This book includes ten essays that trace the notion of unconcealment as it develops from Heidegger's early writings to his later work, shaping his philosophy of truth, language, and history.
Some time ago, in a rather clumsy fashion, I named language the house of being. If human beings, through their language, live as they are called upon by being, then we Europeans presumably live in a very different house than the East Asians do. (GA 12: 85)
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What does this passage suggest about the meaning of language in the slogan? First, notice that all Europeans inhabit the same house, as do all East Asians. This immediately rules out the proposal that language is really to be identied with a particular ordinary, historically specic language like French or German or Japanese or Chinese or Korean. Another, related, example is provided by Heideggers bewailing in 1942 the fact that his compatriots in 1942 indeed speak German, and yet talk entirely American (GA 53: 80). Of course, Germans at the height of the Second World War were not conversing in English with American accents and idioms. Rather, Heidegger believed that their language in an ontologically broad sense was shared in common with their enemies. American, or European, or East Asian these are examples of languages that are nothing linguistic, that is, languages which are neither expression nor a human activity (GA 12: 16).
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So as we turn now to an examination of Heideggers account of language, we need to keep in mind that Heidegger will be talking about language in an ontologically broad sense. That is, he will proceed by (1) identifying the world-disclosive function of language, (2) analyzing to perform that language in terms of the structures that allow it
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Discourse Language, Saying, Showing world-disclosive function, and (3) using the word language indiscriminately to refer to different things that perform this same function. If this is not confusing enough, there is the added wrinkle that the vocabulary Heidegger uses to talk about this world-disclosive function changes over time. In the next section, I will review the development of Heideggers conception of these originary, nonlinguistic languages together with his changing use of terminology, before turning to an account of the core, ontological sense of language that Heidegger is interested in. T H E R O A D T O O R I G I N A R Y L A N G U A G E
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