Heidegger, Humans and Language

Posted on May 26, 2010
Filed Under Heidegger, Peirce, Philosophy | 2 Comments

I think it safe to say that one of the more interesting parts of the latter Heidegger is where he talks about language. One of the more famous quotes is that man doesn’t have language but rather language has man. This has always reminded me of Peirce’s quote that man is a symbol, even though that isn’t really what Heidegger was getting at.

One thing that has long been of interest to me in Heidegger is that he doesn’t really talk about people normally. Rather he talks about dasein. Without getting into the technical debate about what he means by dasein let’s just say it is a way of talking philosophically about human consciousness without all the baggage of talking about human consciousness. I think, as time has gone on, that this has proved quite wise. There isn’t, for instance, the problem of human vs. animal consciousness. (Or all the problems that consciousness as a term has) If an animal fits the analysis Heidegger provides then it is a dasein.

Traditionally philosophers have tended to separate humans from animals by noting that humans have language and reason. With 20th century biological understanding I think saying only humans have reason is problematic at best. However it seems much more reasonable to say only humans have robust language. Yes dolphins, apes and the like have proto-languages. There are crucial elements missing from their being full language users. To me this crucial difference is the question of whether “being” is a question for such creatures.

All the presentation of animal languages do demonstrate some simple sign abilities. But the ability to really grapple with the meaning of “to be” in its various forms seems to not be an issue for animals.

Is this a key element for Heidegger though?

I think it safe to say that what Heidegger means by language is broader and more expansive than what linguists mean by language. As such some may say it does include animal languages.

For Heidegger I think one can say that the metaphysical conception of language is something in terms of dasein‘s thinking tied to conveying information about objects. This metaphysical conception thus is limited by theoretical and scientific representation. It is for Heidegger technology. Language is a kind of machine for calculating and translating.

Heidegger believes that there is more to language than this: what poetry does with language as opposed to what science and technology do with language. Instead of being about translating or calculation it is expressive in the sense of showing. Indeed this is more foundational in that for him meaning determines reference. That is the way entities show themselves to us in a particular community determines how we refer to the entities.

One way of putting this is that things can be for us only because there is a stable structure of significations. So there are signs that enable a desk to constantly be a desk for us. Further these signs aren’t tied to the immediate moment but can be deferred in various ways. (It is the implications of this ability for deferral, as in say a written text, that Derrida focuses in on) Peirce has a fairly similar view. He calls these stabilized systems of significance habits. They play a huge role in his conception of phenomenology. Indeed I believe that they function in many similar ways to how Heidegger conceives of language.

What becomes clear though is that there are many stable systems of significance out there. Indeed animals have quite a few of them. My dog, for instance, sees his ball and recognizes that this enables him to play fetch. So he immediately becomes quite excited, grabs the ball, and runs over to me to play. Is that language though? I think few see that as language even though it appears to disclose a kind of world in which there are various pieces of equipment, practices, and aims.

The question then becomes how to distinguish language from what animals do.

Related posts:

  1. Does Heidegger Reify 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 and Epistemology II

Comments

2 Responses to “Heidegger, Humans and Language”

Nice post; you raise some excellent questions. I wanted to point you to an interesting passage in the History of the Concept of Time that is related to the issues you are discussing here. It’s on pg 255 of Kisiel’s translation:

“A stone never finds itself but is simply present at hand. A very primitive unicellular form of life, on the contrary, will already find itself, where this disposition can be the greatest and darkest dullness, but for all that it is in its structure of being essentially distinct from merely being present at hand like a thing.”

It seems then that we can make a sharp ontological distinction between inorganic entities and organic entities in virtue of organic teleology, however “dark” and “dull”. This distinction is grounded in the significance of having a metabolic structure through affectivity and homeostatic regulation. But within organic entities, we can, as you point out, distinguish between humans and nonhuman organisms. And as you also point out, modern studies of nonhuman communication indicates that “making things manifest” [in terms of bodily relevance] is not unique to humans. However, we might be able to distinguish human language from animal communication in terms of how humans use language for robust *self-interpretation*. Das Man allows for possibilities of self-disclosure that are structured in terms of historically grounded linguistic concepts such as self-hood, having a soul, or being a “mind”. While the minds of humans and nonhumans animals are probably similar insofar as we share the care-structure, humans seem to be the only animal capable of explicitly telling ourselves and others that we have minds. This might form a bootstrapping effect wherein the capacity for making thing manifest *in terms of explicit concepts* such as souls actually changes the phenomenology by opening up a deeper hermeneutic dimension. Charles Taylor’s book Human Agency and Language is really good on this point.

Anyway, those are just some thoughts.

I was going to try and offer a few answers in a subsequent post. I was waiting on some permission to refer to an email discussion first.

I think that Heidegger’s engagement with Schelling is interesting here — which coincidentally I’d been reading the past month while not struggling with Badiou. There the question of panpsychism or pantheism is raised. Which gets us directly to Peirce who is very similar to Schelling (as he himself acknowledges) in many ways.

The quote you give doesn’t really get at the issue of language, as I see it. Rather a rock (ignoring pantheistic issues) simply can’t engage in practices. A cell can. Of course between those two we have ongoing chemical reactions (of which, of course, a rock is technically always already engaged with). Chemical reactions are, by their nature, sign-processes.

Of course the Peircean in me says everything is matters of degree or continuity so we shouldn’t expect to find absolute divisions. So all of this isn’t a big deal. The big issue for Peirce would be teleology (which is of course wrapped up in the question of language and meaning vs. machines). This is also, at least among analytic philosophy, exactly where Peirce is seen as most controversial.

Self-interpretation has typically been the place where humans and non-humans have been distinguished. Except that the past few years there have been experiments that suggest many higher animals do engage in self-interpretation of sorts. For instance Plotnik has shown elephants are capable of self-awareness. (There’s a video for this I can’t seem to track down on YouTube that is very fascinating) Many apes, such as gibbons, can’t do this. Although one can always dispute the significance of mirror tests for this.

The other place animals and humans have traditionally been distinguished is in planning for the future (Aristotle’s teleological reasoning or the idea of final causes as determining action). However that’s definitely broken down of late as well. (And Peirce thought such matters were rather wide spread outside of humans, as I noted – although most science remains as committed to a reduction of final causation to efficient causation as it is to reducing the mind to 3rd person physical descriptions)

In Heideggarian terms the question is whether animals can only look at entities as either present-at-hand or as withdrawn into background practices. They can’t be meaningful in a more robust sense. (Although one might say that even the present-at-hand is highly meaningful) So for many scientists what is required is a sense of self as well as the ability to project into the past or future oneself and ones ownmost possibilities. (What Heidegger gets at with his temporal ecstasies) Tests on dolphins appear to show they can do this. That is they can repeat tricks on demand which are not habitual tricks. This appears to require a self-awareness as well as that ability to project oneself phenomenologically. (See this paper of Mercado et al)

I’ve noticed that even a lot of Heideggarians tend to embrace the Bischof-Köhler hypothesis which is that non-humans can’t have those sorts of phenomenological temporal projections. Even though that thesis has been roundly soundly falsified the past decade. (I think at least)

The one thing that hasn’t been demonstrated though is whether there are mental images involved in these activities. Yet while that criticism makes sense for a representationalist it makes far less sense for someone who takes Heidegger seriously. (Since in one sense Heidegger’s project is a critique of the more Cartesian oriented representationalism)

However as you note in your last sentences, the question about whether there are explicit concepts is significant. Put an other way, how does an animal engage with a sign or word?

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