Language and the House of Being

Posted on April 26, 2010
Filed Under Heidegger, Philosophy | Leave a Comment

Interesting snippet up at Enowning on Heidegger’s infamous statement

Language is the house of Being. In its home man dwells. Those who think and those who create with words are the guardians of this home. (Heidegger, Letter on Humanism)

To me it just means that being shouldn’t be taken as nearly as mysterious as some make it. The word mysticism that some Heideggarians get into always bugged me. As I understand him he just means that to talk about being involves language. I can’t say “my computer is in front of me” without language. Nothing can be in this sense without language.

However I think Heidegger turns more broadly as time progresses beyond “mere” language into art itself. Thus the strong relationship between language and art that I see in “The Origin of the Work of Art.” My own preference would be to see Heidegger moving from language into semiotics in general, although of course he doesn’t analyze it as semiotics. The movement of object to interpretant though the sign vehicle is the movement of being.

In Origin Heidegger speaks of strife between the world and earth. The work of art is a happening that is this strife. As I read it one could see earth as objects and world as interpretants. So the strife is this movement that characterizes signs. There always is a tension between world and earth precisely because signs never represent perfectly. A sign always indicates its object by a guess. There is that essential gap in which we dwell.

Related posts:

  1. Does Heidegger Reify Language?
  2. Heidegger, Humans and Language
  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

Leave a Reply