On the Way to Language

"Flame is glowing lumination. What flame is the ek-stasis which lightens and calls forth radiance, but which may also go on consuming and reduce all to white ashes." [179]


"That earliness preserves the original nature -- a nature so far still veiled -- of time. This nature will go on being impenetrable to the dominant mode of thinking as long as the Aristotelian concept of time, still standard everywhere, retains its currency. According to this concept, time -- whether conceived mechanically or dynamically or in terms of atomic decay -- is the dimension of the quantitative or qualitative calculation of duration as a sequential progression." [176]


"Originally the word "site" suggests a place in which everything comes together, is concentrated. The site gathers unto itself, supremely and in the extreme. Its gathering power penetrates and pervades everything. The site, the gathering power, gathers in a preserves all it has gathered, not like an encapsulating shell but rather by penetrating with its light all it has gathered, and only thus releasing it into its own nature." [159]


"It is enough to suggest it with a short remark. Rhythm, rhusmos, does not mean flux and flowing, but rather form. Rhythm is what is at rest, what forms the movement of dance and song, and thus lets it rest within itself. Rhythm bestows rest."


"We might perhaps prepare a little for the change in our relation to language. Perhaps this experience might awaken: All reflective thinking is poetic, and all poetry in turn is a kind of thinking. The two belong together by virtue of that Saying which has already bespoken itself to what is unspoken because it is a through as a thanks." [136]


"The essential being of language is Saying as Showing. Its showing character is not based on signs of any kind; rather, all signs arise from a showing within whose realm and for whose purposes they can be signs." [123]


"Nor is the ability to speak just one among man's many talents, of the same order as the others. The ability to speak is what marks man as man. This mark contains the design of his being. Man would not be man if it were denied him to speak unceasingly, from everywhere and every which way, in many variations, and to speak in terms of an "it is" that most often remains unspoken. Language, in granting all this to man, is the foundation of human being." [112]


"We proceed too crudely, though, when we speak everywhere without further definition of signs, of something that signifies and to some extent shows something else ... What matters here is that we keep the entire structure of sign relations before our eyes, because it has remained the standard for all later considerations of language, although with numerous modifications." [97]


"An explanation within the scope of grammatical, that is logical and metaphysical, ways of thinking may bring us a little closer to the matter, though it can never do justice to the situation that the guide-word names." [94]


"These lectures make their way within the neighborhood of poetry and thinking, underway on the lookout for a possibility of undergoing an experience with language." [92]


"To the modern mind, whose ideas about everything are punched out in the die presses of technical-scientific calculation, the object of knowledge is part of the method. And method follows what is in fact the utmost corruption and degeneration of a way." [91]


"For man is man only because he is granted the promise of language, because he is needful to language, that he may speak it." [90]


"When thinking tries to pursue the poetic word, it turns out that the word, that saying has no being. Yet our current notions resist such an imputation. Everybody, after all, sees and hears words in writing and in sound. They are; they can be like things, palpable to the senses. To offer a crude example, we only need to open a dictionary. It is full of printed things. Indeed, all kinds of things. Plenty of terms, and not a single word, because a dictionary can neither grasps nor keep the word by which the terms become words and speak as words. Where does the word, where does Saying belong?" [87]


"The word for the word can never be found in that place where fate provides the language that names and so endows all beings, so that they may be, radiant and flourishing in their being." [86]


"Analytic philosophy, which is set on producing this super-language, is thus quite consistent when it considers itself metalinguistics. That sounds like metaphysics -- not only sounds like it, it is metaphysics. Metalinguistics is the metaphysics of the thoroughgoing technicalization of all languages into the sole operative instrument of interplanetary information. Metalanguage and sputnik, metalinguistics and rocketry, are the Same." [58]


"To those who are superficial and in a hurry, no less than to those who are deliberate and reflective, it must look as though there were no mystery anywhere." [50]


"For your gaze into the nature of language does not fasten upon the phonetics and the written forms of the words, which are generally conceived to constitute the expressive character of language." [35]


"Hints need the widest sphere in which to swing ... where mortals go to and fro only slowly." [27]


"Hints and gestures, according to what ou indicated, differ from signs and chiffres, all of which have their habitat in metaphysics." [26]


"But the way there cannot be staked out according to a plan, like a road. Thinking is fond of a manner of road-building that is, I would almost say, wondrous." [21]


"How is one to give a name to what he is still searching for? To assign the naming word is, after all, what constitutes finding." [20]


"Regardless of what the aesthetic quality of a Japanese film may turn out to be, the mere fact that our world is set forth in the frame of a film forces that world into the sphere of what you call objectness. The photographic objectification is already a consequence of the ever wider outreach of Europeanization." [17]


"We Japanese do not think it strange if a dialogue leaves undefined what is really intended, or even restores it back to the keeping of the undefinable." [13]


"The danger of our dialogues was hidden in language itself, not in what we discussed, nor in the way in which we tried to do so." [4]


"I: Do you need concepts? J: Presumably, yes, because since the encounter with European thinking, there has come to light a certain incapacity in our language. J: In what way? I: It lacks the delimiting power to represent objects related in an unequivocal order above and below each other." [2]



On the Way to Language
Martin Heidegger