File spoon-archives/heidegger.archive/heidegger_1998/heidegger.9809, message 47


Date: Thu, 24 Sep 1998 18:11:24 +0200
Subject: Re: Meaning
From: artefact-AT-t-online.de (Michael Eldred)


Cologne, 24 September 1998

Mike Staples schrieb:
> Reading David's question about correspondence and truth, I got to
> thinking about meaning in the same way. We know about truth as
> correspondence versus Heidegger's version of truth, but I was thinking
> that meaning has a similar structure at one level. When we say "What is
> the meaning of X" there is in some circles a division between the
> literal and the symbolic which I understand as untenable in Heidegger's
> presentation (had my hand slapped here before). What strikes me is that
> Heidegger's meaning is a pointing-to with no termination in the sense of
> "this is it". Meaning here follows the path of showing (Michael E.), but
> moves within an interpretive structure of interconnections as, perhaps,
> a verb in contrast to a noun. Meaning as correspondence would be similar
> in structure to truth as correspondence. Seems reasonable, then, that
> the alternative would (as with truth) be meaning as unconcealment
> (perhaps because meaning, significance and truth are so strongly related
> to one another).
>
> any thoughts?

Michael, you called so sweetly, I just have to respond. 
What is the meaning of, say, the word “apple”? Seems straightforward enough. The 
literal meaning would be some kind of edible fruit that would have to be 
distinguished from other fruit by means of some specific difference. On this 
level, language could be thought of as a kind of convenience we employ to order 
and distinguish things, a human invention. When I speak, I summon to presence 
what I am referring to, so that the referends are present also to those 
listening to what I am saying. 

But Heidegger takes things back one step. We can only mean something by speaking 
because language itself is already a pointing before anything has made way to 
words that can be spoken. The pointing points to the appearance and 
disappearance of beings in their presencing and absencing. Beings point first to 
themselves in showing themselves through presencing and absencing, and this 
self-revelation allows language to point to them. Heidegger says in his lecture 
“The Way to Language” (1959):

“Language speaks as pointing by reaching into all regions of presencing, thus 
allowing each presencing (being) to appear and disappear from these regions. 
Accordingly, we listen to language by way of letting it tell us its saying.” 
(UzS 255) 

Heidegger’s thinking aims to show that language itself speaks, and that we can 
speak only by virtue of first listening to language. Language itself speaks by 
pointing and showing, and pointing and showing are ‘happenings’ of 
unconcealment. Our own speaking only participates in this more originary 
happening of truth to which we belong. We can listen to language’s silent 
pointing only because we already belong to it and are bound by it. 

What we mean when we speak, what we intend to say in reaching out with language 
to what we have in mind, depends on language already having reached out by 
pointing to what presences and absences in manifold ways. Our speaking rests on 
and in language’s pointing and showing. 


Michael
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_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_ Dr Michael Eldred -_-_-_
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