Pre´cis of Heidegger, Language, and World-disclosure

Abstract

The book is a critical discussion of the conception of language as worlddisclosure that Heidegger develops explicitly in his writings after the Kehre, but that has its roots in Being and Time. According to this view, our access to the world, and to anything that might show up within the world, is structured by language. This view of language allows Heidegger to criticize the mentalism characteristic of modern philosophy and to articulate his new, hermeneutic approach. It lends plausibility to his contention that our primary access to the world is not due to an allegedly neutral perception of entities but to our prior understanding of everything that can show up within the world as something or other. Thus, the priority of understanding and interpretation over perception requires a hermeneutic transformation of philosophy. While Heidegger’s criticism of the subject–object model so characteristic of modern philosophy is certainly plausible, his view of the role that language plays in our experience of the world leads to counterintuitive consequences. The most notorious of them can be found in Heidegger’s writings on language after the Kehre, when he provocatively claims that ‘there is no thing when the word is lacking’ or that ‘language speaks’ and thus is ‘the master of man’. It is in view of these claims that the charges of linguistic idealism and of a reiŽ cation of language are a commonplace among many interpreters of Heidegger’s later works. Less common, however, seems to be the urge to transform this charge into an explicit analysis and criticism of the premise that underlies Heidegger’s linguistic idealism, namely, his claim that our experience with entities is determined by our prior understanding of their being (1). But if this claim is right, along with the claim that our understanding of the being of entities is contained in our language (2), it is less than clear that Heidegger’s idealism, in spite of its counterintuitiveness, is actually wrong. In light of this