MORTALS
each case letting whatever a letting-lie-before [i.e., the logos] lays down before us lie gathered in its entirety” (GA 7: 220/EGT 66). In taking us up, language “grants a residence for the essence of the mortals” (GA 12: 11/PLT 190, tm).
Speaking of language as granting us a residence brings us to what is certainly Heidegger’s most famed formulation regarding language and another instance of its spatial or rather medial construal: that language is the “house of being” (GA 9: 313/239). Heidegger is clear in the “Letter on ‘Humanism’” (where this statement is found) that it is not meant in any metaphorical sense: “The talk about the house of being is not the transfer of the image ‘house’ onto being. But one day we will, by thinking the essence of being in a way appropriate to its matter, more readily be able to think what ‘house’ and ‘dwelling’ are” (GA 9: 358/272). The house is a space of protection: “Protection [Hut],” as Heidegger informs us in “Building Dwelling Thinking” is “as the same word says: a Huis, a house [Haus]” (GA 7: 160/PLT 156, tm). The house of being offers protection to being.
The nature of this protection is best seen by considering its absence in the technological challenge to things put in place by positionality. In “The Danger” Heidegger states that:
Positionality’s essence lets the thing go without guard. In our language, where it still originarily speaks, the word “guard” [die Wahr] means protection [Hut]. In our Swabian dialect this word “guard” [English, “ward”] means: a child entrusted to maternal protection. Positionality in its positioning lets the thing go without protection—without the guard of its essence as thing. (GA 79: 46/44–45)
The protection offered to the thing is a sheltering guarding of it. This guarding (wahren) is a letting the thing be in its truth (Wahrheit). The protection of the house that language affords to being is a protection through the guardianship of truth.
In the 1957 lecture cycle, Basic Principles of Thinking, Heidegger explicitly states what he means in saying language is the house of being: “‘House’ here means precisely what the word says: protection [Hut], guardianship [Wahrnis], container [Be-hältnis], relationship [Ver-hältnis]. . . . In the phrase just cited, ‘language’ is not conceived as a speaking and thus not as a mere activity of the human, but rather as house, i.e. as protection [Hut], as relationship [Ver-hältnis]” (GA 79: 168/158).70 It is not accidental that so many of the terms used here are forms of halten, “to hold,” for as the “Letter” explains, “‘hold’ in our language means ‘protection’ [Hut]. Being is the protection [Hut] that, through its truth, protects [behütet]
70 In “The Way to Language” (1959), Heidegger explains the line from the “Letter” thus: “It [language] is the protection [Hut] of presencing, insofar as the shining of this remains entrusted to the appropriating showing of the saying. Language is the house of being because, as saying, language is the mode of appropriation [die Weise des Ereignisses ist]” (GA 12: 255/OWL 135, tm).