The problem of the relationship between language and world in Heidegger and Wittgenstein
Abstract: This essay aims to demonstrate that there is an approximation between Heidegger and Wittgenstein in relation to language as a description of the world, founding it as reality. The first position is that one should not oppose these two philosophers considering methodology as the only form of definition. The second central position is that Heidegger and Wittgenstein bring philosophical thought to a construction of the world and man because language exists, and language is possible because there is an image of the world.
Keywords: Language, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, World.
Resumen: Este artículo tiene como objetivo demostrar que existe una aproximación entre Heidegger y Wittgenstein en relación con el lenguaje como una descripción del mundo, y lo funda como realidad. La primera posición es que uno no debe oponerse a estos dos filósofos considerando la metodología como la única forma de definición. La segunda posición central es que Heidegger y Wittgenstein traen el pensamiento filosófico a una construcción del mundo y del hombre porque el lenguaje existe, y el lenguaje es posible porque hay una imagen del mundo.
Palabras clave: Lenguaje, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Mundo.
“Ultimately, the later Heidegger and Wittgenstein are alike trying to let us live and think as humans,
at last”. (Braver, 2012, 239).
1. Introduction
The reality where we all are inserted is dictated by language. Is there an inexpressible or language-independent world? Only by language can one know the world? The starting position, that needs to be considered for this work, is that world and language are amalgamated. There is only one world because there is language, and it is what allows the world to be world, not as an instrument neither as a result, but as a condition of being.
If you want to show that two philosophers, normally in opposition, construct this same meaning, language and world are constituted as a condition of existence, as life, as a reality that is perceived and inserted.
From that assertion, one has as its first general result that if philosophy, as we always hear of the great philosophers, is the thought about the world and about each one “[...] about our own conception, about how we see things. (And what we require of them)” (Wittgenstein, 1995, 6), it is essential to philosophize about language. If this second position (the indispensability of philosophizing on language), is constituted as a paradigm, no philosopher can be excluded from the wake of the philosophers in history, that is, they must all work minimally with language and such material.
There is no philosophy without a preoccupation on language, without a clarification and a position. The main focus here is that many of the “said” contradictions between philosophers, especially those who are more attentive to language, thus classified as analytical –philosophers of language (in a broader sense: Wittgenstein, Russell, Carnap, Strawson, Quine etc.) and non-analytic philosophers, like Heidegger, are not entirely true, thus such philosophers can’t be put in opposition since the phenomenon they study, in this case language, have not been researched by the same prism, as will be seen here above all in relationship between Heidegger and Wittgenstein.
Other researchers have also published this relationship as a “non-opposition”, as is the case of Lee Braver in his book Groundless Grounds: a study of Wittgenstein and Heidegger in 2012, relating Heidegger and Wittgenstein, in which “[...] these two central thinkers make similar arguments for similar views on a wide range of fundamental issues. And where they disagree, we can bring them into dialogue and compare their reasons” (Braver, 2012, 2).
Our first statement sums up that we can’t think of an opposition between them, so the former thinks the language conceived by his theory and the second “[…] a study on the representative scope of language, on the limit for the expression of thoughts” (Coelho, 2009, 22).
There is an approximation of these “separate” groups of philosophy, based on the specificities of analytical research, whether it is interest in language, scientific modes of thinking, how the various problems are linguistically treated, or how the “analytical philosophy of language refers to a way of doing philosophy which includes the belief that the problems of philosophy can be solved, or must be solved, through an analysis of language” (Tugendhat, 1992, 16) , it is concluded that one can converge with other so-called “non-analytical” thinkers with special attention, to what Gadamer describes, that language is not “[…] only one medium among others […] but has a special relationship with potential community of reason [...]. Language is not mere “fact,” but “principle.” In it rests the universality of the hermeneutical dimension” (Gadamer, 2002, 113).
Therefore, in this work, at first there is a will of approximation between Heidegger and Wittgenstein, only then to approach a specific problem, worked by both, that allows this relation to be of approximation and not of opposition. It will be seen that the notion of the world goes through the comprehension of language, inevitably, and that each contributes to this understanding that can be related without major contradictions and problems.
Before presenting these two thinkers, it is emphasized that the “rejection” of both in relation of proximity is strong in the academic circles. If we analyze the references to Heidegger in works of Philosophy of Language, we still see little or total rejection of the thinker as to the work of language. It is seen in such works as William G. Lycan’s Philosophy of Language a Contemporary Introduction, that not only does Heidegger’s work be pointed out once, Nicholas Bunnin’s The Blackwell Companion to Philosophy and EP Tsui-James, quoting Heidegger only in the final part and without pretensions of deepening or highlighting. Already in Part I of Areas of Philosophy, specifically in chapter III Philosophy of Language of Martin Davies, not even the contact. Or more fiercely, in a direct attack on metaphysics, as Carnap did in 1931 in Erkenntnis (text that analyzes Heidegger’s metaphysical work) in which he affirms that there are “[…] two types of pseudopropositions: or a word that is mistakenly believed to have a meaning or the words that occur in them have meaning, but are combined in a way contrary to the syntax, in such a way that they do not produce any sense. [...] both types occur in metaphysics. [...] all metaphysics consists of such pseudopropositions” (Carnap, 2016, 95).
In addition, Hilbert lectured Die Grundlegung der elementaren Zahlenlehre in December 1930, in the Philosophische Gesellschaft Hamburg the following remark against Heidegger’s thoughts: “In Overcoming Metaphysics by the Logical Analysis of Language a recent philosophical conference, I find the phrase “Nothingness is the pure and simple negation of the whole being”. This phrase is instructive because, despite its brevity, it illustrates the main obstacles against the principles set out in my theory of demonstration” (Carnap, 2016, 114-115).
From this dense context, it is realized, at least as something strongly emphasized, that rejection is greater than an attempt to assimilate, although an approximation exists in other authors such as Merleau-Ponty, for example “[...] the word is not a mere instrument of thought, but it is the body of thought in the world. The thought exists through speech, and it is only in this attitude of expression that signification is realized” (Silva, 1994, 57), this thought engendered by Heidegger from the point of view of language as an instrument of conception of the world, not exhausting it in what may be the result of the meaning of the words, but “assume that language contains its evidence in itself” (Merleau-Ponty, 1986, 131).
By “softening” the confrontation, one can also see with Rorty in the work Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature a positive Heidegger presentation:
In this conception, “philosophy” is not a name for a discipline which confronts permanent issues, and unfortunately keeps misstating them, or attacking them with clumsy dialectical instruments. Rather, it is a cultural genre, a “voice in the conversation of mankind” (to use Michael Oakeshott’s phrase), which centers on one topic rather than another at some given time not by dialectical necessity but as a result of various things happening elsewhere in the conversation (the New Science, the French Revolution, the modern novel) or of individual men of genius who think of something new (Hegel, Marx, Frege, Freud, Wittgenstein, Heidegger), or perhaps of the resultant of several such forces. (Rorty, 1979, 264)
Or, more recently, with Daniel Debarry, who at the V Conference of the Brazilian Society of Analytical Philosophy in 2018 presented a proposal that seeks to “put into conversation the analytical and continental traditions in philosophy” (Debarry, 2018, 71).
So, as well summarizes Harries,
Both have been invited to disregard the past. This is certainly true of Wittgenstein: repeatedly suggests that traditional philosophy rests on a misuse of language. One can point to these passages to present Wittgenstein as an anti-philosopher who has surpassed the philosophy of the past by showing that the puzzles which occupied it can be made to disappear by “bringing words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use.” (Inv. 116) Heidegger, too, speaks of the end of traditional metaphysics; his own thinking is an attempt to step back to the most fundamental plane. (1968, 281)
In this way, one can say that Heidegger and Wittgenstein think about language and it corresponds to a description of the world, founding it as reality. Both, as Braver puts it, “[...] locate the fundamental problem in the way philosophizing suspends our ongoing engaged behavior in the world, with its tacit knowledge of how to use words and interact appropriately with different types of entities, to take up disengaged theorist stance” (Braver, 2012, 10).
The first position assumed here, therefore, is that one can’t simply oppose these two philosophers, or separate groups in philosophy because they consider that methodology would be the only defining form.
The second central position is that both Heidegger and Wittgenstein bring philosophical thought to a construction and enlightenment of the world and man, in which reality can only exist, in which world and man exist, if language exists, it is only possible a world, because there is language, and only language is possible because someone has an image of the world. In Philosophical Investigations, especially from paragraphs 89 to 109, Wittgenstein does not constitute a systematic work, he leaves aside the structural theory between language and reality and argues that language must be usable and functional, and for that, the relation between words and world is not enough. There are many meanings in language and many ways of applying it in everyday life. There are a myriad of “language games,” each one being justified within the situation in which man uses, having, as many languages as he does with forms of life.
2. Wittgenstein and the concept
of language
Wittgenstein’s concept of language is understood and evaluated in the rouse of the twentieth-century British universities, focusing more precise and particular problems in the attempt to solve them by analyzing prepositions and meanings, as Moore and Russell did, for example.
Here it is observed that from a more general view, an idea that extends as a great system, a concern is born that turns to the real expressions of the human activity. Although, Russell later added
[...] a new ingredient to the nascent philosophical current. ... The role of philosophy, no longer as an analysis of the meanings of the terms of natural language, but as its replacement by an ideal language, expressed strictly in terms of symbolic logic, which has become the formal instrument characteristic of analytic philosophers. (Macdowell, 2016, 153)
Wittgenstein, in the 1921 Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, atomizes analysis, in which the combination of words in sentences mirrors the combination of the constituents of the proposition and this to the structure of the possible or actual facts of the world. It can be summed up in two conclusions, which allow us to think that the impossibility of metaphysics was not rooted in what can be known, but in the nature of what can be said:
a) Logical and mathematical statements are tautologies. These are determined by their particular syntactic structure. b) The formulation of the “verifiability principle”, that is, the meaning of a statement is reduced to the empirical data whose occurrence determines the veracity of the statement. In linguistic terms a factual proposition will be significant if it can be reduced to a combination of propositions expressing facts of immediate experience. (Oliveira, 2006, 3)
The atomism quoted above allows us to think that propositions are irreducible when they are equivalent to a property (the sand is white = a white sand).
The world we live in is no more than a link from empirical things to meanings. Thus Wittgenstein’s aim was to establish the limits of meaningful saying and thus to solve / dissolve all traditional philosophical problems resulting from the misuse of language.
Secondly, Wittgenstein “revises” his Tractatus thinking, around the 1940s, first of all highlighting a new way of thinking about the now systematized structures of language, now focusing on “language games”, used specifically by groups, with their own rules from practices of language and not a priori, resulting in social use event, “[...] argued that words and sentences are more like game pieces or tokens, used to make moves in rule governed conventional social practices” (Lycan, 2008, 76). It is, therefore, a conception,
We want to establish an order in our knowledge of the use of language: an order with a particular end in view; one out of many possible orders; not the order. To this end we shall constantly be giving prominence to distinctions which our ordinary forms of language easily make us overlook. This may make it look as if we saw it as our task to reform language. Such a reform for particular practical purposes, an improvement in our terminology designed to prevent misunderstandings in practice, is perfectly possible. But these are not the cases we have to do with. The confusions which occupy us arise when language is like an engine idling, not when it is doing work. (Wittgenstein, 1986, § 132)
This conception sees in language an order that “fix” the traditional problems previously raised by philosophy, considered as inconsistent ones.
It was true to say that our considerations could not be scientific ones. It was not of any possible interest to us to find out empirically ‘that, contrary to our preconceived ideas, it is possible to think such-and-such’ - whatever that may mean. (The conception of thought as a gaseous medium). And we may not advance any kind of theory. There must not be anything hypothetical in our considerations. We must do away with all explanation, and description alone must take its place. And this description gets its light, that is to say its purpose, from the philosophical problems. These are, of course, not empirical problems; they are solved, rather, by looking into the workings of our language, and that in such a way as to make us recognize those workings: in despite of an urge to misunderstand them. The problems are solved, not by giving new information […]. Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language. (Wittgenstein, 1986, § 109)
Language evolves into language-games which include not just other propositions, but “the actions into which [language] is woven” (Wittgenstein, 1986, § 7). Linguistic study can no longer just look at words since the context that defines them encompasses behavior as well. “Here the term ‘language-game’ is meant to bring into prominence the fact that the speaking of language is part of an activity, or of a life-form” (Wittgenstein, 1986, § 23). This holism continues to expand and deepen until what determines our concepts, our moral and reactions, is not what one man is doing now, an individual action, but the whole actions of human, the background (Braver, 2012).
This marks a drastic change from his early theory of meaning-objects. As David Pears writes, Wittgenstein realized later that this theory of language greatly underestimated our continuing contribution to the fixity of meaning and so represented the whole enterprise in a way that made it impossible. One of the recurrent themes of Philosophical Investigations is that we cannot give a word a meaning merely by giving it a one-off attachment to a thing. What is needed is a sustained contribution from us as we continue to use the word… This distinction (between obeying a rule and disobeying it) must be based on our practice, which cannot be completely anticipated by any selfcontained thing. We do not, and cannot, rely on any instant talisman (Pears, 1988, 208 – 209, cited by Braver, 2012, 84).
Wittgenstein’s holism expands from closed systems of propositions to a meaning-giving background consisting of cultural practices and the basic patterns of behavior that make up ordinary human life.
It is maintained, even in the face of such a sense, that an analysis by language is complex, seeing problems such as the determination of nature or even a specific method.
Some other researchers continue with formulations on this intention, such as S. Kripke with his causal theory of reference, PF Strawson with his “descriptive metaphysics,” J. Searle with a wingspan for philosophy of mind, G. Ryle with the connectivist model of natural language.
What emerges from this panorama is an “internal” diversity of specific methods, themes and approaches, but never confined to pure language analysis, but rather linked to aesthetic, moral, political, and religious problems. They are related to the ontology, philosophy of mind, philosophy of religion. This general interpretation is not consensual, as many tend to do nowadays seeing the philosophy of language linked to other themes, or to relate it to hermeneutics, as Gadamer did, in which calculating is according to a rule, “The more alive is the less conscious the linguistic act is of itself. The true being of language is what, in being heard, we plunge into: what is said” (Gadamer, 2002, 149-150). However, it still is a force that creates: “[...] language is not a reworked conventionalism, it is not the weight of previous schemes that cover us, but the ever-new generating and creative force to impart fluidity to this whole” (Gadamer, 2002, 242). This approach by Gadamer is rejected, for example in the book Margins of the philosophies of language: conflicts and approximations between analytical, hermeneutic, phenomenological and metacritical of language in which Cabreira emphatically states:
But, on the other hand, I remain skeptical (against Gadamerian optimism) regarding the reception of the late Wittgenstein by the frames of hermeneutics. My idea is that after the Tractatus Wittgenstein continued to think of articulated language, specifically in propositions, as a privileged place for the production of significations, although they are now diversified and articulated in situations of use, and not studied in a logical way general. Nevertheless, the idea of an organizing “logic” continues. I do not think that the interest in a public and socialized theory of language should be confused with an interest in the links between language and the historical-cultural context, in a hermeneutical sense. (2003, 77)
Wittgenstein emphasizes the use of contexts in which daily activities are developed, such as advice, measured orders, requests, worries ... In Tractatus, language was a fixed and formal relationship with the world. In the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein world made up of predetermined facts by logical structures of linguistic activities that in their own dynamics separate themselves from ideas as limits and deprivations, diverging from the consensus of unique analytic standards, “Wittgenstein wants to help us with the knotted squalor of the real, to force our heavenward gaze down to the detritus of practice” (Braver, 2012, 226).
This game structure of language allows one to open himself to innumerable constructions arising from the human situation in its totality.
If in the beginning, such a thought has as one of its characteristics verificationism as legitimating the meaning of a proposition, in the second, the philosopher is willing to admit even a transgression of language. Thus, it breaks out against all epistemic and anthropological dualism, and criticizes radically the philosophical tradition of language, which he himself accuses himself of having been a part of. (Machado, 2013,18)
Thus, it is through language that someone can tell the world, and not only name it, attributing to the context a degree of construction and signification, therefore, a meaning “[...] is not an abstract object; meaning is a matter of the role an expression plays in human social behavior. To know the expression’s meaning is just to know how to deploy the expression appropriately in conversational settings” (Lycan, 2008, 76). Language does not end or limit the world, but opens it by the rule given in the game, not limiting language as well as the world. “Words, says Wittgenstein, only acquire meaning in the flow of life; the sign, considered separately from its applications, seems dead; it is in use that he gains his vital breath. Our expressions gain different functions, according to the context in which they are employed, thus modifying what is meant by them” (Costa, 1992, 63).
For Wittgenstein, there is no truer language game than another language game, they all have an equal value because they keep with them certain rules which he called rules of grammar, which are the semantically relevant rules for the use of language each reality, in each context. With this idea about language, he more strongly emphasizes the linguistic phenomenon from the human condition and the diversity of identity. For this reason, analyzing these games in the constitution of the world is odd, since one can see a direct relationship with Heidegger, from another perspective, but convergent. This frees up the scenario of signs for an understanding of language in its pragmatic relationship with the world.
If language games are directly related to life and to the world in which we live, there is necessarily an interweaving between culture, world and language (Glock, 1998). Games appear, maintained by contexts of life and as a result of human activities “[...] to imagine a language means to imagine the form of life” and “[...] the term” language-game “is meant to bring into prominence the fact that the speaking of language is part of an activity, or of a form of life” (Wittgenstein, 1986, § 19, § 23).
Word meaning is defined from the function that the word exerts in the game of language. Such a game must be situated in a practical linguistic context. It is in the proper relation of each language game, which must adapt to each practical context, that language acquires its meaning.
The way of life would care for the place where language sets in, it would be a shelter where language would establish itself, “Commanding, questioning, recounting, chatting, are as much a part of our natural history as walking, eating, drinking, playing” (Wittgenstein, 1986, § 25).
These language games further clarify our understanding of reality and how we acquire meaning from things. They are varied in each medium, in each community, varying even in time and intensity, such as saying “sit down”, would it be to use a chair? Sit on the floor? Sit on the bent leg? There is no way to generalize a term because it can’t be applied generically.
Thus, language games can’t occur in particular contexts, but should require a context with a community that shares the same rules, such as a card game or board. For Wittgenstein, this is called “family resemblance” (Wittgenstein, 1986, § 67). For him, language is an instrument, its concepts are instruments, “the difference is merely one of convenience” (Wittgenstein, 1986, § 569), the words would have felt only when they had something as utility, an end; language is only a means to this end, meaning occurs due to the end.
3. Heidegger and the concept of language
If for Wittgenstein the world is the real and practical place in which we are located, for Heidegger there is a prior structure for meaning. The Heideggerian exercise on language is “[...] bringing language as language into language” (Heidegger, 2012, 192). His goal, in a way, is to systematize and question the conceptual presuppositions of theories in metaphysics, philosophy of language and theory of knowledge, contemporaneously encompassed under the denomination “Analytical Philosophy of Language”.
This activity is transcendent and it is understood as overcoming (Überstieg), as “[...] something possible as existence” (Heidegger, 1971, 31), that is, a relation “... that leads from ‘something’ to ‘something’” (Heidegger 1971, 33). It is a world constitution, which converges to Wittgenstein’s work as we will see below.
Such overcoming of Dasein is established by the structure of the world. To clarify the world, the “world phenomenon” is what “[...] must serve to clarify transcendence as such” (Heidegger, 1971, 38). What exactly is the world? Heidegger describes the world in relation to transcendence, as:
1. World means a “how” of the being of the beings, but also of the beings themselves. 2. This “how” determines the entities in their totality. It is, at bottom, the possibility of each “as” in general as limit and measure. 3. This “how” in its entirety is, to some extent, prior. 4. This prior “as”, in its entirety, is the same relative to human Dasein. The world is, however, precisely inherent in human Dasein, in which the world, in embracing all beings, also includes Dasein in its totality. (Heidegger, 1971, 39)
Heidegger alludes in paragraph 34 of Being and Time to the theme of his ontological conception of language. One of the main difficulties for his understanding concerns the unprecedented distinction proposed between “discourse” (Network) and “language” (Sprache), which allows the development of his critique of traditional conceptions of man as the talking animal or as the “Rational animal,” as well as the critique of the ontological conceptions of language proposed by linguistics and the philosophies of language, which conceive of it as a systematic set of logically determined signs through which the communication of messages occurs.
The problem with these definitions of human and language is not that they are false, but that they conceal the more original character of discourse as constituting the “openness” of Dasein, and obscure the ontological bond between being of the being that we are and the being of language itself.
Already since Being and Time Heidegger argues that the fundamental basis of language is not logic neither grammar, much less lies in the potentialities of the biological (phonic apparatus) rational animal, but lies in the existential constitution of Dasein, that is, in the “openness” of being-in-the-world. Subsequently, Heidegger will assert that the being of language lies in the openness of the truth of being, while retaining the same criticisms addressed to the improper conception of language. In the period of Being and Time, the opening that each one of them is consubstantially constituted by “understanding”, “disposition” and “discourse”, and Heidegger will attribute to this existential last the ontological character of language.
In Being and Time, Heidegger says that language is the utterance of discourse (Heidegger, 2014, 223), Dasein is expressed only linguistically because the openness guarantees such possibility. Obviously, this is not an ontological presupposition that must be accepted in the manner of an axiom, from which certain theoretical consequences would be derived. Discourse can’t be understood as a human faculty or property that would allow linguistic enunciation, for Heidegger does not locate the origin of language in the ‘interior’ of the being, nor does it restrict it only to its apophantic functions. On the other hand, discourse is the ontological instance that enables ontic expression in several historical languages, insofar as it makes possible the communication of shared meanings in a world of occupations. To communicate something linguistically is not to transmit private experiences or information from the interior of a subject to the interior of other subjects, but to share meaning with others, before the possibility of all being occupied with a world (in common). Thus, the analysis of language has to be, simultaneously, an analysis of co-existence. After all, discourse is the articulation of significance and coexistence can be mediated by communication. Moreover, affirming that the existential basis of language is discourse, “[...] as articulation in meanings of comprehensibility inserted in the disposition of the being-in-the-world” (Heidegger, 2014, 224).
Especially after Kehre, in which Heidegger conceives language from new structures, one understands Dasein with more accessibility to the world. It is emphasized that by language there is an “opening of the world”, utilizing intentionality. This intentionality does not equate to an instrument, since it is not something constituted and not constitutive. “El lenguaje no es solamente un instrumento que el hombre posee entre muchos otros; es lenguaje es lo que, en general y ante todo, garantiza la posibilidad de encontrarse el hombre en medio de lo abierto del ser que está siendo” (Heidegger, 1992, 1).
Heidegger bets on a language that is placed as a means (clearing), of being in it so that there is openness of beings, “Sólo hay mundo donde hay habla” (Heidegger, 1992, 4).
Once established that language is the foundation of ontological difference, since “the being of man is based on speech” (Heidegger, 1992, 4), language is given as and by dialogue, as the unity of existence, because it is through the dialogue that is related to being with the other, the one with the other, which is glimpsed in the German expression Mit-teilung. We are dialogue, it is the one that connects and gives meaning.
This sense precedes man, undoing the idea of language as an instrument. According to Nunes, this is where Heidegger
[…] turns to the essence of language... Taking away the instrumental conception in which Linguistics would incur, which - words speak for themselves - their power of appeal and silence, the latent meaning they hold and the meaning that they dispense with - an intention that comes down to the very expression of making language, as language, come to the word (zum Work kommt), at the same time hermeneutic experience and way of thinking. (2012, 188)
Language produces this movement of openness, of clearing, and manifests itself as the possibility of an existence. The life in which Heidegger concentrates „[...] ist das poetische oder praktische Leben, daswir arbeitend und handelnd mit den Anderen führen, in dem wir uns in einem ständigen Gespräch befinden. Für die vermeintlich sprachlosen Instinkte und Triebe des Lebens bringt Heidegger nur wenig Interest auf“ (Trawny, 2003, 24).
Every language in itself has the mode of being of Dasein, “[...] every language is –like Dasein itself– historical in its being” (Heidegger, 2014, 321). For Heidegger, language is the “essence” while everything else is accidental.
But language is used not only for pointing out and for showing (even when we take these terms in their full Heideggerian import). It is also used to sigh, to command, to request, to pray, to enquire, to lie, to express wishes, conditions, and counterfactual conditions, simply to avoid silence, and for many other purposes. Heidegger seems not only to emphasize the illocutionary usages of words to the exclusion of everything else but even to ignore altogether the existence of such other perlocutionary functions and forms of sentences and words. It may be objected that Heidegger is not just a philosopher of language and is not concerned with providing a full account of the many diverse and complex uses of language, that he is concerned primarily with an attempt to “think Being,” and that his remarks on language are only incidental to his project of rescuing Being from the oblivion in which it has fallen in Western thought. (Kogkelmans, 1972, 264-265)
Moreover, referring to the way of being “in the open” one can affirm that the existential basis of language is discourse, as “articulation in meanings of comprehensibility inserted in the disposition of being-in-the-world” (Heidegger, 221). Since language can’t be understood correctly only through purely formal or logical analyzes of its system of signs, conceived exclusively as subsistent or simply given objects, language is founded on the primary ontological phenomenon of the occupied being-in-the-world (and worried) with the other and with contingent reality, always being open to the ready understanding of coexisting being and the world that presents itself. For this reason, Heidegger can affirm that “the meaningful totality of comprehensibility comes to the word. From meanings come words. These, however, are not things-words endowed with meanings” (Heidegger, 161). In other words, the existential origin of language is significance, always understood in a certain disposition and interpretation.
The assertion that language is the “house of being” concerns the essence of language and does not attempt to produce a concept of the essence of language. With respect to the essence of language, one can only find clues or nods (Winke) that manifest it enigmatically, not signs or concepts that refer to a meaning already established and fixed; it is a question that can create another research.
Conclusion
In an epistemic and idealistic worldview, Descartes and Kant emerge, asserting that the subject is responsible for the possibility of the world as a phenomenon, and thus, there would be a specific cognitive apparatus capable of doing so. The subject creates the world from innate and transcendental models, in this case, the cogito and a priori, respectively. There are still other works, as with Husserl, that would postulate the condition of the existence of the object so that it acts subject, because the consciousness of the subject is permanently aware of something, establishing relation with the world that exists.
After the twentieth century, in the well-known “linguistic turn”, other structures will sustain the subject and the object in its existence. For example, with Wittgenstein, who in a second moment of his works, after Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, points the world as a purely human construction supported by language. Wittgenstein here assumes a less reductionist position, since in the first moment he stated that the world is an interlacing of logical facts, in which language would assume the role of displaying things representing reality. What a word says is what it wants to express, nothing more, to think and speak of the world “[...] there must be something in common between language and the world. The common element must be in its structures. We can know the structure of one of them if we know the structure of the other. Since logic reveals the structure of language, it must also reveal the structure of the world” (Fann, 1999, 24).
Language is contained in the limits of the world, beyond, only silence, silence before pseudoproblems. This harshest stance is gradually being rethought from the perspective that emerges, later on, by an analogy between language and play (chess (Wittgenstein, 1986, § 205)), turning now to a new possibility in which language assumes specificities within certain environments, in certain contexts. All these different activities will be what Wittgenstein will conceive of as language games. Here he breaks with the idea that language is only mediation, considering it part of the totality of the human situation, opening it up for innumerable possibilities of construction.
This passage from the pictorial or referential theory of language to the pragmatic theory as clarifying the gap between the two distinct moments of wittgensteinian thought. If in the first, such a thought has as one of its characteristics verificationism as legitimating the meaning of a proposition, in the second, the philosopher is willing to admit even a transgression of language. Thus, it breaks out against all epistemic and anthropological dualism, and criticizes radically the philosophical tradition of language, which he himself accuses himself of having been a part of.
Without a careful analysis, one has the hermeneutics lost in infinite articulations of which there would be no profit, very dispersed. But analytic without hermeneutics seems to be too introductive, superficial, since it only accounts for establishing models to which they can be replaced. As a radicalism of dualities in which there is a relation between perception and predication, for example between things and words, Heidegger arises more emphatically, with the affirmation that there is only being-in-the-world, as unity and understanding. Without existential analytics with the ontology in the light of the analytic of language, there is no philosophy.
The most obvious fact, both Heidegger and Wittgenstein, points out to an exit from tradition and are confronted with any idea that is ended in a formula or model.
If in the second Wittgenstein, language is broken up as pure mediation and is considered as part of the human totality, opening numerous constructions of reality. Language is given by use, by the play of language that inaugurates constructions of world before the use, thought that goes to meet Heidegger.
Heidegger must be regarded as one who takes a wholly negative attitude towards the classical philosophy of language. It is not a simple critique, but a concern to find a pillar for its underlying assertions that must always be interpreted by the question of being. In evaluating Heidegger’s view, one must always be clear that everything he says about language must be understood within the context of the general concern of Being and Time: to clarify the question about the meaning of Being. In the later works of Heidegger, in the post Kehre phase, his attention shifts from a concern with language, from the point of view of man’s speech, to a concern with the essential contribution of language to the very possibility of man’s speech.
Heidegger from hermeneutics maintains special attention to language, for it is in the word, it is in language, that things come to be and are, above all, privileged access to its main philosophical question, being, as it says in the work Paths of the Forest of 1977, “Language is the enclosure (templum), namely, the house of being” (Heidegger, 1998, 356).
Turning to the words of Ernst Tugendhat, a scholar well known in analytic philosophy, who had Heidegger as a teacher, he points out the being of the Heideggerian ontology meaningful by the analytic, assuming it as concrete and coexisting.
One way of philosophizing is not related to other ways of philosophizing how a mode of dancing relates to other modes of dancing. Ways of dancing are not mutually exclusive or mutually exclusive. You can dance tango, boogie and rock’n roll the same night and with equal enthusiasm, without worrying about the waltz. But one can’t seriously philosophize in a way without rejecting or incorporating the other modes. [...] Philosophy, like all science, deals with truth. [...] The presentation of a way of philosophizing includes the task of relating it to other possible ways of philosophizing and, in the confrontation between them, to demonstrate its correctness. (Tugendhat, 1992, 14)
Heidegger presents himself as one who does not bother to give a complete account of the various and complex uses of language but rather is concerned with the thought of being, and what derives from language converges to this question.
Faced with this, both Wittgenstein and Heidegger connect these cultural concerns with scientism, the idea that science gives us the one true description of reality. This description, especially in its classic Cartesian–Newtonian form, is of a cold atomistic universe, whereas Heidegger and later Wittgenstein emphasize the rich, holistic world we live in, a world that is far better captured in artworks than in scientific formulas. “They want to examine our limitedness without thereby transgressing our limitations, without peeking over to see that nothing lies beyond this world’s horizon–not even nothing” (Braver, 2012, 231).
Heidegger’s later work emphasizes the role that language plays in our experience, to the same conclusion as Wittgenstein: “[…] it is language that tells us about the essence of a thing” (Braver, 2012, 248). It isn’t that we are presented with a pre-sorted world where categories kneel for us to affix words to them, but that we are always in a linguistic world. We cannot select pristine reality from our reality, making the distinction empty.
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Jéferson Luís de Azeredo. Professor de Filosofia na Universidade do Extremo Sul Catarinense. Doutorando do programa de Filosofia na Unisinos. Bolsista FUMDES – SC.
Received: 6 June 2019
Approved: 20 June 2019