Abstract
Recently, the earlier common opinion according to which language does not play a central role in Being and Time and only becomes important for Heidegger after the “turning” (Kehre), has come into question.1 Nevertheless, there has yet to be a systematically internal demonstration of the basic continuity between “Heidegger I” and “Heidegger II” with regard to his conception of language and based on the relevant conceptual structures. The goal of this paper is to trace the crucial elements of this continuity. The relationship of the transcendental philosophical method in Being and Time to Heidegger’s conception of “Poetry” in central writings after the so-called “turning” will build the frame for our formulation of the problem. Our strategy consists of, (I) revealing “Poetry” in Heidegger’s usage to be essentially a paraphrase of the “hermeneutic as” in Being and Time. This, however, requires (II) an analysis of Heidegger’s identification of “Understanding” and “Interpretation” in Being and Time with regard to his conception of the “delotic function” of language. (III) This last can itself only be clarified in connection with the Husserlian problematic of the transcendental language. With this clarification we can finally (IV) reject the (today still) dominant interpretation, according to which Heidegger left the transcendcental method of Being and Time behind after the “turning”. Indeed, we must even question the dominant idea of a “linguistic turn in Heidegger’s hermeneutics”. That phenomenology, also Husserl’s, is itself hermeneutic, and this means in the last analysis that already in Being and Time language is the “housing of Being”.
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Notes
Cf. particularly C. Lafonte, Sprache and Welterschliessung. Zur linguistischen Wende der Hermeneutik Heideggers (Frankfurt/M. 1994).
In this paper I use the term “achievement” in its phenomenological technical sense.
If the italics are those of the writer quoted, this will be indicated by the abbreviation a. i. (author’s italics). Otherwise, all italics — and certainly underlining as well as all passages in brackets — are ours. The list of Abbreviations and Works Cited appears above, in this paper.
For the idea of the being of the entity as its origin (Her-kunft) see my book Interpretación y verdad. Acerca de la ontologia general de Heidegger.
Page numbers without a textual reference always refer to passages in Being and Time.
The use of deixis in this formula, which appears throughout Heidegger’s work, has a particularizing function, which is aimed against “specific” or “empirical” generality. On the particularizing use of deixis see my aforementioned book Interpretación y verdad. Acerca de la ontologia general de Heidegger. For the problem of empirical generality, see below.
The term anwesen is an archaic verb, which is rarely used…. The noun Anwesen (manor, mansion) and the adjectival participate ansesend are more common. The term Anwesenheit is, on its part, a purely technical one. For a detailed consideration of the presence’s problem by Heidegger and his use of the term Anwesenheit see my forthcoming book Interpretación y verdad.
Obviously one is faced here with the typical phenomenological problem of the “correlation” between act and object. M. Scheler, who together with Husserl is considered by Heidegger in his lecture of the summer term of 1925 as the other “leading [führender]” phenomenologist (B20 119n.), says: “All statements that an object exists demand (…) also to say the type of experience [Erfahrungsart] in which the object is given” (S2 270).
Heidegger critically refers to several stances about the Aóyos, and then he says: “Aóyos (…) means rather 8r7Aovv, making visible [offenbar machen]” (32).
Concerning this formula see my forthcoming book Interpretación y verdad, §2I.
In this quotation I stressed the notion of “experience”, for its import for the phenomenological model the “late” Heidegger continues applying in a treacherous way through his new archaizing and deceptive language. See below, the end of §3, the introduction to part I1, as well as § 4 and 5.
Notice Heidegger’s formula for the Aristotelian Ao’ yoç Kara Tt1 0’ S: it becomes important “to address something as something [etwas als etwas ansprechen]” in Being and Time (62).
The word lichten means to light, to illuminate, and has the same root as Licht, that is, light. This demonstrates the coherence of this citation with the quotations made above, in which it is spoken exactly about the light (Licht), and to be sure, in the sense that naming, saying, means to put the named into the light, to present it; according to this usage naming is illuminating.
In last analysis there is a difference: in view of its link with “unusualness”. “poetry” is not mere “projecting” in general but “projecting” on the basis or “historicalness”, that is, not the general “projecting” that also includes the “everydayness”. Nevertheless, the basic structure is the same, for both “historicalness” or “unusualness” on the one side, and “everydayness” on the other side are mere “modifications” of the general structure. For the link between “poetry” and “historicalness” or “unusualness” see my The Concept of Earth by Heidegger. Historicalness and the Oblivion of Being, forthcoming in Analecta Husserliana.
For this point see below, specially § 4–6.
It is interesting at this point to consider the following. The word ansprechen [“speaking (to someone of…)”]—as in the formulation “speaking of something as something”—is equivocal, and in the present context there are two meanings that are of interest. First, it means to address someone in speech. Second, it means to address someone using their title, name, etc. Clearly, Heidegger takes “naming” after Being and Time to involve a form of the second meaning. The German nennen corresponds to the Latin appellare. Thus, we might, for example. distinguish the two senses in English by distinguishing “appellation of something as something” and “naming”.
The Heideggerian “existential” development of “understanding”, according to which, for example, “understanding” is a “capacity”, places a burden upon the simple, traditionally phenomenological structure from which Heidegger begins his investigation.
On voÊbv and AÉyeiv in Parmenides, Plato and Aristotle, cf. Tugendhat: “It is this contradictory combination of Aéyecv and voÊty which is characteristic of the Parmenedian concept of thought: with regard to its object (…) thought is called Aéyeiv, with regard to its structure (pure having-before-oneself) voel v (…) Plato and Aristotle distinguished between Ai-yap and voÊóv although they also—now alongside Ayecv—held fast to the idea of a non-sensory voeiv (…)“. (PhA 46) According to the ”in itself contradictory concept of thought as looking-saying or saying-looking“, thought has ”`the object’ before itself just as sensory perception has its content“, the ”complex structure of `something as something’ [is] reduced to a pure `something— (PhA 46).
As early as his lectures given during the war emergency semester or 1918. Heidegger spoke of a “hermeneutic intuition” (B56/57 117, a. i.), which means precisely an intuition with an as-structure.
Which Husserl calls “Seinsglauben”, “Seinthesis”, “Existentialsetzung der aktuellen Erfahrung” (Id3 29).
Cf. Heidegger’s lecture from the summer 1927: “(…) the development of the methodological structures of ontological-transcendental discernment. (…) The terminological characterization for the character of the priority of being before the entity is the expression of a priori, aprioricity, the prior. Being is as a priori, prior to entity” (B24 27, a. i.). See also: “ `Apriorism’ is the method of every scientific philosophy that understands itself’ (50 footnote).
It is this that Tugendhat in the above footnote refers to as the “compromised” structure “of a pure ”something“. Cf. footnote 8.
The compromised structure is also that which Tugendhat calls “absolute being”, for example, in “it is”, “I am” (SS 174).
See the formula: “having-seen”.
For the technical meaning of this expression see my aforementioned book, §15.
For a discussion of this expression and the problem of truth in Heidegger, see our aforementioned book.
Although on the most basic level, which does not yet imply “being” in the sense of my “existence” and thus “its disclosure itself’ (165) and the distinction between ”properness“ and ”non-properness“.
It is not gratuitous to note here that this is a permanent formula of Heidegger’s. Thus, we find in 1959: “We do not wish to ground language in something else that is not itself, nor do we wish to explain other things through language”. (US I2f.) Or: “The event is not the product (result) of something else (…)” (US 258).
For a detailed discussion of the transcendental phenomenological problems which are involved in this formula, see my aforementioned book, first part, chapter two, and second part.
For the detailed consideration of the transcendental philosophical problems involved in demanding self-referential access to entity, see my aforementioned book.
This is the implicit rejection of classification which is so typical of Heidegger’s method.
For a detailed analysis of this “covering up”, see my aforementioned book.
See above.
For such rejection see 242 and 244, footnote.
There is, however, another form of generality. See below.
With regard to this problem, see my aforementioned book, § 15.
For an explication of the precise relationship between the formulae “of itself’ and ”from itself’ see my aforementioned book.
The specifically ontological transcendental usage of a word is the philosophical usage. See the aforementioned book, especially § 14 and 19.
Cf.: “Nevertheless, not everything which is said is already something said”. (VA 235)
What this means precisely cannot be followed up on here. This would involve a whole series of conditions, which extend up to the “properness of existence”.
Notice the ordering: “is too heavy”, “in its readiness-to-hand”, “of itself’. The last is a formal concretion, that is, the universal ontological formula, the second is a ”regional“, ”de-formalized alteration“ of the first (cf. 241), whereas the first is only an ”antic“, and actually ”ontic-ontological“ concretion of the second.
Cf.: “Knowledgeable is, to put it in Latin quid vidit, he who saw something (…)” (US 223); see also the related passage in VA 209.
We find other “fundamental forms”, for example, when we “see (…) an animal or a human (…). Such acts belong to the sphere of experience (…)” (Id3 9, a. i.).
See here below.
Recall above: no redness without beingness.
E. Fink has attempted to develop this distinction — under the influence of Heidegger — in his self-titled “VI Cartesian Meditation”. We cannot deal with this development here, however.
There are both theoretical and als practical (Heidegger: calculating) comparative manners.
Cf. Foucault’s idea of the “empirical a priori” in The Order of Things.
For an examination of Being as “origin” see my aforementioned book.
“Readiness-to-hand”, “Being-with”, “life” in Being and Time are regional ontological determinations, while “too heavy” constitutes a ontic-ontological determination as a “concretion” of the regional ontological determination “readiness to hand”. Nevertheless, all the mentioned determinations are equally a priori or transcendental, since not one of them stems from experience, that is, not one stands for a referential access to the entity in question.
The traditional interpretation of Being and Time does not understand the basically identity between “understanding” (§32) and “interpretation” (§33), that is to say, the basic phenomenological idea concerning a necessarily “articulated” presentation. A notable example of this mistake is the following proposition of Ricoeur’s: “The Husserlian demand for return to intuition is countered [by Heidegger] by the necessity for all understanding to be mediated by an interpretation” (TA 31). Here there are two mistakes. First, to think that first Heidegger’s Hermeneutic introduces the “articulated” seeing. Second, to misunderstand that in Heidegger understanding is “mediated by interpretation”, for in Heidegger they simply are identical. Ricoeur refers (ibid.) to Heidegger’s rule according to which the “development of understanding” is “interpretation” (148). Heidegger’s reference to “development” means only the order of his explanation. It is not the case that there is, first, “understanding” and then a real “development” to “interpretation”. The last concept only makes explicit from the very beginning the “articulated” structure of “understanding” as such. In §32 Heidegger stresses the presentational achievement of “understanding”, and for this reason he equates it formally to a “seeing”, “sight” (146n.). In §33 Heidegger now simply stresses that “simple seeing” carries more than an “interpretation” in a formal, transcendental sense.
For a more detailed discussion see my aforementioned book.
Remember: “(…) there is Being only in Being-there insofar as he understands Being” (183).
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Canán, Á.C. (2000). Transcendentalism and Poetry in Heidegger. In: Tymieniecka, AT. (eds) The Poetry of Life in Literature. Analecta Husserliana, vol 69. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-3431-8_6
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