phenomenologically incorrect to describe my experience of language as involving first a sensory perception of a sound or graphic mark, followed by a recognition of the sound or mark as a linguistic form, followed by an association of the linguistic form with its meaning, followed by a construction of a unified sense from the individual meanings. In the living use of language, I respond to what is written or spoken fluently, nonreflectively, nondeliberately. For instance, when I hear the term “chalkboard” in the utterance “the chalkboard is black,” I do not hear a sound that I recognize as a word and then associate it with a meaning in order to construct a sense for the utterance as a whole. Instead, as Heidegger says, I “live in meanings,” and the spoken language as I encounter it in the utterances of ordinary involved coping orients or reorients me immediately to the world I am in, to the meanings I inhabit (see GA 21: 151). The words immediately orient me so that I can comport myself with respect to the chalkboard. I can, of course, detach myself from a lived immersion in meanings, and regard “chalkboard” as a term – that is, as a noise or graphic mark that can be detached from its meanings. A beginning speaker of a foreign language will often encounter terms. But with increasing fluency, the terms recede from salience.
The contrast between a deliberate and fluent experience of language suggests a different way of thinking about what words are as opposed to terms. Words for Heidegger are not representations, and have neither a verbal nor a written form: they are “not palpable to the senses” (GA 12: 181). Indeed, Heidegger claims, the word, like being itself, “is not an entity” (GA 12: 182). Instead, he thinks of words as the relational structures that allow there to be entities in the first place: “the relation of the word to the thing . . . is not a relationship between the thing on one side and the word on the other. The word itself is the relation, which in each case keeps in itself the thing in such a way that it ‘is’ a thing” (GA 12: 159). To understand this, we need to recall the discussion of dancing things above. On Heidegger’s view, entities are constituted by the relationships they have to other entities. For there to be a stable thing, the relationships that constitute it as a thing need also to be stabilized, held open, and maintained. The stabilization takes the form of establishing nexuses or nodes of relations that can be, and are, filled by particular entities. Of course, “filled” is a misleading verb to use here if it is heard as suggesting that entities are something independently of the structure of relations, something that can then be inserted into a particular place in the network of relations. Entities do not fill nexuses the way water fills glasses or concrete fills building forms. Water is water, after all, whether it is in a glass or pond. A more apt analogy is the way someone fills the position of an aunt or uncle. One cannot be an aunt first, and only subsequently take up relationships to nieces and nephews. To be an aunt at all is to be constituted by one’s relationships to other people. Aunthood, then, is a particular nexus of relationships to siblings and siblings’ children. When