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Heidegger and Unconcealment
Heidegger and Unconcealment
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into a unied structure, a meaningful, but prelinguistic articulation of the
world on the basis of which entities can be unconcealed and linguistic
acts can be performed.
Thus, despite the appearance of a change from Heideggers earlier to his
later work on the role of language, Heideggers view remains remarkably
consistent in its broad outlines. The consistency is achieved because his
turn to language is offset by a counterturning movement in the meaning
of the term language. During the period leading up to and including the
publication of Being and Time, Heidegger understood language as a totality
of words (Wortganzheit) (Being and Time, pp. 161/204) that is as a vocabu-
lary with rules for combining words into sentences (see GA 4: 39).
As such, language was for him dependent on and derivative of the mean-
ings we encounter as we inhabit an intelligible world. These primary mean-
ings, according to Heidegger, constituted what he began calling in 1925
the basic structure (Grundstruktur) of the logos (GA 21: 26). These primary
meanings are the relationships or involvements that entities have with us
and other things in a practical situation. For example, the meaning of a door
when Imnavigating through a building is: for going in and out (see GA21:
141). This meaning (Bedeutung) thus arises within our activity of comporting
ourselves purposefully and understandingly in the world. Meaning (die
Bedeutung) is dependent on an act of making sense (das Bedeuten):
In the primary understanding of a dealing-with, what is understood or made sense
of [das Bedeutete] is disclosed. In this way, the understanding gains the possibility of
taking for itself and preserving what is disclosed, the result so to speak. The result
of the act of makings sense [das Bedeuten] is in each case a meaning [eine Bedeutung],
not a so-called word meaning, but this primary meaning to which a word can
then accrue. (GA 21: 151 n. 6)
This primary meaning, then, is the way that thing or activity itself (rather
than a linguistic sign) refers to or relates to other activities or entities. The
making sense that understands (das verstehende Bedeuten), which discloses
meanings, is not dependent on our possessing a system of signs, but is
rather the foundation for language, which consists of a unied and system-
atic totality of the word meanings that accrue to the primary meanings
articulated for and through our dealings with entities:
only insofar as such intelligibility meaning already belongs to Dasein, can Dasein
express itself phonetically in such a way that these utterances are words which now
have something like meaning. Because Dasein in its very being is itself something
that makes sense (bedeutend), it lives in meanings and can express itself as these
meanings. And only because there are such utterances, that is, words, accruing to
meanings, therefore there are particular words. That is, only now can linguistic
forms, which themselves are shaped by the meaning, be detachable from that
meaning. Such a totality of utterances, in which the understanding of a Dasein in
a certain sense arises and is existentially, we call language. (GA 21: 151)
130 Language
Language in these early works, then, names a totality of words or a totality of
utterances a systematic whole of signs that we can draw on in expressing
ourselves linguistically (see GA 36/37: 105ff for the view of language as kind
of sign giving). It is interesting, however, that in GA 21, Heidegger did not yet
have a translation for logos into German that he was willing to stick with. He
leads off the lecture by translating logos with Rede, but in a very telling passage,
he qualies this translation: in order to provide an example that directs us
to the logos, he explains, consider not the legein discoursing and discussing,
but rather the legomenon what is said as such, what in each case is sayable and
what is posited, the lekton (GA 21: 54). That is, the Greek understanding of
logos is not oriented to the words we say indiscursive interaction, but rather the
meaningful world that is capable of being talked about linguistically. There
is a distinction to be drawn, in other words, between what we might call the
communicative aspect of discourse and the meaning articulating aspect.
The meaning articulating aspect consists in lifting referential relations into
salience. The communicative aspect consists in sharing these referential rela-
tions with others, or in helping others become responsive to these relations.
7
I suspect that a lot of the confusion in understanding Heideggers notion
of discourse stems fromfailing to take the paradigmof discourse to be what is
sayable the meaningful articulation rather than the action of saying
itself the communicative aspect. In any event, by the time he writes Being
and Time, it seems to me that Heidegger is comfortable translating logos
as Rede (conversance or discourse), but only because he understands
discourse primarily in terms of the articulation of meanings (in just the way
he had described meaning articulation in GA 21): that which is parsed (das
Gegliederte) in discursive articulation as such we call the totality of meanings
(Bedeutungsganze). This can be separated into meanings . . . . Words accrue to
meanings (Being and Time, 204/161). The primary sense of Rede or dis-
course is that which performs the function of establishing and stabilizing
the referential relations of meaningfulness:
The intelligibility of something has always been articulated, even before there is any
appropriative interpretation of it. Discourse is the Articulation of intelligibility . . . .
That which can be Articulated in interpretation, and thus even more primordially
in discourse, is what we have called meaning. That which gets articulated as such
in discursive Articulation, we call the totality-of-meanings [Bedeutungsganze].
This can be dissolved or broken up into meanings. (GA 2: H. 161)
Because the individual words and utterances can only have a meaning
on the basis of a prelinguistic but meaningful disclosure of the world,
Heidegger also thought of language as a derivative phenomenon both
7
In 1925, however, Heidegger still hadnt rigorously distinguished between the communicative
aspect of discourse and the meaning-articulating aspect. See: discourse has a distinctive
function in the development of the discoveredness of Dasein: it lays out, that is, it brings the
referential relations of meaningfulness into relief in communication (GA 20: 370).
Discourse Language, Saying, Showing 131
Sprache as a sign system and Rede in the communicative sense depend on
discourse as meaning articulation.
That Heidegger does not more rigorously divorce the two elements of
Rede is a result of his ontologically broad use of the term. The disclosive
function of both discourse as communication, and discourse as meaning
articulation is to let entities be discovered by providing a referential con-
text within which they can appear as meaningful. Heidegger does distin-
guish the two, as passages like the following make clear:
The current translation of logos as reason, judgment, and sense do not capture
the decisive meaning: gathering joining and making known. They overlook what is
originally and properly ancient and thus at once essential to the word and concept.
Whether, then, in the history of the origin of the word logos the meaning of the
gathering joining [sammelnden Fgens i.e. meaning articulation] was immediately
accompanied by the meaning of gathering saying [i.e. meaning communication], a
meaning that language always already has assumed, and in fact in the manner of
conversance; whether, in fact, originally language and discourse was directly expe-
rienced as the primary and genuine basic way of gathering joining, or whether the
meaning of gathering and joining together was only subsequently carried over onto
language, I am not able to decide on the basis of my knowledge of the matter,
assuming that the question is at all decideable. (GA 33: 122/Aristotles Metaphysics
Theta, 1034; some emphasis in original)
Similarly, when he argues in Being and Time that the call of conscience is a
mode of discourse that may not be heard as offering any communicative
content (see GA 2: H. 2734), Heidegger acknowledges that something
can perform the discursive function of meaning articulation without also
being communicable.
Both aspects of discourse, however, bear a common structure the
structure of gathering or collecting references into a coherent context.
That gathering can occur in either communicative action (saying), or in
the fundamental structural joining together or tting together of referen-
ces. But the latter is the more fundamental sense because it establishes the
stabilized relational context that is exploited in discursive communication:
the original meaning of logos [is] . . . legein: to read, to read together, to gather, to lay
the one to the other and in this way to set the one into a relationship to the other,
and thereby to posit this relationship itself. Logos: the connecting, the relationship.
The relationship is what holds together that which stands within it. The unity of this
together governs and regulates the connection of the self relating entities. Logos is
therefore a rule, a law, yet not as something which is suspended somewhere above
what is ruled, but rather as that which is itself the relationship: the inner tting-
together and tness (Fgung und Fuge) of the entities which stand in relation. Logos
is the regulating structure (regelnde Gefge), the gathering of entities which are related
among themselves. Such a gathering, which now gathers up, makes accessible,
and holds ready the connections of what is connected, and with this the connection
itself and thus individual entities, and so at the same time lets them be governed,
132 Language
this is the structure that we call language, speaking; but not understood as vocaliz-
ing, rather in the sense of a speaking that says something, intends something: to
discourse of or about something to someone or for someone. Logos is discourse, the
gathering laying out, unifying making something known. (GA 33: 121)
As this passage makes clear, at this point (1931), Heidegger has begunphasing
out the use of Rede, and has started using Rede and Sprache interchangeably. But
it is equally clear that he can do so only because he no longer thinks of
language in the way that he did in the years leading up to and surrounding
the publication of Being and Time. The change occurs as Heidegger draws a
distinction betweenthe prereective use of the word language to refer to the
foreground aspect of language that is, a totality of words (GA 4: 39) and
a more thoughtful use of the term to refer to the deeper, background pheno-
menon of a preverbal articulative gathering of meanings. He begins, in
other words, to use the term language in a manner that is ontologically
broad. He can do this because he no longer holds that the dening character-
istic of language is found in its character as a sign.
This changed view of the meaning of language frees the term up to be
substituted for discourse (Rede) as Heideggers preferred term for trans-
lating logos and, as I will show, as a name for a particular constitutive structure
of our being-in-the-world. Rede, in turn, loses its technical being-sense in
Heideggers works after about 1934.
8
To appreciate how much (or rather,
how little) is at stake in this change, we need to say more about this con-
stitutive structure, the explanation of which was always linked with an effort
to appropriate the ancient Greek notion of logos. The idea expressed in the
passage quoted above that human beings always already live in meanings
and act meaningfully is Heideggers version of the Greek claim that the
essence of man is to be the zon logon echon, the living being that possesses the
logos or language.
9
Rede, Sprache, and Sage were each efforts to translate and
thus capture what was essential about this claim.
Rede, discourse, was initially adopted as a translation for logos because of
the etymological connections between the German Rede and the Latin ratio,
which, in turn, was the Latin translation of logos (see, e.g., GA 20: 365 ff.).
By 1935, however, Rede fell out of favor as a translation for logos, a change
in Heideggers view that coincides precisely with the development of his
conviction that the translation of Greek terms into Latin destroyed the
authentic philosophical naming force of the Greek words (GA 40: 15/10).
8
Although I take it as a sign of Heideggers never-ending experimental approach to the use of
terms that Rede stages a comeback in one late course, the Freiburger Vortrge of 1957 (GA 79).
9
Heidegger discusses this claim in both lectures and lecture courses devoted exclusively to Greek
thinkers, as well as extended discussions in lecture courses more broadly conceived. Among
the former are two lecture courses in 1931: Aristotles: Metaphysiks IX, GA 33 and Vom Wesen der
Wahrheit. Zu Platons Hhlengleichnis und Thetet, GA 34; in 1932 the lecture course Der Anfang der
abendlndischenPhilosophie (Anaximander undParmenides) (GA35) andalectureonPlatos Phaidros.
Discourse Language, Saying, Showing 133
So when he now holds that the originary meaning of logos has at rst
nothing to do with language and word and discourse [Rede] (GA 40: 133/
95), this does not mean that hes rejecting his earlier account of the
fundamental role of primary, prelinguistic meanings in disclosing a
world. Nor is he repudiating the claim that the originary meaning of logos
has nothing to do with language when, a mere four years later, he writes
that We can in fact, we must translate anthrpos zon logon echon as: the
human being is the living entity to whom the word belongs. Instead of
word we can even say language, provided we think the nature of lan-
guage adequately and originally, namely, from the essence of logos correctly
understood. (GA 9: 348). Nor, nally, should we see it as a late repudiation
of his work on language, and a return to his earlier view when he writes
in 1957 that discourse and the verb to discourse do not mean lan-
guage and to speak in the sense of the pronouncement of expressions;
discourse (Rede) means precisely what legein and logos meant from early on:
to bring forward, to bring to appearance by gathering (GA 79: 160).
All of these supercially inconsistent pronouncements exhibit one con-
sistent, largely stable view about what Heidegger calls the originary mean-
ing or basic meaning of language. To recognize this, we need to focus on
the ontological structure and disclosive function of discourse, language, and
saying respectively. As Chart 6.2 suggests, when seen from the perspective of
structure and function, the different terms are near synonyms. The originary
language is an ontological structure responsible for the disclosure of the
world. Language plays this role in virtue of imposing a particular structure
on the world the gathering of relationships of meaning or reference that
we have already touched on: the basic meaning of logos is collection, to
collect (GA 40: 133) namely, the collection or gathering of signications
or the relationship of one thing to another (GA40: 133) into a more or less
stable structure. It is in terms of such a gathering or collecting into relation-
ships that we are to understand the idea of language as the house of being.
It is to a more detailed exposition of this notion of gathering that I now turn.
THE CORE PHENOMENON OF GATHERI NG
To understand properly the sense in which language is for Heidegger a
gathering or collecting, we need to recognize the background under-
standing of ontology against which such pronouncements are made. This
will bring us back to the slogan and the question of linguistic constitution-
alism in Heideggers thought. We noted at the outset Jaspers puzzled
response to the slogan. In contrast to the linguistic constitutionalism he
thought he detected in the slogan, Jaspers expressed the view of language
as a bridge that brings us to an independently existing reality. Jaspers
reaction to the slogan shows that he recognized something that few other
commentators have noted: the phrase house of being is not originally
134 Language
Heideggers. It is an unattributed quotation of a passage from Nietzsches
Zarathustra a passage that Heidegger lectured on in the years during
which he was developing his views on language (see GA 44: 56).
10
Some attention to the original source of the phrase is quite helpful
for appreciating whats going on with Heideggers use of the slogan. The
language as a bridge view is advanced by Zarathustra himself:
Oh my animals, answered Zarathustra. Just keep babbling and let me listen! It
invigorates me so when you babble: where there is babbling the world indeed lies
before me like a garden. How lovely it is that there are words and sounds; are not
words and sounds rainbows and illusory bridges between the eternally separated?
To each soul belongs another world, for each soul every other soul is a hinter-
world. Illusion tells its loveliest lies about the things that are most similar, because
the tiniest gap is hardest to bridge . . . . Have names and sounds not been bestowed
on things so that human beings can invigorate themselves on things? It is a
beautiful folly, speaking: with it humans dance over all things. How lovely is all
talking and all lying of sounds! With sounds our love dances on colorful
rainbows. (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Third Part: The Convalescent, 2, translation
modied)
On this view, then, language does not play a role in constituting entities.
Rather, it is an adornment that creates the illusion of connections between
speakers, and the illusion of relations between things. But the things
themselves do not depend for their being on our babbling or on the way
we talk about their relations to each other. Thus language is a bridge
means that language brings us before independently existing entities,
connects them to each other in our representations, and beauties and
adorns them in our representations.
But Zarathustras animals respond by suggesting that language is not just
a bridge to things and an adornment that dances over xed entities.
Rather, entities themselves dance in the way words do:
Oh Zarathustra, said the animals then. To those who think as we do, all things
themselves approach dancing; they come and reach out their hands and laugh and
retreat and come back. Everything goes, everything comes back; the wheel of
being rolls eternally. Everything dies, everything blossoms again, the year of being
runs eternally. Everything breaks, everything is joined (gefgt) anew; the same house
of being builds itself eternally. (ibid., emphasis supplied)
The animals, in other words, invoke the phrase house of being to suggest
a view of ontology according to which there are no stable, independently
existing things entities are constituted and reconstituted by being
joined (gefgt) or tted together.
10
In the Nietzsche lectures, Heidegger rejects the animals account of recurrence advanced in
this passage because it advocates a view of eternal recurrence as a cyclical repetition. He does
not explicitly comment at that time on the idea of language implicit in this passage.
Discourse Language, Saying, Showing 135
In all his works, early and late, Heidegger adheres to some version of the
thesis that entities are constituted by the relationships they bear to each
other. Something only is the entity that it is in terms of the way it is referred
to and aligned with activities and other entities. One might refer to this as
a relational ontology. To take language as a bridge, and words as beautifying
and dancing over things, is to hold that entities are xed and constituted
independently of the meaningful relationships they bear with other things.
The view of dancing things, by contrast, is the view that there is no stable
ontology apart from the meaningful relationships that things bear toward
one another within a world. Heidegger seems to allude to the same passage
in Zarathustra when he discusses the importance of learning to renounce
the idea that words were like handles (Griffe) that grasp that which already
is and that which is held to be, secure it tightly (dicht machen), express it and
in this way help it to beauty (GA 12: 161). Or again
In trying to clarify how chaos came to be posited as what is knowable and to be known,
we happened to stumble across what knows the living being that grasps the world
and takes it over. That is not a matter of chance, for what is knowable and what knows
are each determined in their essence in a unied way fromthe same essential ground.
We may not separate either one, nor wish to encounter them separately. Knowing is
not like a bridge that somehow subsequently connects two existent banks of a stream,
but is itself a stream that in its ow rst creates the banks and turns them toward each
other in a more original way than a bridge ever could. (GA 6.1: 51213)
Heidegger returns repeatedly to the imagery that Nietzsche invokes in
contrasting these two different ways of thinking about the relationship
between language and entities in the world.
11
So we can see that in appro-
priating Nietzsches phrase house of being, Heidegger is invoking a rela-
tional ontology and endorsing the dancing things understanding of entities.
It is in terms of the relational ontology that we are to understand the idea
that the logos is a gathering tting (sammelnden Fgens) (GA 33: 122). For
Heidegger, logos is the structure of tting (Gefge) (GA 33: 121), just as for
Zarathustras animals, the house of being is constructed when everything
is joined or tted together (gefgt). In the slogan, then, language is to be
understood as the gathering together of meanings that allows there to
be entities at all.
12
In particular, language is the unity to the structure of
relations: the Gefge. Language is, as saying that forms the worlds ways,
the relation of all relations. It relates, maintains, proffers, holds, and
keeps them (107). To be the relation of all relations means that language
exerts a kind of stylistic constraint on the way that particular relations are
11
See also GA 7: 148.
12
Heidegger rejects, of course, the idea that entities move in a circle that they get broken down
and reconstituted over and over again in exactly the same ways. See GA 6.1: 263ff, where
Heidegger explains that interpreting the eternal recurrence as a circling of entities is too easy,
and fails to appreciate the importance of the moment as a collision between past and future.
136 Language
established and made salient. By drawing and constraining and stylizing
the constitutive relationships between entities, language is the relation on
the basis of which what is present gathers itself for the rst time as such
around and for human beings (GA 9: 280). The slogan reafrms that we
encounter things on the basis of a grasp of their meanings or the way they
relate to other things. Language stabilizes these meanings or relationships,
holds them open, and makes them salient and communicable. Something
is communicable if it is capable of being picked up and responded to be
others, that is, capable of soliciting others.
WORDS
So far, we have seen a continuity in Heideggers account of the logos running
throughout his work and across the supposed divide between early and
later Heidegger. The logos is the structure of worldly meanings and refer-
ences, the relationships that constitute things as the things they are. This
continuity is obscured by changes in Heideggers terminology in partic-
ular, his preferred name for the logos structure. Perhaps confusingly, where
the early Heidegger distinguished between the logos structure and language
(which he understands in ordinary sense of linguistic structures and forms),
the later Heidegger names the logos structure language.
I have also already suggested that calling this logos structure language in
no way is meant to suggest that it has the structure and form that we
ordinarily associate with language. The originary language of the logos is
decidedly not something like a stock of terms, each with its associated mean-
ing and reference, together with rules for constructing sentences out of
those terms. But to make this point more evident, we need to consider
what Heidegger does say about the relationship between words and the
originary language or the Gefge. We also need to think through the rela-
tionship between words and entities in order to come to a clearer under-
standing of the slogan and Heideggers alleged linguistic constitutionalism.
Heideggers interpretation of the Stefan George poem The Word
(Das Wort) plays a central role in his effort to reorient our thinking
about the word and thus to rethink the relationship between language and
entities. This poem is also, in light of its nal line, especially prone to be
misunderstood as supporting a linguistic constitutionalist interpretation
of Heideggers account of language. With apologies for the rather literal
and unpoetic translation, the poem reads:
Das Wort The Word
Wunder von ferne oder traum Wonder from far off or a dream
Bracht ich an meines landes saum I brought to my countrys border
Und harrte bis die graue norn And waited until the grey Norn
Den namen fand in ihrem born Found the name within her wellspring
Discourse Language, Saying, Showing 137
Drauf konnt ichs greifen dicht
und stark
Thereupon I could grasp it tightly and strong
Nun blht und glnzt es durch die
mark . . .
Now it blossoms and shines throughout the
borderland. . .
Einst langt ich an nach guter fahrt Once I arrived after a good journey
Mit einem kleinod reich und zart With a jewel rich and delicate
Sie suchte lang und gab mir kund: She searched long and announced to me:
So schlft hier nichts auf tiefem
grund
No such sleeps here on the deep ground
Worauf es meiner hand entrann Whereupon it escaped from my hand
Und nie mein land den schatz
gewann. . .
And my country never obtained the treasure
So lernt ich traurig den verzicht: In this way I sadly learned the renunciation:
Kein ding sei wo das wort gebricht. No thing may be where the word is lacking
To understand Heideggers interpretation of this poem, we need to begin by
considering his reason for introducing a discussion of poetry into his work
in the rst place. What, one ought to ask, is Heidegger trying to accomplish?
Does he think the poem offers an argument about language or a particularly
insightful philosophical analysis of the nature of the word? Obviously not.
Does he want to adorn his dense and ungainly prose with some beautiful
poetic embellishments? To the contrary, the poem is not an ornament but a
central element in Heideggers discussion of the word. Does he think the
poet is an authority gure who can resolve a philosophical question about
language for us? With this, we are coming closer to the truth. The poet is not
a philosophical authority, but, Heidegger believes, he can be regarded as
an authoritative voice on at least one thing the experience of being struck
by the power and limits of language itself. And this leads us, nally, to the
main reason for introducing the poem: Heidegger wants us to break out of
our ordinary facility with language in order to actually have an experience
with language itself. Our everyday speech is so habitual, so commonplace,
and so familiar that language itself escapes notice, indeed, is nearly invisible.
As a result, to gain insight into it, we need to be able to attend to it, experience
it, and reect on it, and this might require that we somehow defamiliarize
ourselves with it. The poem is explicitly introduced to show ways to bring us
before the possibility of having an experience with language (GA 12: 151).
This particular poem is selected because it is by a master poet, reporting on
his own experience of language. As we approach the poem, then, we miss the
point if we quickly tear a line or two out of context as authority for anargument
or to add interest and beauty to philosophical prose. We are meant rather
to dwell upon the poem, and to experience the working of language in the
poem. That requires in this instance our attending thoughtfully and painsta-
kingly to the poetic description of the poets experience of a poetic word.
138 Language
Indeed, the rst thing one realizes when engaging seriously with a poem
is that poetic language rarely offers clear, unequivocal propositions as the
content of its sentences. To reduce a poem to a punch line, to a readily
intelligible and unambiguous claim is somehow to miss what is essential.
Poetic words, moreover, have what one might call a productive ambiguity
or, as Heidegger puts it, they oscillate, thus opening up multiple paths
of understanding. As frustrating as this might be to those of an analytic or
scientic mindset, this is not a weakness of the poem but its strength and
precisely one of the elements of the poem we must attend to in order to
experience language. For one of the essential features of language is its
ability to oscillate and thus to lead us into any of an indenite number of
paths. We do violence to a poem if we try to pin it down to a single
correct reading, and Heidegger insists that we must pay attention so
that the oscillation of the poetic saying is not forced onto the inexible rail
of an unequivocal assertion and in this way is destroyed (GA 12: 157).
The words of a masterful poet have a particular kind of oscillation, one
that Heidegger aspired to achieve in his own work. They hover right at the
boundary between our commonplace, ready understanding of terms and
insight into rare, unfamiliar meanings in the world. By helping us to get
caught up in this oscillation between the most familiar meanings of all
ordinary linguistic meanings and the mysterious unfathomable ways that
the world itself silently speaks and calls to us, the poet brings us to under-
stand two things we lose track of in our ordinary commerce with the world:
the potential power of language and the authentic signicance of the
things and people and possibilities around us.
Heidegger immediately alerts us to several words in Georges poem that
oscillate in this way, reminding us that we should not be too quick to
assume we know what the nal lines mean:
One is tempted to transform the nal line into an assertion with the content: there
is no thing where the word is lacking. Where something is lacking, a rupture exists,
a breaking off that is an impairment or detriment. To cause an impairment in a
matter means: to withdraw something from it, to let it miss something. It is lacking
means: it is missing. Where the word is missing, there is no thing. Only the available
word confers being to the thing. What is the word that it is able to do such a thing?
What is the thing, such that it requires the word in order to be? What does being
mean here that it appears as an award that is conferred on the thing from the
word? (GA 12: 209)
We cannot hope to make sense of the poem without asking what a word
is, what a thing is, and what being means. Given that the whole point of
the poem is to cause an experience with language that will compel us to
reect on such things, we should be particularly hesitant to take these
terms in their ordinary, everyday sense. As we bring into play different
possible ways of understanding each of these words word, thing, to
Discourse Language, Saying, Showing 139
be the poem will begin to oscillate productively between several diffe-
rent possible interpretations.
1. WORDS AND TERMS
Lets start by exploring possible meanings of the word word. Word
is an ideal case for illustrating Heideggers notion of oscillation. The
German language has two different plural forms to the singular word
for word (Wort), which correlate with two quite different meanings
of the word word. On the rst meaning, which takes the plural form
Worte, a word is a complete utterance or expression: a verbal or written
expression, which consists of a group of individual terms and presents
a unied mental sense.
13
This meaning of word is attested in English
as well. Shakespeare, for instance, has King Henry VI say: My Lord
of Warwick, hear me but one word: Let me for this my life-time reign
as king (King Henry VI, act 1, scene 1). The one word is a complete
thought, not a single term. This sense lives on in such English expressions
Id like a word with you, or I will keep my word that is, words are
understood as complete expressions, not individual terms.
The other meaning, which takes the plural form Wrter, corresponds
with the way we typically tend to think of the ordinary meaning of the
English word word. Words, Wrter, are single, independent, isolable
meanings with a denite vocal form which, as discourses smallest unit of
sense, produce, by means of their accumulation and linking together,
words in the rst sense as connected discourse.
14
In the singular, Wort, word will oscillate between these two senses, and
can be taken in either way (depending on context). And this is not
accidental, of course words as expressions of whole thoughts, and
words as units of sense stand in an intimate relationship to each other.
Part of the richness of the word word derives from the fact that it can
move in both directions of meaning, and can even do so simultaneously.
But to mark the distinction for the English reader, I will translate Wrter
as terms, and Worte as words.
The distinction as it is drawn in Grimm and in the ordinary German
usage, however, is not quite the distinction Heidegger wants to make. In
general, Heidegger thinks of terms as occurrent linguistic forms that are
detachable from their meanings, and are thus thought of as denoting
concepts, as opposed to directly expressing signications (see GA 2: H.
159, 161; GA 21: 151). Thus a term is a certain type of sound or graphic
mark, with its associated particular meaning or concept. Of course, it is
13
Wort, in Deutsches Wrterbuch von Jacob und Wilhelm Grimm, vol. 30. Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1960,
p. 1473.
14
Ibid., p. 1529.
140 Language
phenomenologically incorrect to describe my experience of language as
involving rst a sensory perception of a sound or graphic mark, followed
by a recognition of the sound or mark as a linguistic form, followed by an
association of the linguistic form with its meaning, followed by a construc-
tion of a unied sense from the individual meanings. In the living use of
language, I respond to what is written or spoken uently, nonreectively,
nondeliberately. For instance, when I hear the term chalkboard in the
utterance the chalkboard is black, I do not hear a sound that I recognize
as a word and then associate it with a meaning in order to construct a sense
for the utterance as a whole. Instead, as Heidegger says, I live in meanings,
and the spoken language as I encounter it in the utterances of ordinary
involved coping orients or reorients me immediately to the world I am in, to
the meanings I inhabit (see GA 21: 151). The words immediately orient me
so that I can comport myself with respect to the chalkboard. I can, of course,
detach myself from a lived immersion in meanings, and regard chalkboard
as a term that is, as a noise or graphic mark that can be detached from its
meanings. A beginning speaker of a foreign language will often encounter
terms. But with increasing uency, the terms recede from salience.
The contrast between a deliberate and uent experience of language
suggests a different way of thinking about what words are as opposed to
terms. Words for Heidegger are not representations, and have neither a
verbal nor a written form: they are not palpable to the senses (GA 12:
181). Indeed, Heidegger claims, the word, like being itself, is not an
entity (GA 12: 182). Instead, he thinks of words as the relational struc-
tures that allow there to be entities in the rst place: the relation of the
word to the thing . . . is not a relationship between the thing on one side
and the word on the other. The word itself is the relation, which in each case
keeps in itself the thing in such a way that it is a thing (GA 12: 159). To
understand this, we need to recall the discussion of dancing things
above. On Heideggers view, entities are constituted by the relationships
they have to other entities. For there to be a stable thing, the relationships
that constitute it as a thing need also to be stabilized, held open, and
maintained. The stabilization takes the form of establishing nexuses or
nodes of relations that can be, and are, lled by particular entities. Of
course, lled is a misleading verb to use here if it is heard as suggesting
that entities are something independently of the structure of relations,
something that can then be inserted into a particular place in the network
of relations. Entities do not ll nexuses the way water lls glasses or
concrete lls building forms. Water is water, after all, whether it is in a
glass or pond. A more apt analogy is the way someone lls the position of
an aunt or uncle. One cannot be an aunt rst, and only subsequently take
up relationships to nieces and nephews. To be an aunt at all is to be
constituted by ones relationships to other people. Aunthood, then, is a
particular nexus of relationships to siblings and siblings children. When
Discourse Language, Saying, Showing 141
we grasp the signicance of aunthood, we have gained the ability to
recognize a stable pattern of relationships, secured this nexus as that into
which something can enter, and, in entering, be constituted as the entity it
is. We have grasped, one could say, the word aunt. To understand words
in general, then, is to be able to discern an entity as standing in the
structure of relationships that allows it to be an entity.
About the word we also said that it does not simply stand in a relation to the thing,
but rather that the word is what rst brings the particular entity as the entity that it
is into this is, holds it therein, relates it, and, as it were, provides it the support
with which to be a thing. Accordingly, we said, the word does not simply stand in a
relation to the thing, but rather the word is itself what holds and relates the thing
as thing; the word is as this relating: the relation itself. (GA 12: 177)
The entity will thus stand at a kind of nexus of relationships. The word, in
the original sense, is the nexus of signicative relationships. Words are
prior to terms because it is only through a grasp of the meaningful relations
that entities bear to one another that their associated names have the mean-
ing that they have.
If we consider this distinction in the context of Georges poem, we can
see that the different ways of hearing word will lead us to imagine
different reasons why the word might be missing. If we think of words as
terms, a word is missing when some ordinary language lacks a term
uniquely associated with some specic sense. Take, for instance the
Persian term zirad, the name of a rope fastened round a camels neck,
to prevent him from bringing up his food when chewing the cud, and
throwing it on his rider.
15
English lacks this term, or any single equivalent
term. But we English speakers have little trouble understanding the idea
of a specic type of rope-equipment designed for that particular task
(even if we are unable to imagine exactly what such a rope would look
like, or how it would be attached to the camels neck, or even how a camel
manages to vomit on its rider in the rst place). We know, after all, what
camels are, and have a fairly good grip on all the relationships involved in a
zirad (the relationship between animals and their riders, between necks
and ropes, etc.). By contrast, if we think of words in Heideggers sense,
then a word is missing when a world lacks a stable network of relation-
ships that would let a particular entity show up within the world. Of
course, such a world will also necessarily lack a term (since a term accrues
to the word or nexus of relationships). But it lacks a term in this case
because it lacks a constitutive place for such a thing as the term names. It is
no accident that English has had to borrow its term for a Samurai, for our
culture lacks the points of reference that are denitive of such a being (for
15
F. Steingass, A Comprehensive Persian-English Dictionary. London: Routledge, 1977, p. 613; see
Adam Jacot de Boinod, The Meaning of Tingo. New York: Penguin, 2007, p. 153.
142 Language
example, the Bushido