Studies in Continental Thought

Günter Figal, Diego D'Angelo, Tobias Keiling, Guang Yang

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780253047229
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Phenomenology in Philosophy

If one takes Heidegger at his word then his philosophy is about pursuing different "paths" of thought rather than defining a single set of truths. This volume gathers the work of an international group of scholars to present a range of ways in which Heidegger can be read and a diversity of styles in which his thought can be continued. Despite their many approaches to Heidegger, their hermeneutic orientation brings these scholars together. The essays span themes from the ontic to the ontological, from the specific to the speculative. While the volume does not aim to present a comprehensive interpretation of Heidegger's later thought, it covers much of the terrain of his later thinking and presents new directions for how Heidegger should and should not be read today. Scholars of Heidegger's later thought will find rich and original readings that expand considerations of Heidegger's entire oeuvre.

I.

LANGUAGE, LOGOS, AND RHYTHM

1

“The House of Being”

Poetry, Language, Place

Jeff Malpas

1.

One of the characteristic features of Heidegger’s later thinking is its concern with language. Indeed, one might say that the centrality of this concern is a clear marker of the more strongly hermeneutical character of the later thinking (the thinking of the postwar years especially) compared to the earlier¹—a character that is present in spite of Heidegger’s explicit claim to have abandoned hermeneutics (or, at least, to have abandoned the term) in his later work.² The concern with language in the later Heidegger also coincides with a more explicit turn toward the topological—toward topos, or place (Ort/Ortschaft).³ This is no coincidence. Not only are the topological and the hermeneutical themselves bound together,⁴ but Heidegger’s topological “turn” itself (which is really a return to something that is present throughout his thinking) develops out of his increasing engagement with both language and poetry, especially as this engagement is mediated through the work of Hölderlin.⁵ That poetry, language, and place are indeed tied together in the later Heidegger is especially evident in the 1947 “Letter on ‘Humanism.’” There Heidegger famously characterizes language as “the house of being,” adding that “in its home human being dwells.”⁶ The themes of home and dwelling, and the very nature of the language that is invoked here, are connected directly back to Hölderlin⁷ in a way that continues from the engagement with the poet that had been under way in Heidegger’s thinking for at least the previous fifteen years (from the early Hölderlin lectures beginning in 1934 to the Ister lectures of 1943⁸) and that would continue long after (including the 1959 volume Unterwegs zur Sprache⁹). Heidegger’s discussions of poetry and language, as well as his relation to Hölderlin, have often claimed the attention of commentators, but the way poetry, language, and place, and especially the place of language within the topology of being, come together in late Heidegger is seldom remarked upon—perhaps unsurprisingly considering the lack of real attention that is given to place in particular.

Yet it is not only the topological character of language—or even of language and poetry—that is brought into view here. When Heidegger talks of language as “the house of being,” what is at issue is as much the idea of the house, and what it is to house, as is the idea of language or, indeed, of being. The house is itself a topological concept: a mode of place and placing—perhaps one of the most basic modes of place and placing. The house is that within which one dwells, that in which one is given a place, afforded shelter, and allowed rest as well as activity; through its delimitation of space, the house grants space, room, and dimension. This remains true regardless of the emphasis on the homelessness of our contemporary condition, regardless even of the critique of home as a site of oppression, subjugation, or violence. What is at issue is not merely the house or home in its contingent instantiations but the house as that which does indeed give place to being. To be the house of being, in Heidegger’s formulation, is also to give home to human being. To dwell is to find oneself housed, to be at home. Once again this does not mean that one finds oneself secured against all uncertainty or questionability but rather that one first finds oneself placed in the world and thus one’s own being appears as an issue. In this fashion, only the one who is already at home can be “homeless”; only the one who is already housed can be in need of housing. Gaston Bachelard writes that “on whatever theoretical horizon we examine it, the house image would appear to have become the topography of our intimate being.”¹⁰ Although this claim plays out in a number of different ways in Bachelard’s work, it nevertheless indicates something of the fundamental nature of the house, and so of home, as topological and so also as ontological.

In claiming language as the house of being, as the structure in which human beings dwell, Heidegger claims this very nature for language. Language is thus the structure within which one dwells, which gives place, affords shelter, and allows rest and activity. One may even be led to say that, if language is the house of being, then there must also be a sense in which language itself grants space, room, and dimension precisely through its delimitation of the same. Part of the task before us is to understand both how and why this might be so—what does it mean for language to have such a nature?—but in equal significance, the task is to understand the topology that is at work here. How can we speak of the house—and so of place or dimension—as belonging to the character of language or of being? What does it mean to speak of them in this way?

In the “Letter on ‘Humanism,’” Heidegger comments that “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,” suggesting that we think less readily in such a way now.¹¹ The comment comes in the context of a warning against reading the phrase “the house of being” as if it were merely an “adornment of language” or as if it involved “the transfer of the image ‘house’ onto being.”¹² It is at this point that the question of poetry comes directly into view, not only in terms of the way it sheds light on the questions of being or of language but in terms of its own nature and the nature of poetic language, including its own relation to the topological. Moreover, if the poetic and the topological seem to be brought together here, then it is not poetry alone—or even poetry as tied to language—that is at issue. The inquiry into the place of language within the topology of being, with which the question of poetry is implicated, includes within it the question of topology itself. What, we may ask, is the nature of topology, such that language and poetry are so closely bound to it? Or, to put a familiar Heideggerian remark and phrase into an interrogative form: What is the character of the saying of place that is involved in the topology of being, and what is the topology of being, such that it takes the form of “a poetry that thinks?”¹³

2.

A mode of topological inquiry, even if not made explicit, is present in Heidegger’s thinking almost from the start. Yet, although this means that Heidegger’s thinking can be construed fundamentally as an attempt to contemplate the essentially placed character of being, the nature of the placedness (and of place itself) at issue here cannot simply be taken for granted. The famous “question of being” is thus inseparable from the question of place—the response to both questions takes exactly the form of a topology—and yet the question of place brings with it further questions about the thinking that place demands and about those concepts with which place is most immediately associated, notably time and space. If the focus of Heidegger’s early work often leads in the direction of the thinking of place through the thinking (and rethinking) of time, then much of the later work leads toward a rethinking of space or, perhaps better, of dimensionality, within a more direct and explicit thinking of place itself. Such a rethinking is especially important given the way in which the Western philosophical tradition, increasingly so within modernity, has tended to prioritize space over place, as it has also tended to prioritize the spatial over other concepts. This is why the critique of the “Cartesian ontology of the world,” essentially an ontology based on the idea of a homogenous and leveled-out mode of spatiality, is such an important element in the argument of Being and Time.¹⁴

The centrality of the questions of both place and space is brought to particular clarity in the period after Being and Time with the increasing focus in Heidegger’s work on truth as aletheia—unconcealment (Unverborgenheit)—and on the associated concepts of the “clearing” (Lichtung), the “open” (Offene), and the “between” (Zwischen), as well as on time-space (Zeit-Raum) and directly on place or locality itself (Ort/Ortschaft). Although the idea of language as the house of being occurs quite late, a topological conception of language nevertheless seems to be present, even if sometimes equivocally, from relatively early on in Heidegger’s thinking—in the way, for instance, in which the character of language, and more fundamentally, of logos, is understood as a pointing out of things in their being. Understood thus, language already seems to depend on a certain sort of placing, even as it is itself a form of placing or bringing near. So any sort of speaking opens into a space in which that speaking takes place, even while such speaking itself depends, as a condition of its possibility, on being already placed.

One might argue that all of these concepts—including the topological conception of language, the idea of truth as unconcealment,¹⁵ and even the notion of the “event” that is so central to Heidegger’s later thinking¹⁶—can be seen as aspects of the “there/here” (Da) that looms so large in Being and Time and remains in the later work, even if its occurrences there are less frequent. One might argue, in fact, that the term Da appears less often in the later thinking precisely because of the way that idea is taken up in the various forms of topos that appear there. Moreover, Heidegger’s emerging concern, particularly under the influence of Hölderlin, with earth (Boden, Erde) and later sky (Himmel), a concern that reaches its full realization in the idea of the Fourfold (Das Geviert), not only powerfully reinforces the topological orientation of Heidegger’s thinking in general but also does so in a way that is focused directly on the question of the poetic and, perhaps more immediately, the question of language.

3.

As Heidegger so often emphasizes (and Gadamer frequently reiterates), language is not to be understood as merely something that human beings possess. Human being is linguistic—which is to say that it is pervaded by language, that it is a being in language. As human being is tied to language, so language is also intimately tied to the possibility of world: “Language is not merely a tool which man possesses alongside many others; language first grants the possibility of standing in the midst of the openness of beings. Only where there is language, is there world, that is, the constantly changing cycle of decision and work, of action and responsibility, but also of arbitrariness and turmoil, decay and confusion. Only where world holds sway is there history. . . . Language is . . . the primal event [Ereignis] which disposes of the highest possibility of man’s being.”¹⁷

The openness of beings that is granted through language is not a matter of language creating either an open domain for appearance or what comes to appearance within that domain. In this sense, language is neither something possessed nor something that produces. There is thus no sense in Heidegger of any form of linguistic constructionism (or any form of social constructionism either). Language grants openness, and in so doing, language may also be said to be a form of freeing or clearing that allows beings to come forth in their being—that is, as the things they already are.

That language lets beings appear in their being does not mean that beings thereby come to presence in a way that is somehow complete or transparent. The supposition of such transparent presence would, in fact, be to misunderstand the very nature and possibility of what it is for something to come to presence. It would also be to forget Heidegger’s constant insistence on the character of every revealing, every appearing, as belonging within the play of concealing and unconcealing that is truth as aletheia. Thus the appearing of beings is such that they appear always with a certain cast or look—this is the very nature of what it is to appear or to come to presence (and it can be understood as tied to the character of any appearing as always situated or placed). Yet even though beings come to presence in particular ways, and so in different ways, they nevertheless come to presence as the beings they are. That we speak of things in different languages does not mean that there must be different things of which each language speaks. Inde...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• I. Language, Logos, and Rhythm
• II. Heidegger’s Physis
• III. Phenomenology, the Thing, and the Fourfold
• IV. Ground, Non-ground, and Abyss
• Contributors
• Index of Names
• Index of Concepts