Lee Braver
On Heidegger’s view of truth, unconcealment and concealment intertwine and, as language represents a privileged site of truth for him, this interdependent opposition certainly applies to it. On the one hand, language, especially in its highest forms of poetry and philosophy, is the essential revelation of being itself; on the other hand, it has an intrinsic tendency to distort what we experience and distract us from being. These are examples of what I call the Problem of Contra-diction: “by speaking in this way, [the speaker] speaks against what he means. He contra-dicts himself ” (GA 40: 18; 26). We’re not talking about a logical contradiction here, but the problem that the way one is saying confuses and distorts what one intends to say. Heidegger sought innovative ways to write that might avoid this problem throughout his work, experimenting with unusual grammatical uses and vocabulary that might be more conducive to speaking of being. In this paper, I will identify three specific problems of Contra-diction, explain how they are problematic, and discuss one rhetorical device he uses to circumvent them: the polysemous participle. If traditional grammar is bound up with the metaphysics Heidegger is trying to twist free of, this essay is an attempt to capture what a page torn out of the other beginning’s grammar book—The Other Beginner’s Grammar Book, say—might be like.1
Heidegger describes a number of ways that language distorts and contradicts what we intend to say. I will take up three.
It is one thing to give a report in which we tell about beings, but another to grasp entities in their Being. For the latter task, we lack not only most of the words but, above all, the “grammar” (SZ 38–9; 63, see also GA 20: 203; 151).
Sein is posed like a fixed, standing object. The substantive das Sein implies that what is so named, itself “is.” Being now itself becomes something that “is” (GA 40: 53; 76).
Because language is oriented toward dealing with beings, it lacks both vocabulary and grammar that would be appropriate to being and so could speak of it. When we try to talk about being, the ways we talk about it often deflect us into ways that are only suitable for speaking of beings. Attempts at ontological speech collapse into ontic discourse, which leads us to think of being on the model of some being or other (God, substance, a set of properties, etc.), thereby contributing to the forgetfulness of being.
To take our orientation from this [relationship] “between” would still be misleading. . . . The “between” is already conceived as the result of the convenientia of two things. . . . But to assume these beforehand always splits the phenomenon asunder, and there is no prospect of putting it together again from the fragments. Not only do we lack the “cement”; even the “schema” in accordance with which this joining-together is to be accomplished, has been split asunder, or never as yet unveiled. What is decisive for ontology is to prevent the splitting of the phenomenon (SZ 132; 170).
We cannot then even continue to say [they] . . . belong together; for when we say it in this way, we continue to let both subsist independently. . . . Inevitably everything here depends on the correct saying. (Pathmarks 309)
From early on, Heidegger found the sequentiality of language to be an obstacle to discussing holistic phenomena. As words, sentences, and chapters go by, one after another, the presentation of topics must occur in a linear fashion as well, which makes us think of the topics they discuss as distinct from each other. Indeed, just using different words leads us to conceive of their named topics as discrete entities, and once a holistic phenomenon is “[split] . . . asunder . . . there is no prospect of putting it together again from the fragments.” This is what I call the Humpty Dumpty Dilemma.2
Throughout his career, Heidegger never stopped thinking about two relationships which get distorted by treating them in discrete, linear ways: the ontological difference between being and beings, and thinking’s relationship to being (the later successor to being-in-the-world).3 He tried to find some way to express them without falling into this trap, at least as far back as the hyphens in being-in-the-world, early in Being and Time. “The compound expression ‘Being-in-the-world’ indicates in the very way we have coined it, that it stands for a unitary phenomenon. This primary datum must be seen as a whole. . . . Being-in-the-world cannot be broken up into contents which may be pieced together.”4
The Contra-diction involved in these relationships runs so deep that even the seemingly innocuous description of “relationships” has already fallen into a linguistic trap. A relationship tacitly posits independent relata that enter into relationships with each other, making their interconnection secondary, external, accidental to what they really are. Among the properties that beings and being possess, this “schema” implies, is the capacity to relate or the state of being related to the other. This conception of being related is ontic, where any assertion of their relatedness—no matter how deep or essential—grammatically portrays them as distinct entities. This contravenes both the radical difference of being from beings and their mutually defined interdependence. “Difference stubbornly resists the attempt to say it as difference; and being likewise resists the attempt to say it as being” (GA 15: 84; 48).
Do the things thing? Are things as things?—or are they only as objects? (Bremen and Freiburg Lectures 21).
Perhaps the central point that Being and Time (as we have it) makes is that traditional ontology has narrowly focused on one mode of being, presence-at-hand, and this mode distorts the modes of equipment and Dasein, readiness-to-hand and existence. Among many differences, these latter two modes are much more dynamic than the former, ecstatically acting rather than statically sitting around. The words we use for entities—nouns—grammatically suggest fixed, self-identical objects more than temporally stretched, active processes, thereby further entrenching presence-based metaphysics and present-based temporality.
Our grammar also does this by apparently fixing its meaning once and for all. Since the letters on the page don’t change, their meaning cannot either, trapping their ideas in amber for all time. This is the picture of writing that Plato gave in the Phaedrus, where he complained that it can never say anything new.
These three problems are deeply interrelated and mutually reinforcing. Ontic Deflection keeps us thinking and talking only of beings, even when we try to reach being. Traditional metaphysics forces our thoughts and speech about beings into categories suited to constant, unchanging presence, writing off dynamic changes as signs of unreality or subjectivity. When we try to think and speak about Relationships, Ontic Deflection ensures that we are only putting beings together, which can have only ontic relationships. Just as Dasein gets misconstrued by being conceived as a present-at-hand subject, so the Relationship between being and beings or between being and thinking (or world/time/truth and Dasein) gets stuffed into these inappropriate categories and so falls away, forgotten.
Finding the proper way to say being is no small matter for Heidegger; indeed, “to bring to language ever and again this advent of Being . . . is the sole matter of thinking. . . . The fittingness of the saying of Being, as of the destiny of truth, is the first law of thinking” (Basic Writings 264). In his early, more phenomenological work, he argues that ways of experiencing are embedded in ways of thinking, which emerge from ways of speaking. Therefore, an inapt vocabulary and grammar conceal far more than it reveals. “Even though [the phenomenon] is something of which one has pre-phenomenological experience . . . it becomes invisible if one interprets it in a way which is ontologically inappropriate” (SZ 59; 85–6, see also GA 20: 74; 56).
His later work makes the connection between being’s manifestation and language much closer, as language is one of the main ways that being shows itself, and since showing itself is what being is, it actually is one of the main ways for being to be. This gives what might seem like trivial concerns external to our actual thinking far more importance.
Being speak[s] in language. . . . If we make use of the traditional grammar and its forms in this grammatical designation of the word [“Being”], as is at first unavoidable, then in this particular case, we must do so with the fundamental reservation that these grammatical forms are insufficient for what we are striving toward. In the course of our study we will show that this is so in regard to one essential grammatical form.
But this demonstration will soon dispel the impression that what is at issue is just an improvement in grammar. What is really at issue is an essential clarification of the essence of Being as regards its essential involvement with the essence of language. We should keep this in mind in what follows so that we do not mistake the linguistic and grammatical investigations for a barren and irrelevant game.5
Since being comes to be in language, the way language speaks affects how being is. Putting an inadequate language right, then, becomes as important as anything could be. “In the word, in language, things first come to be and are. For this reason, too, the misuse of language in mere idle talk, in slogans and phrases, destroys our genuine relation to things” (GA 40: 11; 15).
However, a new problem arises as we begin to solve this initial Problem of Contra-diction—a general formal problem with any attempted solution. Trying to fix language by designing new linguistic devices would reinforce the technological attitude of our time by portraying language as a faulty tool we have mastery over, thereby perpetuating the issue rather than solving it.
Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man. Perhaps it is before all else man’s subversion of this relation of dominance that drives his essential being into alienation. That we retain a concern for care in speaking is all to the good, but it is of no help to us as long as language still serves us even then only as a means of expression. Among all the appeals that we human beings, on our part, can help to be voiced, language is the highest and everywhere the first.6
Constructing a new language that corrects the problem a la analytic ideal language philosophers would only worsen it. This presents Heidegger with a puzzle: how do we circumvent these deep problems with our language without doing something like creating new rhetorical devices in accord with the essence of technology?
Heidegger addresses this problem in a number of ways. The one I will discuss here is when he brings out features and resources better suited to saying being that are already within our grammar and vocabulary but have gone unnoticed or unappreciated, or have become obsolete—recessive linguistic genes, if you will. He frequently fishes around in older etymological features and rarely used connotations of words. I have discussed and am writing on some of these semantic resuscitations elsewhere: tautologies, ambiguous genitives, hyphens, middle voice, and general polysemy.7 Here I want to explore his use of participles— “one essential grammatical form” singled out by the passage quoted above (GA 40: 43; 61)—and show how they solve the three Problems of Contra-diction outlined above.
Heidegger’s thoughts on this matter mark an important divergence from some notions traditionally associated with mysticism, particularly, the ineffability of the mystical. Mystical experiences are often considered to either elude or exceed principles that structure our thought and language at the most basic level, so that all ideas and statements necessarily miss it. This bears some resemblance to our Problem of Contra-diction in that attempts to say something backfire and end up saying something significantly different than intended.
However, Heidegger may see the mystic’s very attempt to preserve the mystical from linguistic Contra-diction as committing a Contra-diction itself. The mystic cordons off the numinous from our speech in order to safeguard its absolute transcendence beyond all mundane phenomenality. This very forbiddance, however, implies that the mystical is the kind of thing that could be expressed, had we but words enough and time; its inexpressibility is due to our lack of something, such as the appropriate categories, vocabulary, or mental faculties. To paraphrase an argument that Heidegger often makes, only that which is in principle effable can coherently be called ineffable. The move to separate the mystical from the mundane by an unbridgeable chasm actually bridges it by creating a continuum between the two. Even if they are placed at opposite ends of it, they must be commensurable just to be set opposite each other. It is a separation that unwittingly joins—a Contradiction. Heidegger calls this kind of problem onto-theo-logy. It occurs when the attempt to say or think the radically other—being for Heidegger—ends up construing it as just a really, really unusual being—usually God for Western philosophy as the beingest being. Reducing being to a being compromises the virtually unthinkable radicality of their ontological difference, for no matter how distinct a being is, it is still infinitely more homogeneous with any other being than it is with being itself. Whereas the mystic worries about being anthropomorphic, Heidegger wants to avoid being ontopomorphic.
To maintain this difference appropriately, Heidegger thinks that we need something far more innovative than a borderline marked, “language stops here.” Instead of being ejected from language, a rather familiar and simple relationship to it, being must develop a wholly new relationship to language, one profoundly different from that of beings—even ineffable beings, even divine beings. It requires “not a new language but a transformed relationship to the essence[-ing] [Wesen] of the old one” (Letter to Richardson xxii). It’s true that there is something of the ineffable about being, but this is not due to its transcendent isolation; being’s is the ineffability of effability itself. It is the effusively effervescent effing of beings that can never exactly eff itself, as much as we may want to tell Heidegger to at times. It’s true that we cannot articulate it—we lack the grammar and vocabulary to do so; it is inexhaustible; it always contains the concealed: pick your reason—yet it is just as true that that is all that we ever do. Everything that we say, think, and do brings the inapparent to appearance, with our words, thoughts, and deeds being not apart from and about the appearing but a part of the appearing. We cannot but say being, even though we never can, because our saying is being (or, more technically, it is the Same as being).8 This allows being to be truly heterogeneous from beings; this gives it a radically different relationship to us and to language than beings do.
We can summarize our journey so far: among the ways Heidegger addresses the difficulties involved in speaking of being is the recovery of uncommon linguistic features, among which is the polysemy of the participle. He does qualify his endorsement of these grammatical endeavors a number of times but qualifies that qualification that they are still very worthwhile hints. “Since we have not yet found a way other than that of grammar in order to grasp, even just superficially, the word in its essence, this provisional path must suffice.”9
Heidegger often points to the significance of the participle quite emphatically, celebrating the way it, as a verb being used as a noun, “participates” in both modes.
The participle is included within the structure of the question of all questions. Aristotle asks τί τὸ ὄν, and not τί τὸ εἶναι. Therefore, we must postpone our peculiar desire for straightforward expressions. “We,” with our perhaps very limited intellect, must conversely try for once to think about the fact that thinkers on the level of Plato and Aristotle perhaps did have their reasons for using the ambiguous participle τὸ ὄν. One who attempts to think in the manner of these thinkers must indeed think the participle nominally as well as verbally, so that the nominal and verbal meanings can be thought in their own determined relatedness. (GA 55: 76; 58–9)
If these thinkers chose this grammatical device over the more comforting “straightforward” modes of expression, they likely did so for a significant purpose. This seems especially true given its location at the very heart of Aristotle’s First Philosophy.
Our contemporary view of language as an instrument of communication gives us a “peculiar desire for straightforward expressions.” An instrument’s value lies entirely in the efficient and effective attainment of its goal; anything extraneous that could get in the way must be removed. Ambiguity hinders productive communication since the recipient must disambiguate the message, which takes time and can easily go astray. For the sake of univocal writing, we straighten all that is crooked, flatten any semantic richness. Philosophers in particular are prone to think that rhetorical style must be filtered out as irrelevant to the only thing that matters—the information to be conveyed.10 The specific sense of a participle must be settled for language to serve its use.
Another feature of participles that Heidegger repeatedly discusses is the fact that they have “their own determined relatedness.”11 The way its various senses are in play with each other defies standard grammatical notions and lacking a convenient way to handle them also leads us to shut down its enigmatic movement. Although this makes them harder to think and say properly, they must be anomalous if they are to say what our present grammar cannot.
In opposition to our present drive toward univocity, Heidegger prizes participles for their ambiguity, often saying that this feature is not an accident. “The multiple meanings of the word ἐόν, however, are neither accidental nor vague. Rather, the word has two meanings in a specific and distinctive sense. A grammatical reflection is needed to make the point clear.”12 Participles’ capacity to function as nouns, verbs, or both builds ambiguity into their grammatical DNA.
Unlike most metaphysicians’ allergic reactions to it, Heidegger argues that the great Greek thinkers chose this grammatical form for its ambiguity, especially in discussing being.
τὸ ὄν can mean a being, i.e., this particular being itself; but it can also mean that which is, that which has being. Analogously ὑποκείμενον can mean “that which lies present,” but it can also mean “something distinguished by lying-present,” and so it can mean the very lying-present itself. (The unusually rich and manifold forms of the participle in the Greek language—the truly philosophical language—are no mere accident, but their meaning has hardly yet been recognized) (GA 9: 330–1; 200).
Greek is flush with rich ambiguity, one reason why it is “the truly philosophical language,” along with German of course.13 Unfortunately, Latin resists it, so the Roman conquest of philosophy left us intolerant of multiple meanings, and philosophy’s general disdain for the significance of writing styles keeps us from seeing this epochal translation for the destiny-determining calamity it was.14
One way that Latin grammar diminished Greek language and ontological thought was by restricting participles’ noun-verb ambiguity to just nouns. This is one source of Ontic Deflection: since Heidegger sets up a rough correlation of nouns with beings and verbs with being itself, the use of the former type of word to the exclusion of the latter represents a linguistic forgetting of being. This correlation is inadequate, of course, but it does fit his constant emphasis on the dynamic character of being as an event rather than a staid, static presence— “like breathing, only quieter,” in Austin’s characterization (1962, 68). Many of Heidegger’s main words, such as event or unconcealment, are chosen with this verbal activity in mind; it’s why he suggested that Stambaugh translate “be-ing” with a hyphen (Stambaugh 2010, xiv).
But through the linguistic transformation of the infinitive into the verbal substantive, the emptiness that already lies in the infinitive, is, as it were, further fixed; sein is posed like a fixed, standing object. The substantive das Sein implies that what is so named, itself “is.” Being now itself becomes something that “is.” (GA 40: 53; 76)
Ontic nouns then prevent us from saying Relations properly since if we only have beings, the only relationships among them must be of the kind that are appropriate to beings. This blocks our access to ways of thinking that could be more appropriate to being.
By virtue of being conditioned by Roman and Latin thought, predicated as it is on nouns and the relations between them, and also by virtue of being conditioned by modern scientific thought, predicated as it is on objective, functional relations, we today are virtually excluded from the possibility of thinking-after being inceptually, and that means thinking it in the sense of φύσις in the manner that the Greeks did. (GA 55: 300; 226)
The Latin translation of philosophy eliminates the ambiguity of participles, which contributes to the forgetfulness of being by encouraging the three problems outlined above.
One way to overcome the limitations of our Latin noun-based grammar, then, would be to look before its occurrence to the Greek emphasis on the verbal sense of participles. This helps us resist Ontic Deflection and get a better sense of the Dynamism of being and beings. “The thinkers think the participle τὸ ὄν verbally. We must accordingly think τὸ μὴ δῦνόν ποτε—the not ever submerging thing (i.e., the never submerging thing)—in a manner analogous to how the thinker thinks the word ‘the being’: namely, in the sense of being. Therefore, we must think τὸ μὴ δῦνόν ποτε verbally as ‘the never submerging.’”15 As he reflexively shows in the brilliant Heraclitus lectures of 1943–44, the submergence of the noun sense of the words allows the re-emergence of the verbal, including within Heraclitus’s writings about this very subject of the intimate conflict between submergence and emergence.
Bringing the verbal sense to the fore while submerging the noun compensates for the excluding focus that has dominated Western thought at least since it went Latin. “The very character of this word is ambiguous. . . . A participle gives two meanings according to which it may be thought. If we keep only to the substantive meaning, as has happened thus far, then we leave out the ‘verbal’ meaning” (GA 55: 53; 43). However, staying with such a move would amount to the kind of direct reversal that Heidegger consistently criticizes as an insufficient response to metaphysics. Simple reversals perpetuate the broader conceptual context that gives the options one is reversing their sense. Just switching one’s choice between them accepts the choice being offered. Here, moving from noun to verb buys into the need to choose only one sense or the other for the participle. This kind of change is superficial, blind to the more radical alternative of speaking multiple senses at once, lacking the concept or “schema” (SZ 132; 170) for how the various meanings can relate to each other.
There is another way, however, that doesn’t say the reverse of the traditional exclusionary focus but instead speaks wholly otherwise, to use Levinas’s phrase. This is polysemy. Whereas ambiguity means that a word, phrase, idea, text, and so on, has more than one meaning which we need to sift through for the right one, polysemy occurs when more than one meaning is meant at the same time. One speaks in more than one sense, like a semantic Tuvan throat-singing or the philosophical version of Rahsaan Roland Kirk’s playing three horns at once.
Heidegger writes a great deal about polysemy, although, as far as I have been able to tell, it has not been the subject of any sustained analysis.16 He insists that it is not “the residue of a still unachieved formal-logical univocity which we properly ought to strive for but did not attain” (WCT 71), nor the result of accidental facts about the way we happen to speak.17 The ability for words, phrases, and so on to say many things is absolutely central to the nature of language itself. One of the reasons he finds poetry so illuminating is that it embraces this quality instead of trying to eliminate it, and in doing so illuminates what language really is.
Only the poetizing itself can make known to us whether and to what extent it is of such an essence as the assertion [“the poetizing word poetizes over beyond itself and the poet”] claims. In this, both the essence of the word and of language in general must come to light for us. Yet here, too, we, for our part, can in turn contribute a few things, if right at the beginning we attend more precisely to a routine phenomenon of “language” and of the word, namely, the “polysemy” of every word. (GA 52: 14; 11)
This is a frequent theme for Heidegger, who repeatedly emphasizes that texts admit of multiple interpretations18 and that words have ranges of meanings.19
While writing has the potential to fall into Plato’s present-at-hand monotony that can only say one thing over and over again (Phaedrus 275d), a script that could somehow remain open without settling down into a single, settled sense could escape this fate. “The burden of thought is swallowed up in the written script, unless the writing is capable of remaining, even in the script itself, a progress of thinking, a way” (WCT 49). This is precisely what polysemy accomplishes. The perpetual possibility of finding new meanings in the same words imbues it with a Dynamism that enables it to give new responses.
Our language has been Deflected into speaking of beings, leaving it no resources to speak of being—not of its Dynamism nor of its distinctive Relationships. “Here we are thinking within that realm (i.e., the realm of the truth of being) where all relations are completely different from those in the region of beings” (GA 55: 379; 282). Participles’ polysemy, however, is a holdover from a time before the iron curtain of metaphysics fell. It can elude contemporary grammar’s fixation on univocity for efficient communication of information.
Participles speak polysemically by saying both their noun and verb senses at the same time, relishing the doubleness of their sense rather than choosing between them.
Seen in terms of form, we can think the participle either nominally or verbally; but there also exists the possibility of understanding the participle as simultaneously both “nominal” and “verbal,” in which case the emphasis can be placed either on the verbal or the nominal aspect. All of these possibilities of understanding reside in the so-called “participle,” and indeed within a unity proper to it. In this unity, the richness of the word flourishes in a way that cannot be exhausted by grammatical dissection. The word whose meaning has come to be reduced to a single form has still another richness. (GA 55: 72; 55)
Polysemy places the multiple meanings in the “unity proper to” the participle, enabling us to “think the participle nominally as well as verbally, so that the nominal and verbal meanings can be thought in their own determined relatedness” (GA 55: 76; 58–9). While contemporary grammar lacks an appropriate schema, we can perform what Being and Time calls a “retrieval” or “reciprocative rejoinder” (SZ 385–6; 438) to recover this from the past and can adapt for use in our circumstances.
Heidegger attributes the multiplicity of meanings built into participles’ grammatical structure to the nature of what it is saying. Participles speak in this distinctive way because that which they are speaking about is in this distinctive way.
Participles take part in both the nominal and the verbal meaning. . . . Blossoming, that is something blossoming and the act of blossoming; flowing, that is something flowing and the act of flowing, and accordingly, then, “being” means something in being, and the act of being. . . . These words are participles because what they state is always applied to what is in itself twofold. . . . The dual meaning of participles stems from the duality of what they tacitly designate. But this dualism, in its turn stems from a distinctive duality that is concealed in the word έόν, being. (WCT 219–21)
Its polysemy enables it to speak of certain topics in a less distortive manner than univocal language can. Heidegger finds participles in many important topics: logos,20 assertion,21 appearance,22 truth/unconcealment,23 and, of course, in several words for being.24
For Heidegger, “being” is “not just one more participle among countless others; ἐόν, ens, being is the participle which gathers all other possible participles into itself,” “the participle of participles” (WCT 221, 243). Its polysemic capabilities are why the great Greek thinkers used it in their ontological writings. Let’s look at how it helps solve the three problems we opened the paper with.
Ontic Deflection plays on the inherent ambiguity of “being” by turning any intended discussion of being onto beings. To reverse this and focus on being would be a helpful compensation but would still be problematic itself. That would treat being and beings as if they were distinct, separate topics we can switch between, which implicitly categorizes them as discrete entities. Ironically, even the attempt to speak about being instead of beings commits the Contra-diction of casting it as a being.
Polysemic participles, however, do not have to switch from one topic to the other; they can speak of both at the same time, in the same words. This is precisely not to treat them as distinct topics that we must alternate between but rather to link them in a wholly different kind of relationship. This way of speaking uses the very problem which leads to Ontic Deflection as its own solution. It is the ambiguity of “being” that poses the danger of misspeaking, but it can also be the saving power by saying being in its unique difference with beings. To truly realize the profoundness of the Ontological Difference, we must speak about it differently than we do relationships among beings. “In keeping with that dual nature, a being has its being in Being, and Being persists as the Being of a being. There does not exist another kind of twofoldness that can compare with this” (WCT 221).
Ontic Deflection gets tricked by the participle “being’s” ambiguity; reversing it remains within the ambiguity’s ontological presuppositions. But saying it polysemically changes the semantico-ontological framework entirely. Instead of falling for the ambiguity or trying to fix it, we say it; the ambiguity itself becomes our meaning because it semantically embodies the distinctive kind of difference we’re looking for. The semantic difference can say the Ontological Difference.
Heidegger closes his letter to William Richardson, the preface to one of the first works on his career as a whole, reflecting on this topic.
Every formulation is open to misunderstanding. In proportion to the intrinsically manifold [mehrfältigen] matter of Being and Time, all words which give it utterance (like reversal, forgottenness and mittence) are always ambiguous. Only a [commensurately] manifold thought succeeds in uttering the heart of this matter in a way that cor-responds with it.
This manifold thought requires, however, not a new language but a transformed relationship to the essence[-ing] [Wesen] of the old one. (Letter to Richardson xxii)
Misunderstanding is always possible because words have multiple possible meanings. However, only a language that is “[commensurately] manifold” can cor-respond to being. Speaking in this way would not be a new language, which would require us to invent it, but rather an altered way of speaking the one we have—projecting the linguistic tradition we have been thrown into.
Speaking both senses of the participle at once creates a Relationship between the word’s senses that “cor-responds” to the Ontological Difference. The particular way the word “being” says both a being and its be-ing brings the meanings into a distinctive togetherness where both are there, all at once.25 The very thing that makes us vulnerable to misunderstanding also opens up the potential for a “transformed,” appropriate understanding.
That precisely a fundamental word like οὐσία and others like it are afflicted with an ambiguity should not diminish its appropriateness as the title of the investigation. On the contrary. Everything depends on the multiplicity of meaning as such being understood. . . . Precisely if it is held fast as this, and not dressed up as systematic tendencies foreign to the matter or leveled into an artificial uniformity of meaning, then, as a multifariousness of meaning, it has the proper suitability [die rechte Eignung] to convey an understanding of the concreteness of matters. The multifariousness of meaning is then precisely the adequate expression of the matters. The more originary that the understanding of the ground of multifariousness and its necessity is, the more the adequation increases. . . . The determinate multiplicity is grounded precisely in what “speaking” is! (GA 18: 343–4; 231–2, all italics in original)
Tacitly designating the relationship avoids Contra-diction because stating it outright splits up the holistic phenomenon with distinct words and distorting terms such as “relationship.” “The ambiguity of the ὄν identifies what presences as well as the presencing. It identifies both at once but neither as such” (OBT 132). Instead of describing the relationship, the participle enacts it, inscribing it into its polysemic grammar. “This ambiguity is not a ‘defect’ but only an expression of the intrinsically manifold structure of the being of a being—and consequently of the overall understanding of being.”26 Participles don’t speak about relationships; they speak them.
From the start of Heidegger’s engagement with phenomenology, the notion of appearance has been important for him. It is deeply intertwined with being, including etymologically since he identifies φαινόμενον with “that which shows itself, the manifest,” or what appears (SZ 28; 51). But since its origins in ancient Greece, and in ancient Greek, it has become “one of the many worn coins that we exchange unexamined from hand to hand in an everyday gone flat. . . . Above all, we need to grasp the concealed unity of Being and seeming. We no longer understand this unity because we have fallen away from the inceptive distinction” (GA 40: 75; 108). The grammar of polysemic participles can help with this.
An appearance can mean both a thing that appears and its act of appearing, thus saying the ontological difference about manifestation, perhaps the topic most relevant to being. Furthermore, the notion of appearing intrinsically implies someone to whom it appears. Like “perception” or “thought,” it is simultaneously objective and subjective, thereby transcends the dichotomy to be able to encompass the human-being Relationship appropriately within its single word.
Thus on the one hand: δόξα as a character of appearances themselves, their aspect, self-offering. . . . On the other hand: δόξα as a character of the comportment toward appearances, having an opinion about them, holding them to be such and such. . . . These two meanings of δόξα are not accidental. They belong together, and indeed entirely in the decisive sense, just as do εἶναι and νοεῖν or λέγειν on the first way; only this not a single word; ἀλήθεια certainly. (GA 35: 184; 143)
Heidegger is criticizing Parmenides here, a rare event. Although Parmenides thinks the human-being Relationship, he asserts the unity of being and thinking or speaking (“εἶναι and νοεῖν or λέγειν”) by dividing them with separate words. His saying that they are the same Contra-dicts itself because it separates them in order to assert their sameness. While it says they are the same, its way of saying that implicitly says that what is the same are two distinct things, so they can never truly be the same.
The single word “δόξα,” on the other hand, demonstrates its meaning semantically by exhibiting how its two meanings “belong together . . . entirely in the decisive sense.” While they face each other from opposite ends of the phenomenon, neither appearances nor the one who apprehends those appearances could be what they are without their opposing other. They encounter each other through countering each other, in a beautiful Heraclitean strife. Thus, when properly read, just the word by itself, which denotes Parmenides’ first way, encapsulates his entire message, as Heidegger translates Fragment 8.34: “apprehension and that for the sake of which there is apprehension are the same.”27
Participles’ ability to say the ontological difference appropriately has been preserved in our language, but our ensnarement in metaphysical grammar turns us away from this possibility.
Because the being is here thought with regard to being, the only proper naming of what the thinkers think remains, in truth, the participle τὸ ὄν, which expresses both the nominal and the verbal. . . . In the oft-mentioned “question of being,” one asks so blindly and implicitly about the being that one cannot hear a different sort of question that suddenly, and for a change, asks about being and its truth. (GA 55: 77; 59)
Despite its apparent triviality, the grammatical form can provide a hint about the ontology that is so elusive to thought and speech.
Thus ὄν says “being” in the sense of to be a being; at the same time it names a being which is. In the duality of the participial significance of ὄν the distinction between “to be” and “a being” lies concealed. What is here set forth, which at first may be taken for grammatical hair-splitting, is in truth the riddle of Being. (EGT 32–3)
Saying both at the same time says what neither on their own, nor any combination of the two, can.
Heidegger sees what happened to Plato’s word for being, “eidos,” as a prime example of the way participial polysemy got closed down. Heidegger translates it as “look” or “view,” which can be read in converse directions: we give someone or something a look or a look-over to take in the look they give of themselves. These are not distinct acts, sequential phases, or separable parts, but rather flip sides of the single event of appearing. Viewing a view on view is a particularly important example of ambiguity since it overlaps with appearing, which is what being is/does.28
The view that a being has in itself, and so first can offer from itself, lets itself then be apprehended at this or that time, from this or that viewpoint. The vista that offers itself alters with each new viewpoint. Thus, this view is also one that we take and make for ourselves. . . . Being, phusis, consists in appearing. . . . The term doxa names various things: . . . 2) aspect as the sheer view that something offers; . . . 4) a view that a person constructs for himself, opinion. This multiple meaning of the word is not looseness of language, but a play with deep foundations in the mature wisdom of a great language, a multiplicity that preserves the essential traits of Being in the word.29
When said polysemically, “doxa” says the ambiguity that encompasses the unity of being and thinking appropriately, as with Parmenides. But the unitary event splits into a subject forming a view of an object when its “look” can only have one meaning at a time.
Finally, participles also express beings’ Dynamism well—our last Problem of Contra-diction. When Heidegger thinks of a building or a dwelling, for instance, he does not see it as a finished product of four walls and a roof placed alongside each other; that would be viewing the house as present-at-hand. A lived-home is an ongoing pathway that our living with each other takes, the four-dimensional woof we weave our lives into and out of. Our dwell-ing in the home is what makes it a dwelling; we continue build-ing it by furnishing it with memories and infusing it with the occurrence of important events. This is closer to an Aristotelian ontology where entities enact their ergon in pursuit of fulfilling their telos than a metaphysics of static objects. A bedroom accomplishes its essence as people find rest within it; a kitchen becomes what it is as meals gather their family around the hearth and across generations. We maintain the building by continuing its build-ing, dwell-ing within the dwelling, and participles participate in this by helping us think and speak this insight in their grammatical form. These things cannot be what they are without us, nor can we be humans at home upon this earth without dwellings and without dwelling. A dwelling without dwellers is not a building; it’s a built.
Participles reveal the Dynamism of beings by reaching back before the artificial division between things and deeds to merge nouns and verbs. The original name for verbs, taken from Plato, was time-word, a portmanteau that was sure to catch Heidegger’s eye. The great challenge of his early work was to integrate being and time so deeply that they lost their appearance of being separate phenomena getting mixed together.30 Since “being” is a participle and hence as much a verb as a noun, while verbs are time-words and nouns beings, the grammatical structure of participles forms a joint that brings being and time together into a fitting relationship. “The word being, as the word of all words, is the inceptual ‘timeword’ as such. . . . Being and time inceptually belong together. Thinking must think this togetherness of ‘being and time.’”31 Far from an esoteric doctrine we must journey far to find, this link is forged every time we speak the word.
Working with language in these ways, Heidegger is able to have a kind of ineffability of being and eff it too. Being can never be accurately or definitively described, yet it flows through everything we say as our sayings reciprocally breathe life into it. This can be considered mystical in the sense that “philosophy necessarily stands in the radiance of what is beautiful and in the throes of the holy” (GA 32 61, 42). The appropriate (eigentlich) attitude to take toward our being blessed with openness to being is grateful, wondrous awe at its splendor. But we do not stare slack-jawed at a glory shining down on us from the distant heavens; aside from anything else, this would turn being into a being—worse, into an object standing apart from and over against us. No, we weave splendor into the world with our words, drawing the thought-ful and thought-worthy aspects out of reality by thinking through them, clearing a small area in the dark forest where light can stream in and become light by being seen.
1 Of course, one of the first things such an Other Beginner’s Grammar Book would do would be to eliminate the phrases, “rhetorical device” and “linguistic device.” Those are about as noxious to Heidegger as a phrase could be.
2 See Braver 2007, 2009, 2014.
3 “The talk of a relation to beyng expresses the opposite of what is properly to be thought. For the relation to beyng is in truth beyng, which, as event, places the human being in this relation. Therefore, many misunderstandings surround the ‘relation’ indicated in the formula ‘the human being and beyng’” (GA 65: 490; 386/§271).
4 SZ 53; 78, see also SZ 131; 169, 193; 238, 232; 275, 328; 376, 351; 402, 359; 410. “By hyphenating the term [being-in-the-world] we mean to indicate that this structure is a unitary one” (GA 24: 234; 164).
5 (GA 40: 41; 59, see also WCT 123). “It becomes necessary, then, first to acquaint ourselves explicitly with the ambiguity of the question, not only to give attention to that ambiguity as such, but also in order that we may not take it too lightly, as a mere matter of linguistic expression” (WCT 123). “We cannot make do without a glance at language and linguistic expression, especially since we are not taking language itself as something incidental, a mere tool for expressing and communicating already constituted thoughts” (GA 35: 67; 51). “The question of Being remains intimately linked to the question of the word. . . . What we are trying to do is pay attention to Being itself, which is said in this saying. We choose a simple and common and almost careless saying, in which Being is said in a word form whose use is so frequent that we hardly even notice it” (GA 40: 67; 97).
6 BW 348, see also BW 221, 223, 262, 410, 423, PLT 215–16, OWL 35, SZ 158; 200–1, GA 40: 120; 174.
7 Braver 2021, 2022, 2023.
8 Heidegger coins the term “the Same” (das Selbe) to talk about this elusive relationship; see Braver 2022 and my upcoming book for discussions.
9 GA 55: 71; 55. “In this unity, the richness of the word flourishes in a way that cannot be exhausted by grammatical dissection” (GA 55: 72; 55). “We thus call the word ‘being’ a ‘verbal substantive.’ Once we have cited this grammatical form, the linguistic characterization of the word ‘Being’ is complete. . . . These linguistic, grammatical distinctions are worn out and commonplace; they are by no means ‘self-evident.’ So we must turn an eye to the grammatical forms in question (verb, substantive, substantivization of the verb, infinitive, particle)” (GA 40: 42; 60–1). “And so, with the question about the essence of the substantive and of the verb, we find ourselves in the midst of the question about the essence of language. . . . We cannot start by immediately going into this question. We are forced onto a detour. We will restrict ourselves in what follows to that grammatical form which provides the transitional phase in the development of the verbal substantive” (GA 40: 43; 61, see also WCT 220–2).
10 “Most of the time we regard such multiplicity of meaning as a deficiency, since it readily gives rise to misunderstandings and becomes a means whereby we are led astray. For this reason, we endeavor to eliminate the deficiency that resides within such multiplicity of meaning. What is demanded is a lack of ambiguity in discourse and accuracy of the word. When language is made into a vehicle of communication it has to conform to being a means of transportation and conform to traffic regulation” (GA 52: 14; 11, see also GA 52: 10; 8). This is a major theme of Derrida’s.
11 “All of these possibilities of understanding reside in the so-called ‘participle,’ and indeed within a unity proper to it” (GA 55: 72; 55). “The dual meaning of participles stems from the duality of what they tacitly designate. But this dualism, in its turn, stems from a distinctive duality that is concealed in the word έόν being” (WCT 221, italics in original).
12 WCT 219. “These two meanings of δόξα are not accidental. They belong together, and indeed entirely in the decisive sense” (GA 35: 184; 143). “The word ‘risk’ simultaneously names the ground that risks and the risked beings in their entirety. This ambiguity is not an accident” (OBT 212). “Not accidentally, οὐσία itself has a twofold meaning . . . the term for a being and its being (at once the what and the that)” (GA 26: 182; 145, see also GA 2: 89–90; 123). “This multiple meaning of the word is not looseness of language, but a play with deep foundations in the mature wisdom of a great language, a multiplicity that preserves the essential traits of Being in the word” (GA 40: 80; 115). “The expression λόγος is taken with this ambiguity, for definite reasons” (GA 18: 212; 143).
13 Heidegger says that Greek, along with German, “(in regard to the possibilities of thinking) is at once the most powerful and the most spiritual of languages” (GA 40: 43; 62, see also GA 51: 16; 14, GA 40: 74; 107). Note, this comment occurs within a discussion of the verbal substantive, i.e., the participle.
14 “So far, there has been no really thoroughgoing investigation of this happening that has been so fundamental for the establishment and formation of the whole Western spirit” (GA 40: 62, see also GA 55: 74–5; 57).
15 GA 55: 58; 46. “For the sake of the consideration necessary here, only the following is of importance: namely, to recognize that the thinkers understand this foundational word in its verbal sense, and in such a way that the being, understood verbally (i.e., as being), is that in view of which the particular being, understood nominally, is questioned” (GA 55: 99; 75).
16 See my book, Saying Being the Same: Polysemy in Later Heidegger, once I finish writing it. Please let me know if you know of any substantive scholarship on the topic of Heidegger’s polysemy.
17 “The polysemy of a word does not primarily stem from the fact that when we humans talk and write we at times mean different things with one word. . . . It springs from the fact that in the speaking of language we ourselves are at times, according to the Geschick [i.e., fate, historical sending] of being, struck, that means addressed, differently by the being of beings” (GA 10: 161; 96).
18 “Multiplicity of meanings is the element in which all thought must move in order to be strict thought. . . . We always must seek out thinking, and its burden of thought, in the element of its multiple meanings, else everything will remain closed to us” (WCT 71).
19 “A wide range of meaning belongs generally to the nature of every word” (WCT 191).
20 Heidegger chooses his word for language precisely because of its participial polysemy: “I: For long now, I have been loth to use the word ‘language’ when thinking on its nature. J: But can you find a more fitting word?. . . . I: The word ‘Saying.’ It means: saying and what is said in it and what is to be said” (OWL 47, see also GA 18: 18; 15, 212; 143, GA 2: 34; 59, GA 40: 98; 141).
21 GA 24: 294; 207.
22 GA 35: 184; 143, GA 40: 79–80; 114–15, 139; 203.
23 “When we say that being-true does not mean something that is extant among things, this mode of speech still suffers from an ambiguity. . . . Being-true is extant neither in things nor in a mind. On the other hand, however, truth as unveiling is in the Dasein as a determination of its intentional comportment, and it is also a determinateness of some being, something extant, with regard to its being as an unveiled entity. It follows from this that being-true is something that’ "lies ‘between’ the subject and the object, if these two terms are taken in their ordinary external signification” (GA 24: 310; 217–18, see also GA 55: 53; 43, 71–2; 55). “Ἀληϑές, in the double sense of ‘disclosed’ and ‘disclosing,’ is ambiguous. . . . We also realize that mysterious relations obtain here” (GA 54: 56; 38). He sometimes blames the move from dynamic unconcealing to correspondence with a static unconcealed object on the loss of the participial ambiguity of truth: “Ἀ-λήθεια means un-concealment and the un-concealed itself. . . . The unconcealed as such is all that is essential, not the process of unconcealing” (GA 65: 351; 277/§226). “How the question of truth is to be set up. Starting with the essential ambiguity: ‘truth’ meant as ‘what is true’; but what is true is truth as the clearing-concealment of the event” (GA 65: 354; 279/§227). It also participates in Ontic Deflection: “The name ‘truth’ is in an essential sense ambiguous. Truth means the one essence and also the many which satisfy the essence. . . . The word ‘truth,’ which names the essence, is nevertheless used for true things themselves. The name for the essence glides unobtrusively into our naming such things that participate in that essence. Such slippage is aided and abetted by the fact that for the most part we let ourselves be determined by beings themselves and not by their essence as such” (NI 146).
24 “The substantive Lichtung goes back to the verb lichten” (BW 441). Being and Time argues that the ambiguity of ousia continues through to Descartes’s substantia: “The term for the Being of an entity that is in itself, is ‘substantia’. Sometimes this expression means the Being of an entity as substance, substantiality; at other times go it means the entity itself, a substance. That ‘substantia’ is used in these two ways is not accidental; this already holds for the ancient conception of οὐσία” (SZ 89–90/123). He applies this directly to “ousia, a word that designates the presence of what is present and at the same time, with puzzling ambiguity, usually means what is present itself” (BW 233). “Οὐσία customarily is a definite being in the how of its being; the how is only co-intended. The terminological meaning, on the other hand, thematically yields the how of being that was previously only intended implicitly. And this holds not only for the how of this way of being, but for every being. Οὐσία can mean (1) the being directly (the how is co-intended) and (2) the how of a being directly (this being itself is co-intended). Therefore, οὐσία means (1) a being and (2) the how of being, being, beingness, being in the sense of being-there. Οὐσία in the sense of being-there contains a double meaning: (1) the being that is there and (2) the being of the being that is there” (GA 18: 26; 19, parenthesized numbers in original, see also WCT 220–1, 243–4, GA 26: 181–2; 144–5, GA 40: 23; 34, GA 40: 138; 201, GA 24: 214; 151, GA 20: 330–1; 200, GA 55: 44–58; 46, 74; 57, NIV 188). “The conclusion of this commentary on ἐόντα is that also in Greek experience what comes to presence remains ambiguous, and indeed necessarily so. On the one hand, τὰ ἐόντα means what is presently present; on the other, it also means all that becomes present, whether at the present time or not” (EGT 35).
25 Heidegger uses the term “the Same” (die Selbe) for this type of relationship; see Braver 2022 and my upcoming book for discussions.
26 GA 24: 291; 205, see also GA 24: 79; 56–7, 92; 66.
27 GA 35: 138; 106. “This fundamental word of [Parmenides’] thinking names neither ‘the being,’ nor merely ‘being.’ τὸ ἐόν must be thought as a verbal participle. Then it says: ‘presencing: presencing itself ’” (GA 15: 405; 95).
28 “For the Greeks, appearing belongs to Being. . . . Being, phusis, consists in appearing, in the offering of a look and of views” (GA 40: 78–9; 113–14).
29 GA 40: 80; 114–15. “Philosophy looks at [sieht an] what is present in regard to its looks [Ansehen]” (OBT 96).
30 This external combination was Hegel’s mistake, broached at the very end of Being and Time: “‘Spirit’ does not first fall into time, but it exists as the primordial temporalizing of temporality” (GA 2: 575; 413).
31 Her 47, see also GA 40: 42; 60. Along with being, Heidegger also points out that early Greek sayings about un/concealment use participles which are simultaneously time-words, thereby emphasizing the temporal, active nature of truth as well. “The word τὸ δῦνον is by no means unambiguous. In fact, the very character of this word is ambiguous. Expressed grammatically, the word has the character of a participle. . . . The word δῦνον is characterized by participation because it, as the word that it is, can participate both in the part of speech that is called a ‘noun’ or ‘substantive,’ and in the part of speech of which the participle itself is a derivation—namely, the verb, or ‘time-word.’ τὸ δῦνον can mean ‘the submerging thing,’ whereby we think of the substance that is subject to submergence. But τὸ δῦνον can also mean the submerging thing precisely in its submerging, and thus the activity of submerging itself understood as such” (Her 43).
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Lee Braver - The Grammatical Riddle of Being: Heidegger's Polysemous Participles.
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