Review: Prophetic Heidegger

Reviewed Work(s): Martin Heidegger by George Steiner

Review by: Howard Eiland
Source: boundary 2, Vol. 8, No. 3 (Spring, 1980), pp. 309-319
Published by: Duke University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/302991
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Prophetic Heidegger*

Howard Eiland

"There is, just now," writes George Steiner, "hardly a sphere of

intellectual argument and language-consciousness in which the presence o
Martin Heidegger is not manifest-be it only as a force to be exorcised."
We may surely agree that, for all its idiosyncrasy and, to certain quarters,
implicit danger, Heidegger's work has exercised enormous influence. It is
commonplace to point out his effect on fields as diverse as theology,
poetics, historiography, psychoanalysis, sociology, linguistics, and classical
studies-not to mention the elaboration and modification of his ideas by
contemporary existentialist, phenomenological and hermeneutical philos-
ophers. As more and more of his writings come to be translated and
collected, he emerges more clearly as the central font of twentieth-century
theory. So diffused is his influence by now that we encounter him, not
only in educated parlance about "reflexivity" or "dialogue" or
"difference" or "traces," but also, ironically, at second- and third-remove

*George Steiner. Martin Heidegger. New York: The Viking Press, 1979.

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in the radical jargon of "saving the earth," of "getting into" or "letting
be," and even more recently in the sort of advertisement that invites one
to "experience the world of Stop and Shop"-a development,
appropriately enough, that has completely forgotten its own (originall
right-wing) provenance. It is a paradox dear to German philosophy th
the most individual of thinkers will most fully express his age, mos
comprehensively gather up the past and set the lines for future inquir
And yet, as Steiner observes, probably no thinker ever has generated s
violently opposed judgments of his work: to his admirers, Heidegger is
supreme critic of the metaphysical tradition, conversing as an equal w
Aristotle, Descartes, Kant and Hegel, while to his detractors, he is a
provincial and romantic obscurantist, an instigator of portentous nonsense.
George Steiner, to be sure, is not out to settle the debate-an
impossibility anyway at the present time, because something more than
two-thirds of Heidegger's total output, including texts of his lectures, has
yet to appear in definitive form. His currently published work will
comprise sixteen volumes of a Gesamtausgabe (possibly not forthcoming
until the 1990s) that is expected to number fifty-seven volumes. All
judgment, meanwhile, must remain as provisional as the philosophy itself.
Within these limits Steiner seems ideally suited to interpret Heidegger to
the English-speaking world. Not only is he natively trilingual (English,
German, and French), but he is versed in a broad range of European
thought. He has demonstrated as much familiarity with the evolution of
linguistics, both scientific and mystical, as with the development of
Western drama and rhetoric. His tastes extend from Racine to George
Eliot, from Dante to Dada (though he appears insensitive to film), and if
he exalts Mallarme and the quest for le mot absolu, he maintains a solid
regard for exigencies of character in plays and novels. His critical
writing-he has published fiction-usually is balanced between generaliza-
tion and close analysis, and he has exhibited striking originality of
speculation on such issues as the language of sexuality, the decline of
privacy, the history of future-concepts, the apparent consciousness of
brain circuitry in moments of remembering. In the present instance, he
admits to a lack of professional philosophic expertise, but it may be that a
literary bias is an advantage in dealing with Heidegger. Why, then, is Martin
Heidegger something of a disappointment? Perhaps we expect too much.
A good portion of the book is given over to rather perfunctory summaries
of What is Philosophy?, Introduction to Metaphysics, Being and Time,
and the "Letter on Humanism," with nods to the commentaries by
William Richardson, Emmanuel Levinas, and Winfried Franzen. As part of
the "Modern Masters" series, edited by Frank Kermode (whose own recent
The Genesis of Secrecy evinces a Heideggerian cast), it is directed toward
the non-specialist for whom, presumably, a probing investigation of the
philosopher's terminology would be out of place. Compared to After
Babel (1975), Steiner's brilliant and important study of "language-

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consciousness" (containing an extended critique of the "synchronic
abstraction" of analytic linguistics), Martin Heidegger seems easy. Still, we
may locate three or four areas in which Steiner has something valuable to
say.
"No aspect of Heideggerian thought," he writes toward the
beginning, "can be divorced from the phenomenon of Heidegger's prose
style." It is, as we know, a notorious phenomenon, one that has been
excoriated by such as Theodor Adorno. At stake is the manifold problem
of difficulty. In After Babel, and again in On Difficulty (1978), Steiner
distinguishes-in a way that recalls Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus-
between a classicism harmonically "housed" in language and a modernism
in which the particular no longer chimes within an overarching universe.
Intimations of homelessness sound in the middle of the seventeenth
century and eventuate by the end of the nineteenth. Homer and
Shakespeare work from "inside the transcendental generality of common
speech," whereas the modern poet characteristically moves against the
current of normal speech and seeks to resuscitate an aboriginal magic of
the word. The philosopher is not immune to the crisis. Heidegger must be
seen within a company of historically-attuned philosophers like Pascal,
Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche, whose work continually poses the question of
how to be read. Heidegger's relation to idiom is distinctively problematic.
He does not simply reject it in favor of arbitrary locutions, as might at first
seem the case, but rather, like the later Wittgenstein, he seeks to reveal
idiom. What does it mean in English, for example, to "figure things out,"
when one begins to "hear" the ancient burden of the words? Hence much
of what Heidegger says is simultaneously obvious and arcane. His bold use
of short sentences has a deliberate "delaying" or "blockading" effect. We
are to be slowed down from our customary busyness, notes Steiner, we are
to be "bewildered and barred in our reading so that we may be driven
deep." Steiner offers a nice analogy with Expressionist action-paintings:

Heidegger welds language into a kind of violent

ordinariness. He twists and compacts the sinews of
vocabulary and grammar into resistant, palpable
nodes .... [He] is striving to get language and his reader
inside the actual world, he is trying to make luminous
and self-revealing the obstinate opaqueness of matter.
Van Gogh can do just this . . .Heidegger's discourse
tends to clot, as does thick paint. To read it with any
degree of penetration is to sense the dynamics, the
roughage of a process rather than its logic or finish.

The key to this illumination of idiom is etymology, and Steiner

sees, as few critics have done,1 that the "etymologizing" of German and
Greek words, rather than a pedantic or mystical indulgence, is in fact the

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cardinal move in Heideggerian philosophy: "Radical insight goes to the
root of words." It also very likely constitutes the crux of analytic and
positivist objections to Heidegger. For in isolating and "breaking open"
the individual word so as to disclose a thought-kernel, he claims to go
beyond or undermine traditional orders of syntax and logic. Where Paul
Ricoeur, for example, classically designates the sentence-level as primary,
Heidegger, like his hero H1olderlin, would follow the trail of "verbal
monads" toward a numinous "Grund des Wortes." Syntax is regarded as
facade. Art invades. In the simple word is embedded, as Steiner puts it in
After Babel, a "literally daemonic potency of definition, of action." The
word is the thing (Steiner adverts to a "dynamic nominalism"), and
etymons are bud-like essences. Using the philologists' reconstructions of
Indo-European root forms, Heidegger would bring to light a set of
elemental vocables, the Grundverfassungen that secretly shape ordinary
diction, grown abstract and oblivious over the centuries. Untersuchen
makes durchsichtig. In tracing the tangled vegetation of a root form from
which important modern words have flowered-as he does with the vital
root bheu- in Section 2 of the Introduction to Metaphysics- Heidegger
attempts, we might say, to map original neighborhoods of meaning. In the
ramifications of bheu--the cognation of beon, by/dan, bur, Baum, Phuein,
futurus, etc.-in this Umkreis of concepts (in which building, dwelling,
being and becoming are all named and interfused through the notion of
emergence), we sense a logic, a gathering and speaking,2 that is prior to
any "rational" logic; by "the fullness at the root," we gain mysterious
access to the dwelling of language in itself.
Now Heidegger was clearly sensitive to the possible offense his
use of etymology might give. Already in Being and Time (?44.), he writes:
"we must avoid uninhibited word-mysticism. Nevertheless, the ultimate
business of philosophy is to preserve the force of the most elemental
words...." A disciplined word-mysticism perhaps. That discipline was
sometimes lacking or blind is suggested by the scholarly refutations of
certain Heideggerian interpretations: e.g., the assumed kinship of bei
(actually derived from ambhi) with bauen and bin (from bheu-), which
Heidegger, in Being and Time, ? 12, took over uncritically from Grimm; or
the notorious translation of aletheia as a privative to mean
"unconcealment," in counterpoint with occluding lethe, whereas the
Greeks, as Heidegger finally acknowledges in "The End of Philosophy and
the Task of Thinking," understood it only in the sense of correctness of
correspondence. Here the putative etymon remains sheer unused
possibility: the "unthought" in Greek thought.
At any rate, it is evident that Heidegger conceives the archaeology
of words as a means to recover primal energies of human discourse. Steiner
identifies several precedent eideavors in Cabalistic and Pietistic
movements, particularly during the seventeenth century. Common to all
such speculation is the conviction that language is quintessentially poetic

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or originary, and that "the nerve of poetry," as Steiner says, "is the act of
nomination." The word evokes. In this radical metaphor of calling is
implicit an analogy between speech and music: at its most primordial, as
Nietzsche and the Symbolists kept insisting, language speaks musically. It
follows that we must learn to listen, that we must temper the
long-ingrained, fundamentally Platonic habit of seeing (recently discuss
by William Spanos in these pages) and ultimately become more attuned t
even "unheard melodies," the streaming stillness (sige) in things. Dionys
must be given his due. Steiner upbraids Heidegger for largely neglecting
musical analogy, since it exemplifies so forcefully a kind of meaning tha
sensuous and yet inward, that is elusive and not to be paraphrased, yet
manifestly there. In the interaction of melody and rhythm,3 we find
paradigm of entelecheia. Like the circular being of Dasein, melody is
futural: in its beginning is its end. Musical meaning or dimension, though
Steiner does not say this, involves a stretching and turning through
time-space that recalls Heidegger's delineation of "geschehen in Being and
Time, his ontological interpretation of Husserl's intentionality (which
latter term, of course, literally suggests "stretching"). In particular, the
analogy of music reminds us of the crucial section in Division Two of
Being and Time, ?65, "Temporality as the Ontological Meaning of Care,"
which Steiner, in my opinion, seriously underestimates, finding it mostly
impenetrable and anticlimactic after the more famous paragraphs on death
and anxiety. I would argue that the finite, spherical conception of
temporality, of existence at once anticipatory and recapitulatory, contains
the germ of Heidegger's later preoccupation with what can be called
cosmic play. Spiel, after all, originally meant "dance" (Tanz): the dancer's
rhythmic, Shiva-like extension of body and articulation of space, his
intentionality of muscle, works to constitute a "Spielraum," a
"Zeitspielraum." We may thus appreciate Nietzsche's Hellenic dictum that
dance, the circumscribed sacred khoros, is the mother of the arts, and we
gain insight into Heidegger's esoteric denomination of the fourfold, in his
essay "The Thing," as an outpouring-enclosing "round-dance."
In such spiralling elaboration of the principle of circularity
Steiner sees an exact parallel with the tautological finality of theology,
with the self-utterance and self-definition of the Deity. "Es gibt Sein" is
heard as an echo of "I am that which I am." Steiner takes a stand
emphatically with the many who find in Heidegger's thought a post- or
meta-theology of radical immanence. Of course, Heidegger distinguishes
his path from that of "onto-theo-logy," but in a teasing manner tha
actually invites further comparison. In Identity and Difference, he
conjectures that "the god-less thinking which must abandon the god of
philosophy, god as causa sui, is thus perhaps closer [niher] to the divine
God." On the question of God he chooses generally to remain silent, but
then silence, as he says, may speak more than words. Intimations like these
make plausible the claim for a pronounced "theological charge" in

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 Heidegger's vocabulary and vision. Steiner adduces numerous points of
contact. The crucial sources for Heidegger's concepts of Angst, of
conscience, of the individuation of death, lie in Kierkegaard and Pascal, in
Luther and Saint Augustine, in the entire Pauline corpus. In particular,
Kierkegaard's anatomizing of despair in The Sickness Unto Death, as
specifically modulated through Lukacs and Durkheim, prepares the way
for the diagnosis of modern alienation and anomie. In Heidegger's idea of
the "positivity of fallenness," of Verfall as a necessary ontic precondition
for the struggle toward authentic Dasein, Steiner sees a counterpart to the
paradox of felix culpa: man must fall in order to be resurrected, he must
first leave or lose his home before he can truly find it. "Consciously or
not," argues Steiner, "Heideggerian temporality relates to that framework
of individualized, eschatologically differentiated time which is postulated
by the fact that the Incarnation takes place in time. (The point is made
emphatically by Saint Augustine, so often Heidegger's predecessor.)"
In addition to this finite eschatological focus on the problematic
"horizon of time," the concepts of reciprocal "nearness" and "farness," of
man as the "shepherd of Being," of philosophy as a pilgrimage toward, of
truth as an illumination or epiphany within the "clearing" of existence,
and moreover the resort to an indefinable immediacy of cognition beyond
the specter of dialectic-all these considerations enact variations on
long-established theological and gnostic themes. The key postulate of a
language speaking in and through mankind inevitably harks back to the
Johannine doctrine of the Logos and its legacy in Western mystical-Pietist
reflection. Indeed, we may venture the summary proposition that
Heidegger's central terms-Word, Place, Measure, the disclosive interplay of
lighting and voicing, the being which is a dwelling, the unsayable deep-are
classically theological formulations and find a close modern analogue in
the dynamic categories of Karl Barth, whose Commentary on Romans
(1918), as Steiner points out, decisively influenced Heidegger's whole style
of word-by-word textual exposition. Barth too would "hover in mid-air,"
moved, borne and driven by the pneuma. (Heidegger speaks, in Identity
and Difference, of a Schwingung, a swinging and vibrating, over and within
the event of appropriation [Ereignis] by which man and Being reach toward
each other.) In his solitary dialogue with a God wholly different, yet
inclining toward man, Barth arrives, like Heidegger, at the primal identity
of denken and danken (tong- is the root of both "think" and "thank"), at
the augmented Aristotelian recognition that philosophy begins and ends in
wonder.

Or perhaps we should say that philosophy begins and ends in

prophecy. For it is generally recognized that Heidegger-standing, as he
thinks, at "the End [Vollendung] of Philosophy" and, moreover, in the
shadow of Nietzsche-gravitated increasingly toward the style of gnomic
utterance and concrete imagery that originated in Miletus and Ephesus. A
prophet attends to fate, and probably nothing signals so clearly

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Heidegger's overcoming of metaphysics as his preoccupation, already
announced in Being and Time, with Schicksal and Geschick. The concept
of Geworfenheit, of man's "thrownness" into the world, ripens into that
of "the gift"-the "Es gibt"-by which man is summoned, "called" to
follow in the course of what is obscurely sent (geschickt). A profound
word-play, as we know, is in force here, for the terms Schicksal, Geschick,
schicken, as well as Geschichte ("history"), all derive from the verb
geschehen (tantamount to sich ereignen) touched on above. Events are
understood as springing forth and gathering us into their reach; events are
questions which we answer or "co-respond" to. A thing (Sache) is what
matters, what bears on us, or bei us. In the late lecture "Time and Being,"
Heidegger refers to the sequence of historical epochs as "words of Being,"
thus synthesizing the master principles of history and language.4 Almost
like Hellenizing Ecclesiastes, the philosopher now thinks of epochs as
seasons, of a lifetime as a passage or spell, a more or less weighty work, in
the perpetually inaccessible Book of Life. It follows necessarily that
Heidegger should stress the determining horizon of the generation within
which any individual career unfolds.
But what has happened, at this late juncture in his thought, to the
death-bound freedom of Dasein? The fact is, that almost from the
beginning Heidegger's notion of freedom was paradoxical-was allied to
the formulas of Marburg theology and of Karl Barth, for whom to be free
is to be claimed for a specific kind of work. In Being and Time (?58),
becoming free involves being "in thrall" (horig) to the call of care, and in
"What Are Poets For? " we find that: "Only by virtue of being willed is
each being that which, in its own way, does the willing in the will ... They
will more strongly in that they are more willing." But-to ask in the vein
of William Barrett's recent defense of freedom in The Illusion of
Technique-is response here the same as responsibility? A deed may be a
word, but what is the difference between a deed of words and a deed such
as Auschwitz? And how is word then implicated in deed? These are the
kinds of questions raised in what I think is the heart of Steiner's book.
Indeed, it is not just questioning he carries out, but indictment. The
voluminous literature on Heidegger's involvement with Nazism, he argues,
does not sufficiently press home the fact of extensive correspondence
between Nazi doctrine and fundamental ontology and the fact of
Heidegger's virtually total public silence, after 1945, concerning the
holocaust and his own attitudes toward "the policies and bestialities of the
Third Reich." (The possibility of private pronouncements in the archive,
of something more telling than the interview published posthumously in
Der Spiegel, is not discounted.)
Steiner carefully summarizes the relevant events-stretching from
Heidegger's assumption of the rectorship of Freiburg University in April,
1933, to the Allied interdiction on his teaching in force until 1951-and
looks at the important documents issued by him during the philosopher's

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nine-month tenure in the National Socialist Party. He exculpates Heidegger
of any alleged anti-Semitism, pointing to his prohibition of the
dissemination of anti-Semitic tracts by Nazi students and of a planned
book-burning and purging of "undesirable" volumes from the university
library early on in his rectorship. He finds that Heidegger never authorized
the banning of non-Aryan Husserl from the use of the library, and that it
was the publisher who insisted on dropping the dedication to Husserl in
the 1942 edition of Being and Time, though Heidegger's failure to
intervene positively and publicly on Husserl's behalf is another matter.
Steiner detects in the infamous Rektoratsrede of May, 1933, a covert but
tenacious appeal for spiritual revolution, apart from politics in the normal
sense, and, in the attack on the League of Nations, an exhortation to a
deeper conception of peace among peoples. Like other critics, he suggests
that Heidegger was "caught up in the electric trance of the National
Socialist promise" at a time before the idealism of resurgence had revealed
its essential barbarism. "It was Heidegger's error and vanity, so
characteristic of the academic," he writes, "to believe that he could
influence Nazi ideology." Already by November, 1933, however,
Heidegger appeared uncomfortable among his Nazi colleagues, and Steiner
reiterates that he resigned his rectorship some six months before Hitler's
accession to total power: "many eminent intellectuals did far worse."
But, Steiner goes on, the spate of articles and speeches of
1933-34, in which Rektor Heidegger goes beyond official obligation, cries
out against him: "it is vile, turgid and brutal stuff in which the official
jargon of the day blends seamlessly with Heidegger's idiom at its most
hypnotic." The National Socialist revolution will reunite philosophers with
the Volk as a whole, enabling a return with "hard clarity" to the question
of the meaning of human existence and to the possibility of serving the
national will, whose sole lawful embodiment is the Fuhrer. To oppose him
would be "treason against being." Even more trenchantly, Steiner details a
series of parallels between Nazi ideology and the thinking of Being and
Time. The pseudomessianism of the Hitler phenomenon spoke to
Heidegger's deep-lying sense of apocalypse, of the crisis of technological
modernity; Hitler's denunciations of "rootless cosmopolitans" and the
unhoused intelligentsia correspond to the critique of "das Man" and of
"Neugier." Both Nazism and ontological anthropology exalt the mystical
kinship between the laborer and his tools, the importance of rootedness on
native ground, of Blut and Boden. Heideggerian "resoluteness" Steiner
compares generally to the Teutonic mystique of sacrificial commitment,
the "heightening of personal fate into national and ethnic vocation."
Above all, in both the idiom of Being and Time and National Socialist
jargon, there is an exploitation of "the genius of German for suggestive
darkness." Heidegger's elevation of the spirit of language over the agency
of the person (one thinks of Jung in this context as well) finds fateful
consummation in "the Nazi use of the human voice as a trumpet played

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upon by immense, numinous forces beyond the will or judgment of
rational man."
But what most disturbs Steiner in the political side of Heidegger's
career is his "very nearly intolerable" post-war silence on Hitlerism and the
holocaust. He essays some hypotheses to make sense of the silence, of
which the most suggestive involves the familiar notion of German destiny,
Geschick: it is the singular lot of Germany to touch the summits and to
plumb the depths, to embody the human identity "in its complete
spectrum of dialectical extremities." By the distinctively German principle
of antithesis and Aufhebung, a Bach or Goethe requires a Hitler. Any
attempt at critique of this essentially tragic "mittence" from beneath, as it
were, from within the bounds of "good and evil," is inauthentic. "There is
nothing democratic," Steiner has written, "in the vision of tragedy." And
yet now he cannot escape the suspicion that, all in all, Heidegger was a
political coward. Granted the obvious greatness of his philosophic-
linguistic activity:

he was, at the same time, a very small man. He led his

existence amid a worshipful coterie and, particularly in
his later years, behind barriers of adulation. His sorties
into the world at large were few and carefully
orchestrated. It may well be that he did not have the
courage or magnanimity needed to confront his own
political past, and the question of Germany's espousal of
barbarism. Though engaged in overthrowing traditional
metaphysics, though committed to a radical and
antiacademic concept of thought, Heidegger was
simultaneously a German Ordinarius, the lifelong
incumbent of a prestigious chair, incapable.. . of
"thinking through," as he would put it, the easy collapse
of German academic and cultural institutions before the
Nazi challenge.

In the background of these considerations, beyond the scope of

Steiner's book, is the profoundly disquieting and complex phenomenon of
a general gravitation by artists and intellectuals of our century toward
fascistic modes of thought. How are we to understand the intellectual
glamour of fascism? It surely has to do in part, as Steiner notes, with a
religious-nationalistic emphasis on the genius of place, with a mystical
susceptibility to the influences of earth and instinct. Particularly salient is
the reactionary tendency of much "language-consciousness," the intimate,
often concealed, relation between "organic" or "autotelic" or "holistic"
and "totalitarian." It is not surprising that an interest in verbal roots, and
in the evocative or musical powers of words, should consort with a passion
for the primal "simplification" of modern life, or with a perception, far

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beyond all liberal cant, of the operation of types in human affairs. Already
with Hamann and Herder, philology conceived character (ethos) to be
founded in race. It then took some hundred-and-fifty years for classic
speculation to help deliver a mittence of wholesale jingoism. On
succeeding generations, it would seem, has devolved the burden, not only
of instituting authority in the absence of a general sense of hierarchy, but
of affirming racial difference and our bonds with the earth without
thereby encouraging racial hatred and all invidious talk of tribal
imperative. How to reconcile holiness with goodness? That is "the
aristocratic question," as Thomas Mann would say, and he too
characteristically chose to remain ironically suspended between antinomie
in homage to the irreducible mystery of the human being. But in a late
essay on "Nietzsche's Philosophy in the Light of Recent History," in
which he critically reconsiders what is probably the main influence on his
own career, he calls for a deepened civilization and, in words that perhaps
bear on the case of Heidegger, decries the separation of the
aesthetic-religious attitude from the moral:

We have made the acquaintance of evil in all its

nauseating forms, and are no longer such aesthetes that
we need to be ashamed of subscribing to the good, nor
need to snub such trivial ideas and guides as truth,
freedom, justice.

Boston College

NOTES

1 On this matter, see Erasmus Sch6fer's account of Heidegger's "analytisch

Etymologie als Mittel der Wortbildung," and his defense of Heidegger's use of
paronomasia and the figura etymologica, in Die Sprache Heideggers
(Pfullingen: Ginther Neske, 1962), pp. 103-17, 202-17, and passim (portions
translated in the volume by Kockelmans cited below), and Otto P6ggeler's
discussion of Erorterung (originally from Ort) as "Topologie des Seins" in Der
Denkweg Martin Heideggers (Pfullingen: Ginther Neske, 1963), pp. 280-99;
also Johannes Lohmann's wide-ranging explication of original ptosis,
ontological differentiation as materialized in the forms of the verb "to be," in
"Martin Heidegger's 'Ontological Difference' and Language," in On Heidegger
and Language, ed. and trans. J. Kockelmans (Evanston: Northwestern Univ.
Press, 1972), pp. 303-63, and, also on ptosis and enklisis, George Vick,
"Heidegger's Linguistic Rehabilitation of Parmenides' 'Being,' " in Heidegger
and Modern Philosophy, ed. M. Murray (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1978),
pp. 203-21.

2 In the many discussions, regarding Heidegger, of logos and legein, it is not

always noticed that the Indo-European root leg- harbors a double potency: of
collecting and, at later stages, of speaking. Legein (from which we get both
"dialogue" and "catalogue") means both to gather and to speak; legere, to
gather, choose, read, is the source of our words "collect," "lecture," "legible,"

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 "intelligent," etc. A possible Germanic derivative is *lekjaz, enchanter, one
who speaks with magic words. Lex suggests an exponential collection of rules,
as well as an articulating of oneself in the sense of self-discipline. If we think
of the idiom, "let me collect my thoughts," or if we think of the correlate
functions of gathering and speaking by which God creates in Genesis, then we
have a clue into Heidegger's interpretation (particularly in What is Called
Thinking? ) of legein as a speaking which collects, a collecting which calls and
takes to heart.
A convenient source of etymological information appears at the end of
The American Heritage Dictionary in the Appendix of Indo-European roots,
edited by Calvert Watkins and based on, with inportant differences, the
standard Indogermanisches Etymologisches Worterbuch (Bern, 1959) of Julius
Pokorny. A convenient and readable text of German etymologies is Volume 7
(1963) of Das Grosse Duden-Lexikon.
3 On the ancient meaning of rhuthmos (from sreu-, to flow) as 'disposition,'
'configuration,' see Emile Benveniste's "The Notion of 'Rhythm' in its
Linguistic Expression," in Problems in General Linguistics (1966), trans.
M. E. Meek (Coral Gables: Univ. of Miami Press, 1971), pp. 281-88. See also
Hans-Georg Gadamer's discussion of rhythm in his essay "The Nature of
Things and the Language of Things" (1960), collected in Philosophical
Hermeneutics, trans. and ed. D. E. Linge (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press,
1976), pp. 69-81, esp. p. 79; and Alfred North Whitehead's inquiry into "the
ultimate vibratory character of organisms" in Process and Reality: An Essay in
Cosmology (1929; rpt. New York: Macmillan, 1969), pp. 323-26.

4 The English word "fate" derives from fatum an utterance, the neuter past
participle of fari, to speak, from which "infant" and "ineffable" also stem.
Fari (for), in turn, belongs to the Indo-European root-complex constellated
around bha-2, to speak, and is cognate with fateri, fama, phanai (to speak, the
source of "prophet"), phone, pheme, etc. A fate, then, is literally a speaking.
Our fate is what bespeaks us or, for Hamlet, what "cries out." This root is
homonymous (though the distinction between homonymy and polysemy is
sometimes problematic) with bha-1, to shine (in Watkins's numbering), the
root of phos, phainein ("to bring to light"), phainesthai, and, via these, of
"phenomenon," "epiphany," "emphasis," "phantasm," and "fantasy." In this
latter complex is implied an idea of lighting that precedes epistemological
concern with illusion and reality. The phonetic correspondence or pairing of a
root meaning "to speak" with one meaning "to shine" occurs elsewhere
throughout the Indo-European lexicon and suggests a deep-seated semantic
affinity. On the root bha-1 (in its later form, pha-), particularly as associated
with the concept of aisthesis, Heidegger has had much to say (e.g., the
Introduction to Being and Time, ?7, A), and in An Introduction to
Metaphysics, he alludes to a controversial effort (by Friedrich Specht, in
1932) to connect it to bheu-.
The question of root-extensions and 'semantic change' is of course
highly technical, though fascinating even to a layman. For a suggestive
contemporary example of such second-level hypothesis-one bearing on
important Heideggerian themes-see the attempt by Douglas Frame to relate
the substantive nous, or noos, to the I-E root nes-1, "to return home," "to
return to life and light," in The Myth of Return in Early Greek Epic (New
Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1978).

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