7. Thinking and Being: Heidegger and Wittgenstein on Machination and Lived-Experience
Over the last several chapters, we have seen how the analytic tradition’s inquiry into language has led it repeatedly to experience the failures and paradoxes of its attempt to envision language as a total structure of signs. This withdrawal of language at the point of its own positive description occurs repeatedly in the history of the tradition, and marks in a fundamental way the most prominent results of its consideration of the basis and nature of linguistic meaning. The analytic tradition’s inquiry into language begins with the attempt to demonstrate the philosophical relevance of what at first seems self-evident, our ordinary access to the language that we speak. It ends, as we have seen over the last several chapters, by demonstrating the inherent and pervasive ambiguities of this access, not only in the theories of philosophers but in its everyday forms as well. In the demonstration, what had been self-evident becomes less so; the aporias of the explicit, theoretical attempt to grasp the structure of language reveal the underlying and pervasive ambiguities of our ordinary relationship to it. The inherent problems of the structuralist picture of language thereby become opportunities for the renewed posing of a set of critical questions about the linguistic basis of the practices and circumstances of an ordinary life.
These critical consequences of the analytic tradition’s inquiry into language come to the fore especially when this inquiry is set in a broader philosophical and historical context. To this end, in this chapter, I examine another prominent twentieth-century reflection on language, one that, although seldom well understood by analytic philosophers, experiences much the same withdrawal of language and explicitly draws from it some far-ranging critical consequences about contemporary social and technological practices. The critical consequences of Heidegger’s examination of language, I argue, bear deep parallels to some of the most decisive results of the analytic tradition, most centrally to the twofold consideration of “rule following” and the idea of a “private language” that marks the main critical movement of Wittgenstein’sPhilosophical Investigations
. The two skeins of criticism are indeed linked, I shall argue, in the problematic ofself-identity
that defines the modern philosophical conception of the thinking and experiencing subject. Once made explicit, this problematic suggests new ways of thinking aboutdifference
andheterogeneity
within a broader consideration of the priority of language for the human “form of life.”
Characteristically, Heidegger’s own engagement of language over the entirety of his career is determined by his pervasive concern with the question of themeaning of being
. From his first writings, Heidegger sought to open a fundamental questioning regarding the possibility of expressing the basic character of “being itself.” He came to see this possibility of expression, or the lack thereof, as conditioned by determinate, historically specific interpretations of the factual as well as “ontological” relationships among different kinds of beings or entities, including significantly the kind of beings we ourselves are. These interpretations themselves, according to Heidegger, find expression in the forms of language open to speakers at various historical times, and are at least partially discernible through reflection on these forms. Since the beginning of philosophical ontology with the Greeks, the history of the linguistic forms of the expression of being and the modes of thought they make possible has been, according to Heidegger, one of ever-greater forgetfulness and obscurity. The progressive withdrawal of being from any possibility of positive expression has been marked by an ever-greater development of determinate interpretations and assumptions that tend to obscure its real character and make it deeply inaccessible to us. Over the course of the 1930s, Heidegger accordingly began to speak of the entire period of this history of successive forgottenness as the period or epoch ofmetaphysics
.
During this time, Heidegger accordingly began to take up with greater and greater explicitness the question of the relationship of ordinary language, and the metaphysical assumptions that underlie it, to thelife
of the kind of beings that we ourselves are, what he had characterized in Being and Time as “Dasein.”
This language, he argued, has for a long time determined the life of the human being as the “subjectivity” of a subject of experience. In the complicated and enigmaticBeiträge zur Philosophie
, written between 1936 and 1938, Heidegger connects this metaphysical conception of subjectivity as “lived-experience” to the complex of technological practices and calculational ways of thinking that he calls “Machenschaft” or machination. These are practices and ways of thinking that he sees as increasingly characteristic of, and dominant over, modern life and its forms and institutions of power; they include, but are not limited to, what he would later characterize as “technology” and “calculational ways of thinking.” With the development of the “history of being” that he undertakes at this time, Heidegger aims both to unmask the complicity of a metaphysical conception of subjectivity with these forms of practice and thought, and also to demonstrate the root of this complicity in the historical forms of language that, as he holds, continue to prevent the truth of being itself from coming to expression.
I.
As he became more and more concerned with the nature of language, Heidegger came to see the very possibility of theexpression
of being, as limited by the forms of ordinary language, determined as they are by deep-seated metaphysical assumptions and interpretations that tend rule out this expression. Beginning in the 1930s, accordingly, his history of being aimed to prepare for the futural occurrence of an “event” [Ereignis
] of being that is, within the metaphysical language that is the only language that exists, literally inexpressible. The term aims to express the possibility of an “en-owning” or self-expression of “being itself,” an expression that, according to Heidegger, has normally and ever more pervasively been blocked by the forms of metaphysical thinking and language. The essential hint of this event to come, according to Heidegger at this time, is provided, not by any possible expression or word of language, but by the paradoxical experience of awithdrawal
orrefusal
of language that at the same time reveals, in negative mode, something of its positive character. The connection he thereby draws between being and the obscure possibility of its linguistic expression, leads him, at the same time, to interrogate the far-ranging connections, deeply rooted in the history of philosophy, that exist between the structures of ordinary language and the metaphysical determination of the kind of being that has, since ancient times, been specified as theanimale rationale
or thezoon logon echon
, the “animal having language.”
In the 1930s, the experience of language thus came to determine, for Heidegger, the possibility of a futural event of being, and with it the possibility of expression that belongs to it. It was not always so. InBeing and Time
, Heidegger’s attempt to formulate the long-forgotten question of the meaning or “sense” of being through a preparatory analysis of the constitutive structures of human Dasein or “being-there” repeatedly alluded to the question of language. NeverthelessBeing and Time
did not (as later texts would) make the being of languageitself
central to the possibility of an understanding of being. Heidegger’s analysis of the structures of Da-sein’s “being-in”, or its possibilities of existing in the world, presented “discourse” [Rede
] as a derivative mode of articulation, subjacent to other, more basic structures of “disclosedness” and lacking anyessential
priority in articulating human possibilities of sense.
Thus,Being and Time
’s analysis of language displayed Heidegger’s interest in the question of thepossibility
of treating language as an object of theoretical judgment or hermeneutic reflection, without coming, yet, to anything quite like a decision on the extent or implications of this possibility:
In the end, philosophical research must for once decide to ask what mode of being belongs to language in general. Is it an innerworldly useful thing at hand or does it have the mode of being of Da-sein or neither of the two? What kind of being does language have, if it can be “dead”? What does it mean ontologically that a language grows or declines? We possess a linguistics, and the being of beings that it has as its theme is obscure; even the horizon for any investigative question about it is veiled. Is it a matter of chance that initially and for the most part significations are ‘worldly,’ prefigured beforehand by the significance of the world, that they are indeed often predominantly ‘spatial’? Or is this ‘fact’ existentially and ontologically necessary and why? Philosophical research will have to give up the ‘language-philosophy’ if it is to ask about the ‘things themselves’ and attain the status of a problematic that has been clarified completely.
The determination of language (what ancient ontology grasped aslogos
) as anobjectively present being
is itself, according to Heidegger, responsible for the basic indifference and confusion of the concept of being that it hands down to us.
Within this determination, language may appear as an instrument of use, a system, or a totality of spoken or written signs; in any case, the decision that has made these prevailing interpretations of language dominant is hidden from us. Even within the course of Heidegger’s own preparatory fundamental analysis of the structures of Da-sein, the being of language remains mysterious for phenomenological investigation. Even its fundamentalmode
of being, what kind of “thing” it is and how it relates to Da-sein as its “speaker,” remains, as Heidegger says, veiled in obscurity. But as Heidegger undertook a more explicit examination of the historical determination of being itself by the various concepts and practices of metaphysics, he came to see the obscurity of the “mode of being” of language as in fact decisive for the withdrawal and forgottenness of “being itself” within this history. For during this period, he came to see these possibilities for the revealing or concealing of being as deeply controlled by linguistic possibilities of expression, especially insofar as the forms of languagethemselves
have come to embody the deep proclivities of metaphysics.
The most important of these proclivities, according to Heidegger, is the tendency of language to interpret being itself as one or another form ofpresent
being or entity. The tendency begins with Plato’s interpretation of being in terms of the endurance of the unchangingeidos
and continues, through medieval theology, into the modern determination of beingsobjects
representable in the self-consciousness of asubject
of experience. This tendency, with its various modes of determination of being itself as presence, prevents the true character of being from coming to light or even from being intelligibly questioned.
An abiding sense of the dangerous and destructive consequences of this withdrawal of being from expression, and the hope of the futural event that would reverse it, dominates the esoteric rhetoric and elliptical investigations of Heidegger’s “being-historical treatise” of the mid-1930s, theBeiträge zur Philosophie: vom Ereignis
. From its first pages, in fact,Beiträge
takes up the question of being as a question of the possibility of language, as a question of the possibility of an adequate “saying” of being itself, or of its “essential swaying” (Wesen
) in the singular event ofEreignis.
Ereignis
itself, the event of “en-owning” to whose articulation the entirety of the book contributes, is difficult to define, and cannot be understood at all, according to Heidegger, through the “used-up” words of metaphysics. Thus, the entirety of theBeiträge
will constitute an attempt toward a “thinking-saying” ofEreignis
, a thinking and saying that also, unlike the language of metaphysics, “belongs … to be-ing’sword
.” In a time when the fundamental possibility of a thoughtful speaking of being has all but completely retreated, “all essential titles have become impossible” and “the genuine relation to the word has been destroyed”
. TheBeiträge
’s speaking and thinking ofEreignis
will therefore, necessarily, attempt to find a way back to this “genuine relation”through
the impoverishment and failure of the language of metaphysics, a struggle with and through the language of the tradition to find the terms and voices that can again speak, or witness, its most significant experience.
Heidegger’s growing appreciation, in theBeiträge
, of the failure of metaphysical language to articulate the truth of being necessitates certain terminological innovations, giving theBeiträge
a tone that is less straightforward and more evocative and performative than the analytic prose ofBeing and Time
. One of these innovations is Heidegger’s practice inBeiträge
of re-writing “being” itself asSeyn
rather thanSein
, at least when he is discussing it as it might appear outside the closure of the metaphysical tradition.
This is necessary, Heidegger explains, in order to gesture toward a break with the metaphysical tradition’s consistent interpretation of being as “beingness,” the quality of enduring presence and representability that the language of metaphysics constantly inscribes in its interpretation of individual beings. This stranger and more archaic way of writing “being” also aims to gesture toward the strangeness of a future experience or event of being outside the closure of this tradition, the event ofEreignis
itself. The speaking of be-ing inEreignis
, Heidegger tells us, will no longer be a speaking “about” being in which words and phrases describe or represent its aspects or characteristics, but rather a direct speaking “of” be-ing itself.
But the exhaustion of ordinary language makes this future speaking and thinking problematic, indeed almost impossible, in that the very linguistic terms that would be needed for it are lacking, along with the thought that those terms could call forth:
The truth of be-ing cannot be said with the ordinary language that today is ever more widely misused and destroyed by incessant talking. Can this truth ever be said directly, if all language is still the language of beings? Or can a new language for be-ing be invented? No. And even if this could be accomplished - and even without artificial word-formation - such a language would not be a saying language. All saying has to let the ability to hear arise with it. (CP
, 54)
Here, Heidegger makes it clear that no new language, no innovation of new terms or introduction of new turns of phrase, can make possible the simple speaking of the truth of be-ing. The linguistic failure that renders be-ing unsayable is not simply the failure of this or thatparticular
natural language to include the terms or metaphors that would be needed. Rather, the failure of language to speak the truth of be-ing conditionsall
language in the historical epoch of the consummation of metaphysics, since this consummation itself means that the truth of be-ing withdraws from us more and more.
Following these introductory remarks, the “Preview” that begins theBeiträge
moves to articulate the way in which the necessaryfailure
of language makes way for the possibility of a future speaking and thinking ofEreignis
. Insofar as this failure is not simply an empirical or contingent failure of a particular speaker, it reveals something of the character of language itself:
The word fails, not as an occasional event - in which an accomplishable speech or expression does not take place, where only the assertion and the repetition of something already said and sayable does not get accomplished - but originarily. The word does not even come to word, even though it is precisely when the word escapes one that the word begins to take its first leap. The word’s escaping one is enowning as the hint and onset of be-ing.
The word’s escaping is the inceptual condition for the self-unfolding possibility of an originary-poetic-naming of be-ing.
When will the time of language and deep stillness come, the time of the simple nearness of the essential sway and the bright remoteness of beings - when the word would once again work?
Here, the possibility of the time of “language and deep stillness,” the time to come when “the word would once again work,” must remain radically in question, since it cannot be asserted within any language that is available today. But precisely in witnessing the necessaryfailure
of language to speak being, Heidegger says, it becomes possible to obtain a “hint” and even an “onset” of be-ing itself.
Significantly, Heidegger’s description here of the failure of language that provides the first possibility of this first “hint,” goes far beyond anything that is suggested byBeing and Time
’s description of “keeping-silent” as a possible mode or modification of the existential structure of discourse and articulation.
Here, the decisive silence is not at all the contingent silence of an individual speaker who chooses to keep silent, of my choosing to hold back what I could or would otherwise say, but choose not to. The failure of language is not any longer traceable to the individual decision of a human subject at all; it is, rather, a matter of the failure of the word itself, of a situation in which “the word does not even come to word.” In his later works on language as well, Heidegger would often return to the description of what is shown in this experience of “words failing one”, finding in it, as in his earlier discussions ofAngst
and the nothingness, the possibility of a first revelation of beings as a whole in their underlying character.
The failure of language to speak the truth of being under the conditions of the completion of metaphysics is not simply a matter of the absence of words or terms. Instead, it witnesses the incapacity of any and every language, of language itself, to bring to light its own most fundamental determinants.
As is clear from Heidegger’s discussions of the “ontological difference” between beings (e.g., individual items, events, objects, processes, or ideas - whatever can be named) and being itself, one of the characteristic forms of this failure is the metaphysical diremption that makes every attempt tospeak
being, to articulate the fundamental character of being itself, collapse into the description ofa
being, an object or principle whose objective presence is subsequently presupposed. For:
Every saying of be-ing is kept in words and namings which are understandable in the direction of everyday references to beings and are thought exclusively in this direction, but which are misconstruable as the utterance of be-ing. Therefore it is not as if what is needed first is the failure of the question (within the domain of the thinking-interpretation of be-ing), but the word itself already discloses something (familiar) and thus hides that which has to be brought into the open through thinking-saying.
This difficulty cannot be eliminated at all; even the attempt to do so already means misunderstanding all saying of be-ing. This difficulty must be taken over and grasped in its essential belongingness (to the thinking of be-ing). (CP
, 58)
This collapse of the word of be-ing into “references to beings” is not a simple error or an avoidable mistake, since it is deeply rooted in the tendency of metaphysics to determine being as beingness, or as the most general characteristic of objective and enduring presence. Correlatively, along the lines of a necessity that amounts to the sway of metaphysics over language itself, being is taken for a being, stabilized in the form of objective, enduring presence as soon as it is named at all.
II
As is well known, also beginning in the 1930s, Heidegger would consistently identify the character of modern times as determined bytechnological
andcalculational
ways of thinking and behaving. These ways, he thought, manifest the most developed and injurious forms of an abiding forgetfulness or loss that traces almost to the beginning of the Western tradition. The discovery and unveiling of the hidden bases of the technological character of modern thinking and acting thus became an essential part of Heidegger’s narrative interpretation of the history of Western thought from its first beginning with the Greeks to its anticipated, if wholly unforeseeable, future. But inBeiträge
itself, the Heideggerian critique of technology develops alongside what may be a surprising result even to those familiar with this story: that the modern dominance of technology and a technological way of thinking and relating to things - what Heidegger calls, in theBeiträge
, “machination” (Machenschaft
) - is possible only through the conjoint emergence and growth of something that seems at first completely opposed to technology, namely individual, subjective “lived-experience” orErlebnis
.
Heidegger’s description of this conjoint emergence and dominance in modern times traces it to the increasingwithdrawal
of being from any possibility of expression within forms of language and life determined by metaphysics. This withdrawal manifests itself as the prevailing determination of being [das Sein
] from the sole perspective of individual beings [die Seienden
]
, and culminates in the total dominance of technological and calculational ways of thinking and handling objects. Heidegger refers to the total pattern of these ways of thinking and operating, and the interpretation of beings that facilitates them, asmachination
.
From the perspective of machination, all objects become raw material for quantitative measurement, calculation, and manipulation according to a natural-scientific understanding of matter. With its dominance, the making and manipulating of particular objects comes completely to the fore and obscures even the possibility of any question about the essence and nature of being itself.
At the utmost limit of the process, the distress caused by the withdrawal of being and of the question of its possibility, Heidegger says, is so complete that it manifests itself as a totallack
of distress, as the impossibility of even raising the question of what has withdrawn and what has been abandoned.
But Heidegger nevertheless thinks that it is possible, even in the most advanced forms of abandonment that culminate in the total domination of machination, to detect a faint echo or resonance of the original “happening” or “swaying” [Wesung
] of being at the time of the beginning of Western history. Perceiving this echo even in the completion of the dominant processes of technological thinking and machination, Heidegger suggests, will simultaneously enable us to gain a first premonition, hint, or intimation of the event of being, asEreignis
, in the “other” beginning, the one for which the thinking of theBeiträge
aims to prepare.
Machination thus echoes being in an age that has completely forgotten it. Coming to the fore alongside the withdrawal of being, machination fosters what is not proper to being (das Unwesen des Seins
), what furthers this withdrawal and indeed brings it to completion. But because it does nevertheless echo the essential sway of being, machination can also prepare the way for the event ofEreignis
, in which be-ing (Seyn) comes into its own.
But if we are to hear in machination the distant echo of being and see in its structure the possibility for beginning our preparation for another beginning, more is needed than simply an appreciation of its ambiguous nature. We must also understand, according to Heidegger, the long-suppressed connection between machination and what seems at first most distant from it, lived-experience orErlebnis
. The increasing spread and completion of the dominance of machination leads incessantly, Heidegger says, to the dominance of lived-experience as an “insipid sentimentality” in which every undertaking and event exists as experience and to be experienced.
But behind this banality lies a matter of the utmost importance for the historical project he undertakes. For it is the thought of the hidden connection between machination and lived-experience that will complete the “basic thrust” of Western history and begin the preparation for the “other beginning”:
If machination and lived-experience are named together, then this points to an essential belongingness of both to each other … When thinking-mindfulness (as questioning the truth of be-ing and only as this) attains the knowing awareness of this mutual belongingness, then the basic thrust of the history of the first beginning (history of Western metaphysics) is grasped along with that, in terms of the knowing awareness of the other beginning.
If we can understand what machination and lived-experience have to do with one another, Heidegger suggests, we can understand in the deepest sense how Western metaphysics, arising from the first beginning, has interpreted being and understood the nature of beings, and from this understanding begin to glimpse the futural event of be-ing in the “other beginning.”
III
In the context of the development of Heidegger’s thought,Beiträge
’s description of the connection between machination and lived-experience is significant in several ways. First, the connection of machination to ‘lived experience’ both illuminates and problematizes Heidegger’s inheritance of the phenomenological project of the descriptive analysis of experience. ThoughErfahrung
rather thanErlebnis
is Husserl’s usual word for experience, Heidegger’s use ofErlebnis
gestures towards theLeben
of Husserl’sLebenswelt
and the temporal primacy of Husserl’s ‘living present’. With his criticism of ‘lived-experience’ as conjoint and coeval with machination, Heidegger seems to turn decisively against his teacher’s attempt to reduce the abstracted and ramified conceptual network of scientific knowledge to its foundation in actual experience. InThe Crisis of European
Sciences
, Husserl had undertaken theepoche
or ‘bracketing’ of the world of scientific abstraction in order to uncover its foundation in the actually lived world of unabstracted experience. The current crisis of European culture itself, Husserl had complained, arises from a certain overdevelopment or technization in modern science that has led to a forgetfulness of this foundation. The scientific abstraction that Husserl criticizes bears many similarities to Heidegger’s ‘machination’: both arise as a total, all-engulfing framework of conceptualization and calculation; both injuriously neglect the historical origin and basis of this framework. But if, as Heidegger says, machination and lived-experience arise together as what is not ownmost to being, there is no hope for Husserl’s revitalizing return to a foundation in lived-experience. The apparent forgottenness of this foundation in the development of the modern scientific outlook is only apparent, the echo of the more fundamental forgottenness of being that inaugurates Western philosophy.
Secondly, and more broadly, Heidegger’s identification and critique of the connection between machination and lived-experience mark his most direct rejection of a range of projects in the nineteenth-century philosophy of subjectivity, project that identified subjectivity with ‘life’ and saw ‘lived experience’ as the vital foundation for all aesthetic and cultural productions. Heidegger must certainly have had in mind, for instance, Dilthey’s repeated invocation, throughout his ‘philosophy of world-views’ of the subjective, lived-experience of the individual thinker as the basis for any possible philosophy or artistic creation.
A decade earlier, inBeing and Time
, Heidegger had already criticized the orientation of Dilthey’s investigations toward the problematic of ‘life’, suggesting that although Dilthey’s philosophy contains an ‘inexplicit’ tendency toward fundamental clarification, this tendency cannot be fulfilled by it, for the philosophical orientation which begins with the life and lived-experience of individual persons (and here, Heidegger identifies not only Dilthey, but also Husserl, Bergson, and Scheler as adherents to this orientation) still cannot raise the question of thebeing
of the person.
As early asBeing and Time
, therefore, Heidegger begins to develop a critique ofErlebnis
that also aims to criticize the prevailing ‘anthropologistic’ or humanistic philosophy of subjectivity, and indeed the entire subjective/objective contrast that it presupposes. But it is not until theBeiträge
that Heidegger develops this critique fully, connecting the rise of lived-experience explicitly to the rise of anthropological thinking in philosophy, and situating both against the background of the growing dominance of machination and technology.
More broadly, in his later thought, Heidegger sees no way to surpass the modern idea of subjectivity while remaining within the confines of any existing notion of the “human.” The critique of subjectivity he undertakes is therefore, as he says, simultaneously a critique of “anthropologism” and every “human”-centered way of thinking. InBeiträge
, Heidegger finds that the emergence of lived-experience, and its totalization as the universal category of the “experienceable,” “demands and consolidates the anthropological way of thinking.”
For in connection with the identification of all kinds of things and happenings as graspable through “lived-experience,” the human being is defined as theanimal rationale
. The definition begins by defining the human purely biologically, in terms of its animal “life,” and then subsequently adding the determination of rationality, which then can only, Heidegger avers, be understood as a capacity for representing objects and contents of thought within a subjective self-consciousness.
Lived-experience, then, inaugurates and confirms the prevailing anthropologistic conception of humankind asanimal rationale
. It does so by restricting “beings” to a certain limited range, the range of beings that are representable as “lived through live-experience.” It makes the livability of any being as an experienced representation the criterion of its being altogether, and thereby restricts being to objectivity, understood as set over against subjectivity. The movement of this restriction is that of a pre-delineation, a pre-structuring of the totality of beings to guarantee their representability as objects, their livability in experience, and their comprehensibility to rational man. In the pre-delineation of beings as a whole, lived-experience and experienceability become the univocal standard of their being.
On the basis of this pre-delineation of beings as possible objects of experience and representation for subjects, “man” is conceived as theanimal rationale
and the realm of beings as essentially consisting of objects of representation open to his rational knowing. Lived-experience and the notion of “objectivity” are linked in their historical arising; moreover, the more that objectivity is developed as the realm of the existence of whatever is, the more that it demands subjective lived-experience as its criterion and standard. Machination and lived-experience, then, come to prominence together, in modern times, when every event and object comes to be understood as material for the experience of the experiencing subject, and hence subject to the pre-delineation imposed by a framework of possible representation and representability. This pre-delineated framework is what Heidegger would later callGestell
or “enframing,” the essence of technology itself according to the late essay “The Question Concerning Technology.”
Its imposition leads to the interpretation of all beings as measurable and calculable, and to the growth and furtherance of the forms of technological creation and manipulation that this universal measurability and calculability makes possible. Heidegger indicates that we can understand the deeper history of this process only by grasping the original, non-quantitative understanding of the nature of beings that reigned at the time of the first beginning. This understanding of nature, not as a particular domain or set of beings, but as the nature of beings themselves, was called “phusis” by the Greeks.
In theBeiträge
discussion, Heidegger invokes this original understanding of beings as “phusis” without explaining it in any detail; for more insight, we must look to his less esoteric published writings. In the courseBasic Questions of Philosophy
, written contemporaneously withBeiträge
, Heidegger considers the origin of technology as the origin oftechne
, the Greek term for the particular attitude toward beings that culminates in today’s advanced calculational processes of technological manipulation and control. He finds, though, thattechne
does not originally arise from calculation or the quantitative at all, but rather from a basic attitude ofwonder
at beings in the world.Phusis
itself is the conception of beings that encounters them from within this attitude of wonder. Given this, originaltechne
is already, in a certain sense, a proceeding againstphusis
. But it is not yet the totalizing, world-involving process of modern technology.
Primordially,techne
is a perceptual knowledge of beings. Though it does not yet involve the systematic ordering of all beings according to principles,techne
already proceeds “against” beings, trying to “grasp beings as emerging out of themselves in the way they show themselves … and, in accord with this, to care for beings themselves and to let them grow, i.e., to order oneself within beings as a whole through productions and institutions.”
In this “against,” we can already see the roots of the interpretation of beings that is evident in the etymology of the German word for “object”:Gegenstand
, or, literally, that which stands against. Primordialtechne
will eventually lead to the determination of beings as objects and the oppositional subject/object relationship that characterizes the dominance of machination. But in primordialtechne
, Heidegger finds a more basic “against”; it is the “against” of perceptual knowledge grounded in wonder as a basic disposition. This perceptual knowledge accords with, rather than opposes, the way that beings can show themselves in truth, what Heidegger elsewhere callspoiesis
.
Indeed, it implies a procedure “against beings, but in such a way that these themselves precisely show themselves.”
Originally,techne
is the respectful looking that perceives the being in its self-showing openness. The relationship of man to beings in originaltechne
is neither the relationship of particular subject to particular object nor the challenging relationship of man to beings in technology. Instead, it is the appearing ofphusis
, or the self-showing of beings in the resonance and strikingness - the wonder - of their own being.
But although it is itself neither machination nor lived-experience, the primordial seeing oftechne
originatesboth
machinationand
lived-experience in their togetherness. For although primordialtechne
remains a non-confrontational seeing, the exteriority oftechne
tophusis
already prepares the objectification of beings and of the dominance of lived-experience as the unified standard of all events and happenings. From the basic proceeding oftechne
“against”phusis
will emerge the mutually challenging relationship in which lived-experience, as a universal standard of experienceability, pre-delineates beings and prepares them for technological and machinating control. In understanding the phenomenology of originary techne, we understand the showing of being intechne
prior to
the forgetting and obscurity of being that transformstechne
into machination and starts it on the path of total domination of objects. Still, the possibility of this withdrawing of being is already essentially prepared by basictechne
:
The basic attitude towardphusis
,techne
, as the carrying out of the necessity and need of wonder, is at the same time, however, the ground upon which arisesomoiosis
, the transformation ofaletheia
as unconcealedness into correctness. In other words, in carrying out the basic disposition itself there resides the danger of its disturbance and destruction. For in the essence of techne, as required by phusis itself, as the occurrence and establishment of the unconcealedness of beings, there lies the possibility of arbitrariness, of an unbridled positing of goals and thereby the possibility of escape out of the necessity of the primordial need.
The forgetting of being inaugurates machination by covering over the basic need of wonder, the need of the basic attitude that takes beings into respectful consideration and care. Without this basic attunement toward wonder, the prevailing way of revealing beings becomes the correctness of representations rather than their self-showing in original unconcealment, what Heidegger callsaletheia
. The overall character of beings itself becomes objectivity rather thanphusis
; beings are understood as objects for subjective representation, and the standard of such representation is their universal experienceability in lived-experience.
In the passage, Heidegger also names the origin of this process of forgetting and covering over whereby beings become objects and truth becomes correctness. It isomoiosis
, or identity. Identity itself is the origin of the “disturbance and destruction” that transforms the original attunement toward beings into one of representation and subjectivity. After the onset of this “disturbance and destruction,”identity
plays an essential role in determining the nature of beings, leading ultimately to the determination of the overall character of beings as objectivity and of truth as representational correctness. At first glance, this claim seems puzzling. How could such a thing as identity, surely among the most abstract and contentless of philosophical concepts, play a fundamental role in determining the prevailing conception of the nature of objects and the everyday ways of thinking and operating that arises from this conception? But as we shall see, Heidegger thinks that the thought of identity, and in particular the tautological principle of the self-identity of objects, itself underlies, at the deepest level, the conjoint arising of machination and lived-experience as a universal standard for beings. To see how, though, we must look elsewhere in Heidegger’s corpus.
IV
With the location of the joint origin of lived-experience and machination in originaltechne
, the togetherness of these seeming opposites becomes thinkable. InBeiträge
, Heidegger says also that the thought of the original unity of lived experience and machination “completes the basic thrust of Western history” and essentially prepares our thinking forEreignis
. The preparation forEreignis
is intelligible as soon as the true character of machination’s echo of the first beginning becomes apparent. This character, in turn, becomes apparent as machination’s origin in primordialtechne
, from which machination and lived experience arise jointly under the condition of the forgottenness of being. InBeiträge
, Heidegger specifies, in a distinct but related way, the connection between machination and being’s essential swaying in the first beginning:
Machination and lived-experience are formally [formelhaft] the more originary version of the formula for the guiding-question of Western thinking: beingness (being) and thinking (as re-presenting com-prehending).
This formula recalls the fragment of Parmenides that Heidegger investigates in several of his later texts, most significantlyIdentity and Difference
andWhat is Called Thinking
:
to gar auto noein estin te kai einai
This fragment, Heidegger says inWhat is Called Thinking
, is usually translated as:
"For it is the same thing to think and to be."
This saying of Parmenides captures, according to Heidegger, “the basic theme of all of Western-European thinking.”
It echoes in Kant’s identification of the conditions for the possibility of experience with the conditions for the possibility of the objects of experience, and in Hegel’s “Being is Thinking.” But theto auto
, or sameness, of the Parmenides fragment is notomoiosis
, or identity, even though sameness and identity are often treated as interchangeable in the tradition of Western metaphysics.
Indeed, one of the most basic foundations of Western thinking, Heidegger suggests, can begin to come to light if we can understand the difference between this sameness and this identity.
InIdentity and Difference
, Heidegger explores the implications of the principle of identity: A=A. This principle, Heidegger says, is itself a keynote of Western thought. It asserts the sameness of each particular thing with itself. But rather than simply rest with this seemingly self-evident principle, Heidegger proceeds to inquire into its hidden ground:
Sameness implies the relation of ‘with,’ that is, a mediation, a connection, a synthesis: the unification into a unity. This is why throughout the history of Western thought identity appears as unity.
Throughout the history of Western thought, identity has been considered in connection with unity: what is self-identical is unified with itself. But this relationship of the thing with itself becomes more than simple unity as the Western tradition progresses. In the speculative idealism of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, Heidegger suggests, self-identity, understood in terms of the selfhood of the subject, becomes articulated as a complex process of self-relation.
What is decisive for the possibility of speculative idealism is the possibility of seeing the self’s relationship of self-identity as one that is capable of mediation, and thus one that can exist and develop in a variety of different ways. With this notion of mediated self-identity, the original principle of identity comes to bear a philosophical weight that brings to completion its historical itinerary. If we can think of the “is” of the proposition “A is A” not as a purely abstract relation of unity, but as an expression of being itself, Heidegger suggests, we can understand how the principle of identity expresses an ancient and guiding determination of the nature of beings:
For the proposition really says: “A is A.” What do we hear? With this “is,” the principle tells us how every being is, namely: it itself is the same with itself. The principle of identity speaks of the Being of beings.
As a law of thought, the principle is valid only insofar as it is a principle of Being that reads: To every being as such there belongs identity, the unity with itself.
What the principle of identity, heard in its fundamental key, states is exactly what the whole of Western European thinking has in mind - and that is: the unity of identity forms a basic characteristic in the Being of beings. Everywhere, wherever and however we are related to beings of every kind, we find identity making its claim on us.
(pp. 25-26).
Western thought, repeatedly and foundationally, asserts the unity of identity (die Einheit der Identität
). In speaking the unity of identity and the identity of the same, it seeks to subject beings to the basic law that determines the identity of any object. This basic law, in turn, pre-determines the field of possible beings, making possible the pre-delineation of the world that is then accomplished by the dominance of machination and
lived-experience. When the formal identity of “A is A” is understood as the selfhood of a self, it makes the self-identical self of Hegel, Fichte, and Schelling the center and locus of this pre-delineation. Subjective experience becomes the universal and universalizing standard for the nature of beings. Lived-experience emerges along with machination as the total systematicity enabled by the application of the self-identity of the experiencing subject to the lawbound world of objects.
In originarytechne
, by contrast,noein
is not thinking as representing or calculating, but as the basic attitude of a perceptual knowing grounded in the attunement of wonder and the understanding of beings asphusis
. Under the condition of the forgottenness of being, sameness (to auto)
becomes identity (omoiosis)
andnoein
becomes thinking in the sense of Kant and Hegel. In this development, the originary sameness of thinking (asnoein
) and being (estin
) becomes the technological challenging-forth of beings and the standard of lived-experience that makes it possible. But the connection of machination and lived-experience continues to pose a form of the “guiding-question of Western thinking.” For by understanding of the connection of machination and lived-experience, we begin to grasp the meaning of Parmenides’ fragment, and thereby to understand the meaning of being at the “first beginning” of history, from which understanding we can begin to prepare for the “other beginning” ofEreignis.
V
In 1930, six years before Heidegger began writing hisBeiträge
, Wittgenstein wrote the following as part of the introduction to his plannedPhilosophical Remarks
:
This book is written for such men as are in sympathy with its spirit. This spirit is different from the one which informs the vast stream of European and American civilization in which all of us stand.That
spirit expresses itself in an onwards movement, in building ever larger and more complicated structures; the other in striving after clarity and perspicuity in no matter what structure. The first tries to grasp the world by way of its periphery - in its variety; the second at its centre - in its essence. And so the first adds one construction to another, moving on and up, as it were, from one stage to the next, while the other remains where it is and what it tries to grasp is always the same.
Wittgenstein’s thought, like Heidegger’s, explores the relationship between lived-experience and machination in order to issue a deep challenge to the prevalence of the guiding metaphysical idea of the self-identity of the same. The attitude Wittgenstein critiques in theRemarks
, the spirit of onward and upward movement, is the attitude of machination. And Wittgenstein’s critique of the metaphysical picture of the rule, as developed in thePhilosophical Investigations
, aims at the essence of what is “always the same” through an investigation of the same connection of machination and lived-experience that Heidegger discovers in the course of his own thought.
In critiquing the constructional spirit “which informs the vast stream of European and American civilization,” Wittgenstein may well have had in mind the constructional project of Carnap’sDer Logische Aufbau der Welt
, published just two years previously. InAufbau
, Carnap had outlined an optimistic and utopian project of epistemological “construction” of the scientific world:
If we allot to the individual in philosophical work as in the special sciences only a partial task, then we can look with more confidence into the future: in slow careful construction insight after insight will be won. Each collaborator contributes only what he can endorse and justify before the whole body of his co-workers. Thus stone will be carefully added to stone and a safe building will be erected at which each following generation can continue to work .
The constructional project of theAufbau
aims to display the epistemological structure of science by revealing the concepts of science as logical constructions from basic, uninferred entities. According to Carnap’s conception, science itself is a network of logical relations, a unified field of logically interrelated propositions. The relationality of this total network, Carnap suggests, is the condition for the possibility of objectivity itself:
Now, the fundamental thesis of construction theory … which we will attempt to demonstrate in the following investigation, asserts that fundamentally there is only one object domain and that each scientific statement is about the objects in this domain. Thus, it becomes unnecessary to indicate for each statement the object domain, and the result is thateach scientific statement can in principle be so transformed that it is nothing but a structure statement
. But this transformation is not only possible, it is imperative. For science wants to speak about what is objective, and whatever does not belong to the structure but to the material (i.e. anything that can be pointed out in a concrete ostensive definition) is, in the final analysis, subjective.
Carnap’s conception of objectivity as the form of relational description of science, in connection with his utopian ambitions for construction theory, manifests the key elements of Heidegger’s description of machination. The logical form of objectivity is the pre-delineated field of lawbound relations among objects, explainable in virtue of their submission to this pre-delineation. As Heidegger suggests, this lawful pre-delineation is itself, according to Carnap, the essential condition for the possibility of objectivity. In the logical field of propositional relations, the totality of beings is subject to explainability and reducibility. Moreover, Carnap’s project essentially involves the connection between this machinational pre-delineation and lived-experience as a universal standard. For the epistemologically illuminating reconstruction of a scientific concept reduces it to its basis inimmediate lived experiences
,erlebnisse
or “erlebs.” In Carnap’s picture, therefore, the correlate of the total field of objectivity is the standard of experienceability by a subject. Objectivity is possible only on the basis of the formalizability of all lived-experiences, their regimentation in a total web of scientific explanation. With this relation, Carnap’s picture inherits Kant’s identification of the conditions of being (as objectivity) with the conditions of possible experience (as subjectivity); and he situates these conditions explicitly within a total pre-delineated world-picture of unitary explanation.
Wittgenstein’sPhilosophical Investigations
critiques the joint configuration of machinational, technical thinking and subjective lived-experience in two interrelated movements, the so-called “rule-following considerations” and the “private language argument.” As is well known, the argument against private language attempts to show the incoherence of the idea of a subjective language, particular to one person, in virtue of which she could name her essentially private sensations or experiences. It shows the incoherence of this idea by showing that such naming would be in a certain sense idle or empty, that it could do nothing to give the name a stable relationship to its bearer if this relationship were not already determined by its complex role in the entirety of a human life. In Heidegger’s language, the critique of private language shows that no standard of lived-experience, no criterion of experienceability-by-a-subject, can do the work of authorizing the total pre-delineation of a unified field of objectivity and explainability of beings, as it appears to do on Carnap’s picture.
The target of Wittgenstein’s critique has it in common with the target of Heidegger’s critique, in particular, that it presents the referential connection between a “word” and its “object” as forged by the fixation of a particular mental image or symbol in the mind of a subject of experience. The assumption of such a connection determines the fundamental relationship of thinking to its objects as one of representation, and hence (as Heidegger would point out) as a mode of presence, a substitution of image for thing in the interiority of the subject. The conception was, as we have already seen, a primary target of analytic philosophy’s linguistically based critique of psychologism, even before Wittgenstein’s determinate and extended application of it to the problems of “rule-following” and “private language.” In the opening pages of theInvestigations
, Wittgenstein seeks to loosen its hold by reminding us of the various types of words (not only nouns and verbs) that make up a language, and of the vast and scarcely delimitable heterogeneity of their ways of functioning in a language as a whole.
With this reminder, Wittgenstein calls into question, on linguistic grounds, the picture that sets the subjectivity of experience against the objectivity of things, where such objectivity is determined, first and foremost, in terms of a subject’s capacity of makingreference
to particular things.
In place of the picture that determines the fundamental character of language as that of representation, and so consolidates the logic that sets subjective experience off over against the objectivity of objects, Wittgenstein seeks to remind us of the irreducible complexity of the functioning of various types of words in the various contexts of a human life. His special terms of art for this complex integration and the unities they make up - “language-games” and “forms of life” - do not refer to specific, theoretically representable unities of practice or activity. Rather, they express the variety and complexity of this integration of language into human life and the multiplicity of its modes. In relation to the human life of whose possibilities these linguistic modes are so many expressions, language itself is nothing like a possession. With the concrete reminder of the multiplicity and complexity of the varieties of usage and their integration into human life, the ancient definition of the human aszoon logon echon
(the animal having language) lapses, as it does in a different way in Heidegger’s critique. For both philosophers, the availability of language to life can no longer be specified as that of a present object simply open to the theoretical gaze. The essential and revealing withdrawal of language from this gaze shows the inherent ambiguity and unavoidable complexity of the everyday relation of life to the language that articulates its most definitive possibilities, the ambiguous and open space of theapplication
of language to everyday life.
For Heidegger as well as for Wittgenstein, the experience that most directly reveals the inherent complexities of the relationship of language to life is indeed that of thefailure
of language, of the “running up against” its boundaries that Wittgenstein saw as the characteristic expression of a fundamental and typical human desire.
Where these boundaries are encountered in the form of the failure of language, we gain, according to Heidegger, a certain kind of insight into the character of language itself. This insight shows us the underlying reasons for our pervasive failure, within the ordinary realm of language and its possibilities of expression, to bring to light the essential character of the deepest determinants of our being. The early Wittgenstein, in a revealingly parallel way, identified “the limits of my language” with “the limits of my world” and called thefeeling
of contemplating the world “as a limited whole” the “mystical.”
Near the end of theTractatus
, he also identifies the “mystical” with the “inexpressible” that can only be shown and never said.
As for Heidegger, the revelation of this “inexpressible” beyond is marked most of all by the linguistic experience of language’s own boundaries in the privative mode of silence, by the necessary silence that one must preserve “whereof one cannot speak.”
Yet where are the “boundaries of language,” and what does the analytic tradition’s recurrent failure to fix them in the form of an explicit theoretical description reveal about the complexities of their figuring in a human life? As we have already seen, for the late Wittgenstein as well as the author of theTractatus
, the critical or reflective work of tracing the boundaries of sense in the linguistic performances of everyday conversation or action cannot and does not culminate in the specification of a single, univocal set of criteria capable of drawing a fixed line between sense and nonsense in the practice of a language as a whole. In the idiom of theTractatus
, any such statement undermines itself, as soon as it is stated, by revealing itself as nonsense. In that of theInvestigations
, any propositional expression of criteria meant to determine the bounds of sense still leaves open the further critical question of the application ofthat
expression in practice. With theInvestigations
’ detailed critical consideration of rule-following, the access to language that we constantly presuppose, and practice with every word and gesture, is shown to be incapable of explication in terms of any fixed set of rules or standards. Rather, our constant recourse to language is a paradoxical deliverance to what can never appear as an object, given to the theoretical gaze that would account for it or in the ordinary practice that would be determined by it.
Synthesizing the rhetoric of Wittgenstein and Heidegger, we might say: our most everyday experiences of language, of its successes as well as its failures, its capacities for revealing as well as what it hides, mark the ordinary occasions of our recourse to it with the extraordinariness of the unresolved mystery of language’s being itself.
VI
In the context of the late Wittgenstein’s project of perspicuously viewing the actual use of our language in order to clear up philosophical confusions, the concept of therule
emerges as a particular point of difficulty. When discussing rules, he agues, we are particularly tempted to misinterpret the grammar of our language, giving it an interpretation that it does not bear. We may particularly be tempted to invoke rules when we are tempted to establish and explain the submission of beings to the possibility of overall explanation and clarification. Explanatory projects like Carnap’s, for instance, make the rule-based and lawbound character of beings the basis of their total explainability and characterizability in the objective terms of scientific description and explanation. In reminding us of the actual character of our language of rule-following, Wittgenstein shows the failure of this metaphysical use of rules to establish its own ground. He shows us that the metaphysical interpretation according to which beings are submitted to a unified regime of explanation insofar as they are rule-bound fails to accomplish its goal, because it conceals its own origin in what is actually a fiction, a mythology of the regular self-identity of the rule across the infinite diversity of the circumstances of its application.
Considered in connection with Heidegger’s thought, the concept of a rule again has a special and basic significance. For the rule, in the basic picture of machination, is the most essential condition under which a subject’s experience can act as standard and criterion for the object. Only in virtue of a rule-bound pre-delineation of beings does the self-identical subject guarantee the submission of the range of beings, as objects of representation, to its thinking. In the self-identity of the rule, the self-identity of the subject itself is made the standard of the world of objects; for it is the universal applicability of the rule that establishes the possibility of the pre-delineation of the world as explainable in relational, causal, and lawbound terms. The universality of the rule, then, licenses the projection of the assumed self-identity of the subject into the assumption of the lawbound unity of the world of objects, guaranteeing the fundamental comprehensibility of all objects by guaranteeing their universal experienceability. It is this claim for the universality of the rule, its guarantee of infinite application undisrupted by heterogeneity, difference, and particularity, that we may see Wittgenstein’s considerations as criticizing in particular.
One specific way that Wittgenstein criticizes the application of the idea of rules in projects like Carnap’s is to remind us of the close connection between the use of the concept of the “rule” and the concept of the “same:”
223. One does not feel that one has always got to wait upon the nod (the whisper) of the rule. On the contrary, we are not on tenterhooks about what it will tell us next, but it always tells us the same, and we do what it tells us.
One might say to the person one was training: “Look, I always do the same thing: I ….”
224. The word ‘agreement’ and the word ‘rule’ are related to one another, they are cousins. If I teach anyone the use of the one word, he learns the use of the other with it.
225. The use of the word “rule” and the use of the word “same” are interwoven. (As are the use of “proposition” and the use of “true”).
Under the pressure of the demand to explain what it is to follow a rule, our natural temptation is to explain the rule in terms of the identity of the same. We think of the rule as a self-identical structure thatrepeats itself infinitely
bytelling us the same
at every stage. The rule, we are tempted to think, “always tells us the same, and we do what it tells us.”
To see more clearly the philosophical temptation at the root of the line of thought that Wittgenstein is criticizing, we may consider the following sequence:
2 4 6 8 10
Having given the partial sequence, we might attempt to give the rule of the series: it is “add two.” The rule itself can be thought of as a finite item. But when we think of the rule as the metaphysical item that generates the series, we think of it repeatingitself
infinitely. As we apply the rule to generate more of the series, we do thesame
thing again and again. We can do so because the rule itself remains the same. The rule itself is not affected by the conditions of its application. Theself-identity
of the rule guarantees thesameness
of each of its infinite applications.
According to the thinking that Wittgenstein criticizes, then, to follow a rule consistently or correctly is to do the same thing, again and again, ignoring or leaving no room for any possible heterogeneity of instances of its possible application and development. The assurance provided by this characterization, however, blinds us to the complex relationship of our concrete acts of rule-following to the particular contexts of their occurance. Attempting to explain, rather than describe, what it is to follow a rule, we picture to ourselves the self-identity of an entity the same with itself in all of its instances. It is this picturing that underlies the misleading picture of the rule that Wittgenstein criticizes, the picture of the rule as a “rail laid to infinity,” a selfsame, stable bearer of regularity whose only application is infinite repetition.
And to advert to the assurance of the rule in explaining ourpractices
of counting and calculating is to advert to the certainty of an idealized process of thought that would be applicable in any situation whatsoever, one that would make thesubject
the self-identical thinker of the same in any circumstance or context. Accordingly, it is to dissimulate in advance the varieties of difference, found in the openness of the horizon of possible applications of a rule, that could subvert its underlying stability and disrupt the ideal certainty of this ideal subject.
The “rule-following considerations” problematize this metaphysical picture of the rule by posing a paradox.
The paradox shows that the metaphysical description of the rule - the description according to which the rule repeats the identity of the same - fails to afford us the explanation it seems to. For as long as the rule is thought metaphysically, any application of the rule still needs another explanation. The rule, thought metaphysically, needs an interpretation in order to be applied at all; but then the interpretation itself must be interpreted, and so on. The self-identical rule, meant to guarantee the certainty of the self-identical subject in applying a universal standard of experience to all beings, falls short of this guarantee exactly where it is called upon to interact with the subject. No metaphysical item - no self-identical agent of infinite repetition - can explain what we call “following a rule” in the particular cases in which we appeal to that notion.
VI
With hisBeiträge
critique of the joint configuration of machination and lived-experience, Heidegger joins Wittgenstein in exposing and criticizing the pervasive determination of modern “forms of life” and conceptions of its subject through forms of metaphysics that are inscribed ceaselessly in the everyday expressions of our language itself.
The underlying basis of the critique, for both philosophers, lies in their sustained considerations of the nature of language, of the possibilities it brings to light or constrains, and of the ambiguity of our lived relation to it. In both philosophers’ treatments, this ambiguity is shown in the experience of language’s withdrawal from the forms of description that would bring it to light as an object, that would clarify its fundamental mode of being and thereby display its relationship to the living being that speaks. This experience of the withdrawal of language from the positive description of its essential mode of being is also, as we have seen over the last several chapters, a regular and repeated experience of the analytic tradition that undertakes explicitly the analysis and description of language’s structure. It makes evident the determination of ordinary forms of action and practice by unargued metaphysical conceptions of language, meaning, and identity. In so doing, it opens the critique that interrogates these practices on the basis of the ambiguity of their own linguistic ground, and so might perhaps open the possibility of a life purged of the forms of violence and mystification to which they lead.
Analytic philosophers are likely to be suspicious, with some justice, of the determinative role in Heidegger’s inquiry of the question of the expressibility of “being itself.” The characteristic Heideggerian narrative of the successive withdrawing of this ill-defined “object,” with its eschatological hopes for a future return, inscribes Heidegger’s critical aims within a framework that we may see as both nostalgic and historically totalizing in ways that analytic philosophers, typically suspicious of such grand narratives, may certainly wish to resist. But the central object of Heidegger’s analysis of the origin of the linguistic forms of metaphysics - our standing tendency to take language as a present being, as an unproblematic possession of the human animal and so as wholly under the control of its power of thought - is readily recognizable in the specific forms of language, and pictures of the life of its speaker, that the analytic tradition also repeatedly interrogates. Whatever the effects or forms of its historical development, this tendency to treat words as the possessions of a thinking subjectivity that inscribes the possibilities of their use in advance is present wherever and whenever, in human discourse, the question of the meaning of a word, or its significant employment in the course of a life, is explicitly raised or implicitly foreclosed. The critique that exposes the ambiguity of its objectification of language does not depend on any determinate or positive conception of the “nature of being” or the prospects for its influence over the course of history, for it demonstrates this ambiguity in the everyday life of language itself. It exposes the failure of the thinking, experiencing subject, and of the rule-governed forms of regularity it inscribes, to master the open possibilities of language’s everyday use.
It has been evident for several decades that the possibility of gaining a clear understanding of the significance of linguistic reflection for twentieth-century philosophy, and with it perhaps as well possibility of a genuine reconciliation of analytic and continental philosophy, depends in significant measure on gaining a clear sense of the parallels and convergences between the very different critical projects of Heidegger and Wittgenstein. Many commentators have speculated on these convergences, but relatively few have placed them within the context of a larger consideration of the implications of the basic inquiry into the nature and structure of language that both philosophers actually undertook.
Within the scope of “analytic” readings, interpretation of the significance of Heidegger’s thought has furthermore regularly been vitiated by a prominent and influential misreading which, portraying him as a “social pragmatist” theorist of the practical basis of the disclosure of beings in the world, tends to obscure the deep and ever-growing significance of the question of language for his most central concerns.
Their explicit setting within the scope of this question reveals the ongoing relevance of the common experience of the enigmatic withdrawal of language that Heidegger and Wittgenstein shared, and that still continues to determine our relation to language wherever and whenever it is in question.
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Author: Paul M. Livingston
