Günter Figal
On the Way to Language—with this title, Heidegger has not only aptly characterized the contributions of his late book; the title characterizes his philosophy as a whole. There has never been a turn to language in Heidegger; at the beginning of his independent philosophizing he was already concerned with the question of language, in a manner that, basically, applies or ought to apply to each philosophizing: philosophy, as thinking that articulates itself in language and that has to endeavor to reflect its actualization, is always already more or less expressly an engagement with its linguistic character (Sprachlichkeit). However, Heidegger pursues this engagement with particular intensity. Already in his earliest lectures he is carried by the conviction that language as possibility of philosophy is at the same time its endangering; thus it is essential to gain philosophically the language of philosophy against the tendency of language itself—particularly a linguistic form that gives the impression of being appropriate to philosophy. But in the course of time Heidegger has understood ever more clearly that the possibility of philosophical articulation is located in the essence of language itself. It arises from language itself, provided that one corresponds to that essence without ever being able to appropriate it. Language is always prior to philosophizing, and it always stays ahead of it. Heidegger’s thinking as a whole can demonstrate that philosophy is a path in language, a being-toward-language without available beginning and without a goal within reach.
Already from the very beginning, Heidegger’s reflection on language is a discussion with the traditional understanding of philosophy. What is inherent to it as possibility and endangering is, as Heidegger calls it, “the theoretical.”1 By this is meant the attitude in which the world as a whole or some of its particular aspects become an object, and in which that which can be asserted becomes an object of assertion. What is concealed by this is that the world is primarily experienced in significance and that life in the world is actualized in a worldly manner. Accordingly, a turning away from assertions and the development of a language is required in order to do justice to this primordial experiencing of world. Heidegger finds a model of this turning away in the expression and manifestation of Christian life, as they are realized in Paul’s Epistles—Heidegger thinks that precisely there something that has never been seen in the philosophical tradition, especially not in ontology, becomes effective: “history and life.”2 This expression means an existing that actualizes in temporal openness: in a present that is extended between the having-been of revelation and the futural return of the Lord and that is thus temporal in a transparent manner. Since the “expressive forms of ancient science” that were adopted in later Christianity distort this mode of experience, it is essential to “radically get rid of” its formative power.3 What would be in theological terms a repetition of early Christianity in its primordiality Heidegger has attempted philosophically and for the sake of philosophy: in analogy to the linguistic form of the Epistles he develops the concept of a philosophical discourse that does not objectify life, thereby treating it as an indifferent given, but rather interprets and communicates the temporally and “factically” actualized life. Heidegger’s name for this attitude and mode of articulation of life is “hermeneutics of facticity.”4
Now it would have been obvious to work out the program of such a hermeneutics in terms of a turning away from the “expressive forms of ancient science” and the very conception reflecting it. Over and above an orientation toward the Pauline Epistles this would have helped the fundamental themes of Christian theology to achieve new significance, and it could have led to an understanding of language stimulated by the former. But this possibility was seized not by Heidegger, but only by his student Gadamer: Against the forgetting of language that he diagnoses with regard to Greek thought, Gadamer, in his opus magnum, falls back to the thought of Incarnation in order to come to an understanding of the true being of language. In contrast and despite his critique, Heidegger remains committed to Greek thought—above all to the one among its representatives who, in a manner authoritative for the tradition, establishes the understanding of philosophy as theory and also of language as medium of determining and establishing: Aristotle. Just as Heidegger criticizes the ontological tradition by reflecting on Aristotle as its originator and by attempting to gain from his thought the possibility of a different “ontology of facticity”5 truly corresponding to life or existence, he remains also, as a thinker of language, an Aristotelian criticizing Aristotle. In the elaboration of his hermeneutics of facticity Heidegger engages with the Aristotelian examination of language as the possibility of determining and establishing, as λόγος ἀποφαντικός, that is not in the sense of a negative critique, but rather in an integrative manner. Heidegger’s hermeneutics of facticity takes up the Aristotelian program of a “logic,” “of the categories of this addressing and interpreting.”6 Thus understood, logic “needs to be brought back to . . . the original unity of facticity”; it is an “offshoot,” that is, an emerging part of the hermeneutics of facticity.7 One can reverse this: If logic belongs as one part to the hermeneutics of facticity, one has to articulate it “logically”; it does not abolish the Aristotelian examination of λόγος ἀποφαντικός, but it renders it effective in a new manner when understood in a comprehensive context.
Heidegger’s attachment to Aristotle is obvious in his thought of the twenties up to Being and Time; anybody who describes it does not discover anything new anymore, but at best contributes to a better understanding of basically familiar facts. But Heidegger, by recognizing the failure of the program of Being and Time, in no way leaves Aristotle behind. Heidegger’s attachment to Aristotle is also not limited to his early project of a hermeneutic ontology of Dasein. On the contrary, even the revision of his thought leading Heidegger away from the approach of his opus magnum and bringing him to the realization regarding the irretrievable pre-givenness of language goes back essentially to an engagement with Aristotle. This is neither inconsistent nor an expression of a bias regarding Aristotelian thought. Rather, it is Heidegger’s only possibility not to give up his earlier conception as simply having missed its point. This conception can be revised only if there can be a different interpretation of the very context that was worked out by it. On condition that the hermeneutics of Dasein actually includes a “logic” in the Aristotelian sense, a new, more appropriate conception of this hermeneutics is dependent on a different understanding of this “logic.” We shall now see what all this means in greater detail.
* * *
Heidegger’s “logic,” as it is developed thoroughly for the first time in the lecture from the winter semester 1925–26, has a clearly formulated intention. It discusses the Aristotelian definition of λόγος ἀποφαντικός in order to show that the statement “is not the locus of truth, but truth the locus of the statement.”8 Not least because this interpretation was included with minor modifications in Being and Time, it is known in its essential features. Something as something can be brought to language only because there is always already the possibility of discovering it as something. By coming to language in an assertion, something becomes accessible in a particular manner. But the effecting of this accessibility, the ἀποφαίνεσθαι of λόγος ἀποφαντικός, is due to the previous accessibility of worldly relations. To take up Heidegger’s example from Being and Time: in order to be able to articulate the statement “the hammer is heavy,” one has to have experienced the hammer as too heavy and thus unsuitable while working with it. If the “apophantical as” that becomes effective in the assertion of something (the hammer) as something (heavy) is founded in the “hermeneutical as,” in the interpretation of something (the hammer) as something (too heavy for this particular purpose) occurring in dealing, then Heidegger can rightly claim that logic as “the interpretation of the categories of this addressing and interpreting” belongs in the context of the interpretation of worldly relations and of life or existence in them, and thus into hermeneutics.
In the unfolding of this train of thought Heidegger is by no means sparing in critical remarks regarding Aristotle. Aristotle has “failed” to ask about the “structural phenomenon” of the hermeneutical as;9 he “has not freed himself from the orientation towards language”10 and therefore holds on to the “λόγος in the sense of determining”11 as a main idea that has been authoritative for the entire tradition. On the other hand, Heidegger sees in the Aristotelian determination of λόγος ἀποφαντικός itself nonetheless the signs for the dependence of linguistic truth and falsity on a previous uncovering: When Aristotle states that only the one λόγος is expounding “in which being-true and being-false comes forth,” “coming forth” (ὑπάρχειν) originally means “from the outset being objectively present” or, in an added explanation, “laying the foundation for something so that everything else is carried by means of this being which is objectively present from the outset.”12 In the context of this determination the critique of Aristotle can be limited to the point that, instead of Dasein and its worldly relations, he understands the objectively present, that is, being in its essential determinateness and identity (οὐσία) as that which “lays the foundation.”
This is certainly a central difference; it is the one from which Heidegger’s program of a fundamental ontology of Dasein—that is to prove an ontology of objective presence as something derivative and at the same time is to found it in its possibility—receives its justification in general. But Heidegger can put human Dasein at the ontological locus of οὐσία only if he leaves the very frame unchanged in which he carries out this replacement. This is the very way in which the claim of Being and Time is formulated: the “unity of being in contrast to the manifold of ‘categories’ ” that, according to Heidegger, Aristotle has discovered but not explained in a satisfactory manner13 is shown vis-à-vis Dasein. Since Dasein is not only “ontic,” a being, but, due to the understanding of being essential to it, also “ontological,”14 it can be the One all manifold exhibiting is to relate to. Accordingly, Dasein, like οὐσία conceived by Aristotle, has to be accessible in its unity such that it carries the multiplicity of “categorial” determinations and renders them comprehensible. In other words, Dasein has to be understood as that which is already from the outset accessible, without which nothing belonging to it can be exhibited, brought to language and thus to explicit attention.
This is the real point of Heidegger’s critical interpretation of the Aristotelian λόγος ἀποφαντικός: at most, it is of secondary importance to him to show that the assertion is an abstraction becoming independent vis-à-vis a context that is experienced primarily in everyday taking action. Rather, what is crucial is that with everyday taking action the very unity that is Dasein itself comes into play. Everyday taking action belongs to a Dasein that interprets itself in the multiplicity of the diverse aspects of worldly life, but that is essentially—Heidegger would say: authentically—the immediate apprehension of its own being. This immediacy of Dasein does not communicate itself in the articulating language linked thus with the manifold, and it can by no means be shown and asserted. If it comes to be expressive, then this takes place all at once, in a moment. And provided that it is the matter of philosophy, there is already a name for it in Heidegger’s first lecture from 1919: “hermeneutical intuition.”15
Although hermeneutical intuition does not communicate itself in asserting, it is not without language, and in order to understand its linguistic character, Heidegger again falls back on Aristotle, more exactly, on his determination of the nous and the νοεῖν, on, as Heidegger calls it in Being and Time, “the simple sense perception of something.”16 Since in it the simple is grasped, it is not an asserting of something as something, but a touching lightly and saying, a θιγεῖν καὶ φάναι, as Aristotle calls it (Met. 1051b 24). Here one should not think of a simple addressing as it occurs with naming, but rather of a saying of the simple accessibility as it prevails more or less explicitly in each articulated discourse. In Aristotle, simple saying corresponds to a revealed being (on alethes, Met. 1051b 1) in Heidegger, to the being of Dasein that, hermeneutically, is to come to language in its simplicity and immediacy. It uncovers the truth that lays “the foundation” or each saying and that is concealed, if the perceived, as Heidegger says at one point, is “disperceived” (Auseinandervernommen):17 as Dasein in the dispersion of the worldly life and not in the simplicity of its being.
It is precisely through the very way in which Heidegger here introduces the alternative of truth and coveredness (Verdeckung) that the notion of a perceiving and saying prevailing in discourse becomes problematic: The unity and simplicity is purely perceived at most in a moment so that it, inhering in the manifold, emerges as if in a puzzle picture and disappears again immediately; since the articulated and manifold cannot be removed, the unity that can be grasped only immediately is always obscured or covered by it. But this difficulty need not be due to the matter, but may have its reason in the intention to realize the simplicity of perceiving and saying immediately and as much as possible by itself. This intention could for its part cover the essence of language, if the simple and the manifold in language do not contradict but rather complement each other.
* * *
Heidegger draws this conclusion in his lecture during the summer semester of 1931 that attends to the first three chapters of Book Θ of the Aristotelian Metaphysics. Language itself is here determined as unity and multiplicity; it is no longer the articulation of a primordial simple, but the possibility for the unification of the manifold and at the same time the enabling of multiplicity leading necessarily to this unification. Language understood as λόγος is, as Heidegger himself says, “to glean, to harvest, to gather, to add one to the other, and so to place the one in relation to the other”; it is itself “the relation, the relationship” that “holds together that which stands within it.” It is “the ruling structure, the gathering of those beings related among themselves.”18 This holding together and relating is, however, actualized always only in certain regards. The gathering takes place in a selective manner; it is, Heidegger says, “only partially a taking into possession of something because that which is to be possessed always remains other.”19 By placing the one in relation to the other, “it is always a this or that which is decided upon and separated out.”20 That which is separated out, that which is kept apart from the particular gathering, is not the diffuse and chaotic multiplicity of a prelinguistic, wholly nonarticulated world, but the non-bounded yet explorable space of the negative, of the sayable, that is excluded from the particular saying yet encloses it. In Heidegger’s formulation: The space of the negative is a dispersing “into a multiplicity of expository sayings and assertions,” in which language understood as λόγος “is always already found split up and scattered.”21 For this reason Unity is “always a winning back,”22 the winning back of a unity that is essential to language and in which it always again and essentially loses itself.
In this rough characterization of λόγος Heidegger develops determinations that form the center of his later thinking of language. The considerations of On the Way to Language as well as the interpretations of Heraclitus’s understanding of λόγος are here prefigured, and this shows that Heidegger does not gain them only in the context of a reflection on the poetic character of language or of his engagement with Heraclitus’s fragments. That λόγος as a relating is something Heidegger unfolds with regard to the apophantical as he had recovered it in his discussion of Aristotle: By saying something about something, this something comes not only to language in its immediate particularity, but gets also related to something that is not identical with that which it is in itself. Moreover, the assertion stands in a relation to that which is not ascribed to it. In each ascribing, “it is always a this or that which is decided upon and separated out”; something is something as that which is addressed, always in the context of particular other, not yet realized possibilities, so that the determinateness of the assertion belongs together with the indeterminateness, the multiplicity of being-other.
Despite these characteristics of the assertion, Heidegger does not see the assertion as the locus in which the essence of λόγος becomes most effective. For him, it is in a knowledge of producing (ἐπιστήμη ποιητική) that the relation of unity and multiplicity is developed in a more decisive form. Here, λόγος is to grasp as the reason why the form—Heidegger says: “outward appearance”—of the work to be produced not only can be regarded as end and completion of producing, but, in the actualization of production, also can be related to that which essentially “lies over and against.”23 According to this interpretation, producing is tantamount to “forging something into its boundaries, so much so that this being-enclosed is already in view in advance,”24 and this being-enclosed forms itself in the “unbounded” standing over and against it, lying opposite of it. That is, the εἶδος becomes effective in the material that, taken on its own, is unbounded, and it becomes effective by becoming form (μορφή). Heidegger summarizes his considerations: “Because this proximity of εἶδος and ὕλη lies in the essence of producing, producing necessarily, at each step along the way, is constantly excluding and enjoining, fitting in and, at the same time, leaving out.”25 And since the relation of the enclosed unity of εἶδος that has the effect of enclosing and the boundlessness of the unformed are brought together in λόγος, Heidegger can say that “the being-gathered-together of production is at play in the gathering [λέγειν] of the discussion and of the cognizance.26 If the εἶδος regulating producing is given in λόγος, so that it has to be understood as λόγος, and if the forming of εἶδος in the material is to be understood as fitting in and excluding in terms of λέγειν, producing can indeed be characterized as “a talking to oneself and letting oneself talk.”27
It is doubtful whether Heidegger’s reflections constitute accurate assessments of the Aristotelian train of thought in Met. E 2. When Aristotle determines the understanding of producing as a capability that is accompanied by λόγος (δύναμις μετὰ λόγου) and therefore can say of it that it is not only directed at a singular, that is, its end, but also at its contrary, he thus thinks of this contrary as material, but also as a condition opposed to the end; more precisely, he thinks of a condition that is characterized by the being-out-of-reach (Entzogenheit) of that which, as end, would be actuality. In this sense, the art of healing deals with sickness and health; both are present in it, whereas the “alogical” capability of the warm has no immanent relation to the cold, but is directed only at making warm (Met. 1046b 2–7). The fact that Heidegger misses this point by reading the question of the relation of εἶδος and ὕλη into the Aristotelian discussion does not prevent him from grasping precisely Aristotle’s insight: that λόγος is the possibility and the locus of the different and opposite.
However, Heidegger is not primarily concerned with a clarification of δύναμις μετὰ λόγου. Its determination in Aristotle is for him simply a point of departure and a turning point toward a different conception of human existence as such. Consequently, the distinction between δύναμις μετὰ λόγου and δύναμις ἄλογος fades in Heidegger’s interpretation. He is no longer concerned only with distinguishing a capability that realizes itself in an actuality belonging to it from a capability regulated by λόγος and actualizing itself in the recognition of a lack and its compensation. That λόγος keeps present the lacking is just one possible formation of its essence: in λόγος everything that is not immediately there can be there, and something that is there can be related to something different from it. Thus λόγος is the play-space of the relational and the possibility to comport oneself in it. Or, in Heidegger’s expression, λόγος is “the perceiving exploration of . . . , and the conversant relating to . . . ,”28 and, already before this, “the possibility of exploring and becoming conversant and so being conversant.”29
For Heidegger, λόγος is therefore now the essence of human existence; in the terms from Being and Time, it is its disclosedness and that which has to be comprehended philosophically against the very tendency of self-concealment. But this no longer amounts to rendering effective against language a “hermeneutical intuition.” The attempt to bring Dasein into language originates from language itself. Correspondingly, philosophy can be attentiveness toward language—articulation of the essence of language that neither reveals itself in each discourse nor eludes discourse altogether.
Heidegger can claim the concept “hermeneutics” not only for the interpretation and communication of Dasein to be grasped intuitively, but also for this very manifest attentiveness toward language, since it is as far from the reification of its matter as Heidegger had insisted it is for the hermeneutics of facticity. The manifestation of the attentiveness toward language belongs to language itself; it does not deal with what-is-the-case, but, in Heidegger’s later formulation, it is itself “what-is-the-case,”30 in which a case fore-gives the possibility of comportment, a “relation”31 that has no enclosed and bounded opposite, but rather is the adopting of a giving-itself. This giving-itself is the possibility of discourse in and out of language experienced as such, the non-objective fore-given that is not reached with any naming of a particular, but is already experienced in each as play-space of the relational. It can be explored only hermeneutically since it is as the “hermeneutic”32 already “the bearing of message and tidings.”33 Language as the play-space of the relational founds also the relation to itself. It is the very mediation that mediates itself in a discourse open for its own being-possible. The engagement with and discussion of Aristotle had a preparatory function for these thoughts that form the center of Heidegger’s later thinking of language. One can thus understand it as a dialogue in which the essence of language becomes effective in the mediation of reading and interpreting.
Translated from the German by Drew A. Hyland and Erik M. Vogt
1 Martin Heidegger, Towards the Definition of Philosophy, trans. Ted Sadler (London: Continuum, 2000), 50.
2 Martin Heidegger, Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie, GA 58 (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1993), 146.
3 Heidegger, Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie, 61.
4 Martin Heidegger, “Phenomenological Interpretations in Connection with Aristotle: An Indication of the Hermeneutical Situation (1922),” in Supplements: From the Earliest Essays to Being and Time and Beyond, ed. John Van Buren (Albany: SUNY Press, 2002), 111–45, 121.
5 Heidegger, “Phenomenological Interpretations,” 121.
6 Ibid.
7 Ibid.
8 Martin Heidegger, Logik. Die Frage nach der Wahrheit, GA 21 (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1976), 135.
9 Ibid., 141.
10 Ibid., 142.
11 Ibid., 159.
12 Ibid., 129.
13 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: SUNY Press, 1996), 1–2.
14 Ibid., 10.
15 Heidegger, Towards the Definition of Philosophy, 99.
16 Heidegger, Being and Time, 29. {2010 edition, 31}
17 Heidegger, Logik, 185.
18 Martin Heidegger, Aristotle’s Metaphysics Θ 1–3: On the Essence and Actuality of Force, trans. Walter Brogan and Peter Warnek (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 103.
19 19. Heidegger, Aristotle’s Metaphysics, 123.
20 Ibid.
21 Ibid, 124.
22 Ibid.
23 Ibid, 119.
24 Ibid, 118.
25 Ibid, 119.
26 Ibid, 124.
27 Ibid.
28 Ibid, 108.
29 Ibid, 104.
30 Martin Heidegger, On the Way to Language, trans. Peter D. Hertz (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 11.
31 Ibid., 32.
32 Ibid., 11.
33 Ibid., 29.
Günter Figal - Heidegger’s Philosophy of Language in an Aristotelian Context:
Dynamis meta logou
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