Date: Fri, 22 May 1998 14:35:12 -0400
Subject: Re: Language?


Michael Staples wrote:

> Can we conclude that even if we can't be too precise about
>defining language, we can agree that language as used in the
>heideggerian sense transcends the notion of a system of signs and
>signals, and at some point intersects the poetic (as developed by H.)?

Michael, a brief word just before you sign off on this topic.  The
self-referentiality of language. Heidegger in raising the problem of access
to Sein ('to be') in Being and Time, shows how it belongs to the
questioning of questioning.   It is not merely that we question in circles
and try to catch our own tails, but that the circle is primed by the
pursuit of 'to be'.   Such that the questioner _becomes_ questioning.  It
is the _to be_ of and for the questioner.  The same with language.   The
philosophical questioning of language as Heidegger shows the way, is not to
discover what language is, the thing language is, whether a system of signs
or whatever, but to pursue one's own orientation to language, such that one
intensifies one's own language-being,   Although Being and Time has the
makings of a poetic work, it is still shot through with the attempt to
explicate in the form of a theory of Dasein.   But in the later work,
Heidegger's work is not only more purely phenomenological, but in his quest
to understand the poetical being of human being, this is self-referential
in that his language/thought is the struggle to get into the way of poetic
being.   This distinguishes him from a poet whose poetry is about something
external to the poem.   Heidegger's poetical thinking is about what he is
doing, such that he is doing it.   His poetry is on the way.

Daniel

Message text written by INTERNET:heidegger-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
>> So language comes from poetic expression because language is not just
> a system of signs but and expression of being.

Greg, do we have enough on language to take back to our other
discussion? Can we conclude that even if we can't be too precise about
defining language, we can agree that language as used in the
heideggerian sense transcends the notion of a system of signs and
signals, and at some point intersects the poetic (as developed by H.)?

Michael Staples
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