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The Writing of Aletheia

Martin Heidegger: In Language

by Martin Travers (Author)
©2019 Monographs VIII, 246 Pages

Summary

Martin Heidegger was engaged in a continual struggle to find words – new words, both descriptive and analytical – for his radical form of philosophy. This tendency can be traced from Being and Time, where he elaborated an entirely new vocabulary for his ontological enquiry; to Contributions to Philosophy, which saw him committed to a transformation of language; to later essays on poets such as Rilke and Trakl in On the Way to Language.
The Writing of Aletheia is the first study to appear in either English or German that provides a full account of Heidegger’s language and writing style. Focusing not only on his major philsophical works but also on his lectures, public talks and poetry, this book explores the complex textuality of Heidegger’s writing: the elaborate chains of wordplay and neologistic formations; the often oblique, circuitous and regressive exposition of his ideas; the infamous tautologies; the startling modification of grammatical rules and syntax; the idiosyncratic typography of his texts; the rhetorical devices, imagery and symbolism; and the tone and voice of his writing. All of these aspects betray not only his will to structure and his assertiveness but also his ongoing self-questioning and reflectiveness about the ultimate goal of his philosophical quest.

Table Of Contents


Martin Travers

The Writing of Aletheia

Martin Heidegger
In Language

About the author

MARTIN TRAVERS is a Senior Research Fellow in the School of Humanities, Griffith University, Brisbane. He was educated at the universities of East Anglia, Tübingen and Cambridge and has published widely in the areas of German and comparative literature. He is the author of books on Thomas Mann, the literature of the Conservative Revolution and Gottfried Benn.

About the book

Martin Heidegger was engaged in a continual struggle to find words – new words, both descriptive and analytical – for his radical form of philosophy. This tendency can be traced from Being and Time, where he elaborated an entirely new vocabulary for his ontological enquiry; to Contributions to Philosophy, which saw him committed to a transformation of language; to later essays on poets such as Rilke and Trakl in On the Way to Language.

The Writing of Aletheia is the first study to appear in either English or German that provides a full account of Heidegger’s language and writing style. Focusing not only on his major philosophical works but also on his lectures, public talks and poetry, this book explores the complex textuality of Heidegger’s writing: the elaborate chains of wordplay and neologistic formations; the often oblique, circuitous and regressive exposition of his ideas; the infamous tautologies; the startling modification of grammatical rules and syntax; the idiosyncratic typography of his texts; the rhetorical devices, imagery and symbolism; and the tone and voice of his writing. All of these aspects betray not only his will to structure and his assertiveness but also his ongoing self-questioning and reflectiveness about the ultimate goal of his philosophical quest.

This eBook can be cited

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Acknowledgements

Two sections of this book incorporate and rework material that has already been published: the third section of Chapter 4 initially appeared as “‘Die Blume des Mundes’: The Poetry of Martin Heidegger” in Oxford German Studies 41 (2012): 82–102. The third section of Chapter 5 appeared as “Trees, Rivers and Gods: Paganism in the Work of Martin Heidegger” in Journal of European Studies 48 (2018): 133–143. I would like to thank the editors of those journals, T. J. Reed and John Flower respectively, for their constructive contribution to those articles. Thanks also go to my wife, Ann, for her meticulous editorial work and for being able to see not only the wood but the trees. I dedicate this book to her and to my three daughters, Charlotte, Isabel and Lucie.←vii | viii→ ←viii | 1→

Introduction

Language: Housing Being

His philosophy is extremely obscure. One cannot help suspecting that language is here running riot.

— Bertrand Russell, Wisdom of the West (New York, 1989)

“Every path of thought leads in a strange way, more or less perceptively, through language”, Heidegger tells us in his essay, “The Question Concerning Technology” (“Die Frage nach der Technik”) (GA 7: 7).1 We might be tempted to view this statement purely as a theoretical generalisation, a tenet in a lingustic philosophy describing how we engage with the world through language. But these same words also apply, and apply supremely, to Heidegger’s own philosophy and to his own way of philosophising. Language was not only at the conceptual centre of his work: it constituted the very medium through which that work was possible. From his early magnum opus, Being and Time (Sein und Zeit), in which he attempted to bring into view an ontological realm for which “not only most words were lacking but, above all, grammar” (GA 2: 52), to his next major work, the Contributions to Philosophy (from Ereignis) (Beiträge zur Philosophie (von Ereignis)), where he strove for a re-formation of language in order to push “into realms that are still closed off to us” (GA 65: 78), through to his later writings celebrating the transformative power of the word in the essays On the Way to Language (Unterwegs zur Sprache), where the discourse of philosophy moves both thematically and formally towards the poetic, Heidegger was involved in a struggle to find forms of expression, descriptive and analytical, for his ideas, seeking, as he noted in one of his earliest lecture courses, “to allow Being to be investigated and come to language” (GA 63: 1).←1 | 2→

The result was a body of texts that pushed the conventions, both semantic and grammatical, of what we must (temporarily at least) call ordinary language to previously unseen limits. Even those readers, such as Karl Jaspers, who could not accept much of the content of Heidegger’s philosophy found themselves enthralled by his language. As Jaspers remarked after his initial reading of Being and Time in 1927, “now I had before me a work that, through the intensity of its execution, the constructivist nature of its conceptuality, the accuracy of an often-illuminating new use of words, made an immediate impression” (98).2

Not all of Heidegger’s contemporaries responded with such enthusiasm. In 1931, Rudolf Carnap, exponent of the logical-positivist school in philosophy, published “The Overcoming of Metaphysics through Logical Analysis of Language” (“Überwindung der Metaphysik durch logische Analyse der Sprache”). His target in this essay was what he regarded as the semantically vacuous nature of metaphysical statements, which are “pseudo-statements”, because the language they use to describe the world is incapable of verification or objective assessment. The “meaning” that such language generates is a false and illusionary one, the result of a figurative and stylistic légèreté de main. As Carnap argues, “the meaningless words of metaphysics usually have their origin in the fact that a meaningful word is deprived of its meaning through its metaphorical use” (230). As an example, Carnap gives a passage from Heidegger’s lecture “What is Metaphysics?” (“Was ist die Metaphysik?”), which includes the phrase “nothing nothings” (“das Nichts nichtet”) (229). This sentence, Carnap argues, represents a “violation of logical syntax”. It is meaningless, and for two reasons: firstly, because it is “based on the mistake of employing the word ‘nothing’ as a noun (instead of simply using it as a predicate of ‘is’, as in ‘there is nothing in the room’), and secondly, it fabricates the meaningless word ‘to nothing’, which has no dictionary status”. Such statements are neither true nor false, and hence tell us nothing about the world because “a hypothesis must be capable of entering into relations of deducability with (true or false) empirical statements, which is just what pseudo-statements cannot do” (232). Because Heidegger’s words←2 | 3→ do not correspond to the requirements of a verifiable empirical statement or to the terms of propositional logic, they are, quite literally, non-sense.3

And then in 1964 appeared the most trenchant critique of Heidegger and his language: Theodor Adorno’s The Jargon of Authenticity (Jargon der Eigentlichkeit: Zur deutschen Ideologie). Adorno depicts Heidegger here as a representative of a broader movement in contemporary German thinking, existentialism, a movement that included not only Heidegger but also Karl Jaspers and Martin Buber, along with lesser known figures such as Otto Friedrich Bollnow and Ulrich Sonnemann. These are the promoters of a “cult of authenticity” that seeks to establish a realm of pure interiority within what it regards as the debased and valueless culture of modernity (8). But instead of providing an objectively informed analysis of this culture, Adorno argues, their work simply mystifies the problem by promoting a counter ideology made up from nebulous quasi-religious terminology, sacerdotal words such as “transcendence”, “inwardness” and “authenticity” (10). This is a “jargon”, “untouched by history” (9 and 8), which simply obscures the real plight of modern culture, which lies in the commodity values of late capitalism. It is “ideology as language” (132).

Heidegger is the high priest of this movement. In his arcane and mystifying terminology, “Heidegger cannot get enough of ritual preparations for the ‘step into the temple’ […] Heidegger is by no means incomprehensible, as one might gather from the marginalia of the positivists, but he lays around himself the taboo that any understanding of him would simultaneously be falsification” (79). Adorno looks behind Heidegger’s magisterial persona, and the assertive language through which it is promoted, and finds both an←3 | 4→ authoritarian personality and a discourse of domination. It is not simply a matter of the demagogic assertiveness of Heidegger’s language (his refusal to meet his readers on their own level of intelligibility), but of substance, of the absence of social and historical relevance, and his lack of concern for the concrete individual that reveals, according to Adorno, a fundamental anti-humanism (129).4

Details

Pages
VIII, 246
Year
2019
ISBN (PDF)
9781788746724
ISBN (ePUB)
9781788746731
ISBN (MOBI)
9781788746748
ISBN (Softcover)
9781788746717
DOI
10.3726/b14719
Language
English
Publication date
2019 (September)
Keywords
Martin Heidegger Martin Heidegger’s Language Language and Philosophy Philosophy and Writing
Published
Oxford, Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, New York, Wien, 2019. VIII, 246 pp

Biographical notes

Martin Travers (Author)

Martin Travers is a Senior Research Fellow in the School of Humanities, Griffith University, Brisbane. He was educated at the universities of East Anglia, Tübingen and Cambridge and has published widely in the areas of German and comparative literature. He is the author of books on Thomas Mann, the literature of the Conservative Revolution and Gottfried Benn.

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