CHAPTER 2: THE ORIGINAL ONTOLOGICAL CHARACTERISTICS OF DASEIN
original appropriation of what it is 'about,' and through so-called verbal thinking [Wortdenken], which has surrendered to the power of certain verbal phrases [Wortbegriffe], it may also pervade and govern the treatment of problems within scientific disciplines [Wissenschaft]. In chugging along in language - because language is a fundamental way of being-in-the-world - uprooted Dasein secures a reputation and legitimacy for itself through the public realm of the 'one'. We encounter the vagueness and vacuity of meanings, which are not in fact grasped as meanings, in the way everyday talk pursues its themes. This impoverished ontological structure of the said and the talk that is governed by it must not prompt us to view language as a matter of tone or sound in the first instance. The vagueness [30] of meaning is a specific quality, namely the routinized intelligibility of well-worn everyday talk. Because language constitutes a basic way of being-in-the-world, this talk is a specific way of dwelling in the world.
If we accept the original fact [Tatbestand] of being-in-the-world as the ground for the interpretation of language, and if we understand talk and its possibilities in light of Dasein's possible ways of being, we can evaluate the validity of the various answers to questions concerning the 'essence' of language. Interpretations of language as a symbol, as an expression of what we experience and cognize, as the conveying of 'lived experiences', as communication, and as articulation, all base their respective claims on phenomenological features of language, but fail to appropriate and explicate these features accordingly. That language is communication is clear when we look at Dasein's most ordinary mode of being. But communication must not be understood here as the imparting of knowledge- the transportation, as it were, of insights out of one subject and into another. Communication, as talking something over with one another, is the form in which, together with others, 'one' 'shares' ['teilt'22] and has the cared-about world. To have the world means to be concernfully immersed in it. Communication means to bring others, and oneself together with others, into such being-in-the-world and to dwell in it.* We may look upon communication of this sort as communion with others [Teilnahme].
* That the Greeks' pre-scientific interpretation of Dasein could locate man's being in the ability to talk: ἄνθρωπος = ζῷον λόγον ἔχον springs from the experience of everyday Dasein, in particular the Greek one. The later animal rationale = rational living being [vernüftiges Lebewesen] conceals the state of affairs originally experienced. Again, the fact that the Greeks pushed the investigation of language towards a logically determined grammar is due to their particular way of being in the world through speech [sprechenden In-der-Welt-Seins].
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