to hear the faint ring of what is peculiar to language.”  (p. 399)

In section I of the essay, Heidegger discusses the traditional picture of language with which we started, and gives a version of its most developed form, as expressed in the writings of Wilhelm von Humboldt.  In Humboldt’s description, language turns out to be “the eternally self-repeating labor of spirit to make articulated sound capable of being an expression of thought.”  (p. 403).  For Humboldt, language is what man does to make sound able to express thought: it is the infusion of articulated sound with the spirit of meaning or intention.  For Humboldt’s way of “bringing language to language,” this labor of the spirit, the infusing of sound with meaning, is itself the intellectual development of mankind.  But because it construes language as a human doing, as a labor of soul upon body, Humboldt’s way of thinking of language remains trapped within the metaphysics of his age and fails to reveal the essence of language: “Humboldt’s way to language goes in the direction of man, passing though language on its way to something else: demonstration and depiction of the intellectual development of the human race.

However, the essence of language conceived in terms of such a view does not of itself show language in its essence: it does not show the way in which language essentially unfolds as language; that is, the way it perdures; that is, the way it remains gathered in what it grants itself on its own as language.”  (p. 405)

To think and speak language from its essence, to bring language as language to language, we have to hear language as itself, rather than something else.  “Instead of explaining language as this or that, and thus fleeing from it, the way to language wants to let language be experienced as language.  True, in the essence of language, language is grasped conceptually; but it is caught in the grip of something other than itself.  If on the contrary we pay heed only to language as language, it demands of us that we begin by bringing to the fore all those things that pertain to language as language.”  (p. 406)

“Propriating showing as owning, propriation is thus the saying’s way-making movement toward language. 

Such way-making brings language (the essence of language) as language (the saying) to language (to the resounding word).”

Last time we saw how Heidegger’s thinking about language depends on the rejection of a traditional picture of language as the animation of dead signs with living meaning, a picture that can be found in Aristotle and – in a different way – in Augustine.  Now Heidegger wants us to progress along the way to language, the bringing of language as language to language.  To do this, we can begin by listing what is essential to language, what especially pertains to it and makes it language.  We list what pertains to language as a prelude to understanding what is essential to language, what is at the root of everything that happens in, and through, language.  One of the things that pertains to language as language is the speaker.  “To speech belong the speakers.”  (p. 406).  In speaking, we presence things; we make present the objects of our concern and our common interest.  “In speech, the speakers have their presencing.  Where to?  Presencing to the wherewithal of their speech, to that by which they linger, that which in any given situation already matters to them.  Which is to say, their fellow human beings and the things, each in its own way; everything that makes a thing a thing and everything that sets the tone for our relations with our fellows.  All this is referred to, always and everywhere, sometimes in one way, at other times in another.” (pp. 406-407). 

What else belongs to the essence of language?  Heidegger suggests that we can run through the things that belong to language – the speaker, what is spoken, also the unspoken – but we do not thereby think their unity.  Their unity, the unity of the essence of language, remains hidden to us.  Heidegger proposes to call this unity the “rift-design.”  (This recalls the idea of the “rift” between earth and world in “The Origin of the Work of Art.”)  The rift is a kind of line that draws forth, the “drawing-out” of the essence of language.  Language’s essence, in speaking, is “drawn out” into the linear form of words.  Like a farmer’s furrow, the rift-design “opens up the field, that it may harbor seed and growth.”  (p. 408).  As the rift-design, the essence of language draws speaking out as a showing.  Heidegger recalls the ancient kinship between the word for “saying” and the word for “showing”:  “Yet what is it we call saying?  To experience this, we shall hold to what our language itself calls on us to think in this word.  Sagan means to show, to let something appear, let it be seen and heard. 

What we are saying here becomes obvious, though hardly pondered in its full scope, when we indicate the following.  To speak to one another means to say something to one another; it implies a mutual showing of something, each person in turn devoting himself or herself to what is shown.  To speak with one another means that together we say something about something, showing one another the sorts of things that are suggested by what is addressed in our discussion, showing one another what the addressed allows to radiate of itself.”  (pp. 408-409).  To speak, then, is not to talk to someone else; it is to participate in a “saying” that is a showing. 

This showing, Heidegger suggests, is older and more essential than the definition of language as a system of signs.  “What unfolds essentially in language is saying as pointing.  Its showing does not culminate in a system of signs.  Rather, all signs arise from a showing in whose realm and for whose purposes they can be signs.” (p. 410).  This showing is not simply something that we do, but a self-showing, a manifesting in which language itself speaks.  When we think of language as this self-showing, we can begin to understand it as something to which we ourselves belong and with which we ourselves may come into a more or less direct relationship: “If speech as listening to language lets itself be told the saying, such letting can be given only insofar – and so near – as our own essence is granted entry into the saying.  We hear it only because we belong to it.  However, the saying grants those who belong to it their listening to language and hence their speech.  Such granting perdures in the saying; it lets us attain the capacity of speech.  What unfolds essentially in language depends on the saying that grants in this way.”  (pp. 411-412).  When we think language essentially, as a self-manifesting showing that points, we are well on the way to bringing language as language to language.  We experience language, then, as a possibility or a granting, an essence that allows manifestation, rather than as something we do, make, or control.

What do we experience when we experience language as a possibility or granting of showing?   Heidegger suggests that we experience the saying of language as a shining forth: “It lets what is coming to presence shine forth, lets what is withdrawing into absence vanish.  The saying is by no means the supplemental linguistic expression of what shines forth; rather, all shining and fading depend on the saying that shows.”  (pp. 413-414).  But what is the basis and origin of this possibility of saying?  The happening of saying in the clearing, its allowing things to shine forth, can also be called an “owning.”  Owning is the event of a thing’s coming into its own, of its showing itself as itself.  Heidegger also calls it “propriating,” “en-owning,” or Ereignis: “Propriation gathers the rift-design of the saying and unfolds it in such a way that it becomes the well-joined structure of a manifold showing.  Propriation is the most inconspicuous of inconspicuous things, the simplest of simple things, the nearest of things near and most remote of things remote, among which we mortals reside all our lives.”  (p. 415)  Propriation also brings mortals to our essence “by remanding mortals to that which in the saying advances from all sides in order to converge on the concealed, which thus becomes telling for man.  The remanding of human beings, the ones who hear, to the saying is distinctive in that it releases the essence of man into its own.” (p. 417). 

Interestingly, Heidegger uses the concepts of propriation and Gestell to describe a world in which language and speaking has become the mere exchange of information.  “The enframing, because it sets upon human beings – that is, challenges them – to order everything that comes to presence into a technical inventory, unfolds essentially after the manner of propriation; at the same time, it distorts propriation, inasmuch as all ordering sees itself committed to calculative thinking and so speaks the language of enframing.  Speech is challenged to correspond to the ubiquitous orderability of what is present. 

Speech, when posed in this fashion, becomes information.”  (p. 420) The conception and practice of speech as the ordered exchange of information is prepared by the projects of formalizing language that philosophers and logicians undertook in the first half of the twentieth century.  For these projects, natural language is but the set-in-order source of the possibility of a clear, ordered, formal language.  The project of “formalizing” natural language leads to the ordering and orderability of language, its being set in order as information.  But Heidegger suggests that to resist the dominance of information and information theory, we need to rethink not only formalization but also what is “natural” about natural languages: “However, what if ‘natural language,’ which for information theory remains but a disturbing remnant, drew its nature – that is, the essential unfolding of the essence of language – from the saying?  What if the saying, instead of merely disturbing the devastation that is information, had already surpassed information on the basis of a propriation that is not subject to our ordering?  What if propriation – when and how, no one knows – were to become a penetrating gaze, whose clearing lightning strikes what is and what the being is held to be?  What if propriation by its entry withdrew every present being that is subject to sheer orderability and brought that being back into its own?”  (pp. 421-22).

When we understand language as the saying that shows, we can understand its special relationship to our own essence, one that demands that we can never stand outside language and understand it as a tool or instrument for the expression of meaning.  “We human beings, in order to be who we are, remain within the essence of language to which we have been granted entry.  We can therefore never step outside it in order to look it over circumspectly from some alternative position.  Because of this, we catch a glimpse of the essence of language only to the extent that we ourselves are envisaged by it, remanded to it.  That we cannot know the essence of language – according to the traditional concept of knowledge, defined in terms of cognition as representation – is certainly not a defect; it is rather the advantage by which we advance to an exceptional realm, the realm in which we dwell as the mortals, those who are needed and used for the speaking of language.”  (p. 423).

“The logos of being, ‘Thought obeying the Voice of Being,’ is the first and the last resource of the sign, of the difference between signans and signatum.  There has to be a transcendental signified for the difference between signifier and signified to be somewhere absolute and irreducible.  It is not by chance that the thought of being, as the thought of this transcendental signified, is manifested above all in the voice: in a language of words [mots].  The voice is heard (understood) – that undoubtedly is what is called conscience – closest to the self as the absolute effacement of the signifier: pure auto-affection that necessarily has the form of time and which does not borrow from outside of itself, in the world or in ‘reality,’ any accessory signifier, any substance of expression foreign to its own spontaneity … This experience is considered in its greatest purity – and at the same time in the condition of its possibility – as the experience of ‘being.’” 

            -Jacques Derrida

We saw last time how Heidegger means to replace a traditional concept and picture of language, one that he finds in Aristotle’s description and Wittgenstein finds in St. Augustine.  According to this traditional picture, each word has one meaning, and meaning is an internal image, concept, or intention.  The purpose of linguistic signs is to communicate my meaning to another.  At its limit, this picture makes language a mere instrument for the transmission of meanings; signs themselves are seen as essentially arbitrary and lifeless.  To speak is, then, to breathe life and meaning into dead signs, to animate the body of signs with the spirit of meaning.

The Heideggerian critique of this picture also works, though, as a critique of the picture of language presupposed and utilized by one of the most important European schools of thought about language in the twentieth century, the school called “structuralism” and begun by the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure in 1911.  The Heideggerian critique of the traditional metaphysical picture of language, then, also has had an important role in inaugurating the theories and practices called “post-structuralism,” including the deconstruction of Derrida.  For Saussure’s structuralism, a sign has two components: a “sound-image” or pattern of mere sound (called the signifier) and a “concept” or image (called the signified).  The connection between the particular signifier and the particular signified is itself completely arbitrary, as is shown by the variety of words with which I can communicate the same concept in different languages.  The system of language itself, though, is a system of the relations of signifiers.  If I explain the meaning of a word to you, or explain to you what I mean by a particular word, I can only give you more signifiers; I can never guarantee that they evoke the same signified.  Thus language, as it is spoken, is a linear chain of signifiers, each one following from the last in the order spoken and each relating to others as a matter of definition and context.  Language itself, Saussure suggests, can be thought of as this purely relational system of differences.

This picture formed the basis for the analytic work of “structuralist” philosophers, anthropologists, and psychologists throughout the middle part of the twentieth century, including the literary theorist Roland Barthes, the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, and the Freudian psychoanalyst and philosopher Jacques Lacan.  The “archeology of knowledge” undertaken by the philosopher Michel Foucault itself applies some “structuralist” terms of analysis, while also seeking to problematize and extend them.  A more radical critique of the linguistic theory of structuralism comes from the theory and practice of “deconstruction,” invented by Jacques Derrida.  We have seen that the origin of the idea of deconstruction is Heidegger’s “Destruktion” or de-structuring of the tradition of ontology or metaphysics.  Derrida picks up this project of de-structuring, bringing its theory to a greater level of explicitness as he deconstructively “reads” philosophical and literary texts.  Because a large part of the practice of deconstruction depends on its complication and partial rejection of structuralism, we can understand it by considering the application of the Heideggerian critique to the structuralist picture of Saussure.

On page 402 of our reading, Heidegger says, “Ever since the age of the Greeks, beings have been experienced as what comes to presence.  Inasmuch as language is, coming as speech again and again on the scene, it pertains to what comes to presence.  One represents language, having taken one’s departure from speech, with a view to articulated sounds as bearers of meanings.  Speaking is one form of human activity.”  Elsewhere, Heidegger discusses the thought of being as presence as the metaphysical tradition itself.  In the traditional picture of language, speech is the presencing or manifestation of meanings.  The speaker breathes life into the meaning, making the meaning present in the sound.  The meaning is only present in the sound insofar as the presence of the speaker’s intention in the sound authorizes it.  With this picture, speech and meaning become the authorization of language to manifest presence.

One way to understand Derrida’s deconstruction is as a problematization of one apparently trivial implication of the traditional picture, an implication that we saw briefly last time.  For the traditional picture, as for Saussure’s picture, writing can only be a second-order representation, a derivative copy of what has been said.  Meaning is essentially present only in spoken language, and the power of writing to convey meaning is always dependent on the original presence of the speaker’s intention in speech.  Thus, the tradition of metaphysics and the history of philosophy have privileged speech over writing; they have taken meaning to be something that is fully and authentically present in speech and only secondarily possible in writing.  Derrida’s practice of deconstruction aims to reverse this traditional priority by considering writing as prior to speech.  In writing, the system of signs is truly, as Saussure suggested in a limited way, a system of pure differences, without any stable end or bearer of meaning.  In writing, the signified that would authorize the meaning of the signifier is radically absent and always put off, always deferred even as the text moves ceaselessly towards it.  The text itself never manifests the authorizing signified or center that would enable it to have a single, stable meaning.  Interpretation, then, is not the decoding or locating of the single hidden meaning of the text, but rather the continual exposure of the ambition of the text to a meaning that must remain always absent and differed.  Interpretation moves in the circle of meaning, the “weft” of the text itself.  There is no breaking out of this circle to view language from outside as a stable system of univocal meanings; our interpretation can only move toward greater and greater self-consciousness by moving within it.