Does Heidegger Reify Language?

Posted on April 30, 2009
Filed Under Heidegger, Philosophy | 1 Comment

The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger has in it an unfortunate essay by Richard Rorty about how Heidegger reifies language. I don’t believe he does. But Rorty’s view is now “common accepted wisdom” (i.e. Das Man in Heidegger-talk) and gets repeated more than it should. One quote against this view of reification is the following:

Instead of explaining language in terms of one thing or an other, and thus running away from it, the way to language intends to let language be experienced as language. In the nature of language, to be sure, language itself is conceptually grasped – but grasped in the grasp of something other than itself. (On the Way to Language, 119)

Even in Being and Time language is a worldly phenomena (worldly in the special sense Heidegger uses). It’s determined by our practices in the world. In other words for Heidegger one doesn’t speak of language in terms of ideal references but simply its worldly context that determines meaning. (This is similar to Davidson’s point that there is no such thing as language if we mean what philosophers have traditionally thought about language) So Heidegger says,

In discourse, insofar as it is genuine, what is said is drawn from what is talked about. (SZ 32)

The confusion comes from places like his essay “Words” where he says,

…the being of anything that is resides in the word. Therefore this statement holds true: Language is the house of Being.” (On the Way to Language 166)

However one has to keep in mind that in places like “A Dialogue” he says things like,

…speaking about language turns language almost inevitably into an object . . . and then its nature vanishes. (“A Dialog on Language” 149)

To the degree we can talk about a reification of language we aren’t really speaking of language. Rather it is that language is the ontic manifestation of the ontological structure of discourse. But to think of Heidegger as reifying in any normal sense of the term seems quite incorrect. Language is more “style” than language as thought of by philosophers. (Thinking here of style in Nietzsche’s sense – especially as understood by Heidegger)

Related posts:

  1. Heidegger, Humans and Language
  2. Language and the House of Being
  3. Language, Externalism and Meaning
  4. Davidson: Private Language
  5. Joseph (Smith) in Egypt: Babel, Hieroglyphs, and the Pure Language of Eden
  6. Heidegger’s Language

Comments

One Response to “Does Heidegger Reify Language?”

I like this quote from Taylor Carman’s “Was Heidegger a Linguistic Idealist?”

To trace historically contingent, factical languages back to discourse understood as an existential structure of being-in-the-world is not to reify language in general as a kind of universal medium, but to acknowledge that ontically concrete linguistic phenomena are what they are only by being part of human practices, which are at once constituted and constituting, thrown and projecting. Language, like all meaningful worldly phenomena, owes its intelligibility to what Wittgenstein calls a ‘form of life’ (PI §§19, 23, 241, pp. 174, 226). Language is to discourse, one might say, as the surface of a thing is to the whole. Even if there cannot fail to be a surface, still the surface is not the whole. One can even admit that without this surface the thing would not be the thing it is. But this is arguably true not just of discourse and language, but of ontological structures and their ontic manifestations generally. Language is not the whole of signiŽcance, then, but only a part, a kind of surface. There is nothing obviously inconsistent or untenable, it seems to me, in Heidegger’s account of language as an ontically concrete manifestation of discourse, which is for its part an existential structure of being-in the-world.

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