Language Speaks

Language Speaks

Outside Reading: Martin Heidegger/Language, Poetry, Thought

September 20, 2016

One of the most trivializing and intriguing philosophers of the 20th century, often associated with the existential movement, Martin Heidegger was obsessed with the issue of Being. Throughout the history of western philosophy Heidegger observed how Being was either addressed indirectly, improperly, or missed altogether. He believed the notion of Being to be so fundamentally and intimately part of a thing that it is nearly always missed and obscured. Finding no adequate grounds upon which to base his arguments in the history of philosophy, Heidegger was forced to come up with his own language for the issue.  His writings are riddled with etymological analysis and new terms that bring new and refreshing light to the hiddenness of Being. Heidegger’s persistence to plumb the depths of Being led him to brilliantly create language for things that had never before been articulated. 

According to Heidegger, language is an essential existential category of humanity. We live in an articulated world that becomes open and revealed to us through language. “Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man.”(144) This is a broad reaching statement that gives ascendency to the power of language. 

In his essay, Language, Heidegger seeks to understand the essence of language by phenomenologically observing how language manifests itself as language. He does not seek to ground language in anything nor is he attempting to prove language as the grounds of something else. The goal of the essay is to understand “language as language.” Heidegger critiques traditional approaches to language not by proving them wrong but by proving them insufficient to account for language as language in it’s most essential, primordial form. Throughout history philosophers have merely attributed language to the phenomena of expression rather than looking at language on it’s own terms.

When looking at language as it is, on its own terms, we find that language speaks. So what then does it mean to speak? Speaking is a human activity that externalizes an inward thought through expression and presents and represents the real and unreal. The speaking of language must be sought in what is spoken. Words call forth, disclosing what was previously concealed and giving presence to the thing being spoken of. Speaking does not divide world and things into a subject-object dialect but illuminates the process on penetration between world and things as inseparably one. If language speaks then human speech is a twofold response of receiving and replying to language. By anticipatory hearing, in the “peal of stillness,” man hears language speaking and responds.