Centre for English Studies, JNU ES472E: Prof. Saitya Brata Das
Aesthetic Theories
Term Paper (Monsoon Semester)
Submitted by: Akansha Singh
Registration no.- 75824
On Topic
Saying and Thinking
The paper intends to take up the questions concerning language and thought, which emanated after reading Heidegger. An attempt has been made to check how far a couple between language and thought can been synthesized. The word “synthesis” is being used here in advance because a dialectical relationship between language and thought is being speculated. Neither language nor thought directly belongs to the realm of the aesthetic, as pre- given. Nonetheless, the idea of testing the coupling is to be grounded in the context of the aesthetic. One is hesitant to move further without mentioning that originally the paper was supposed to revolve around the concepts of language and thought (as the very first line mentions). However, after understanding Heidegger’s idea of the aesthetic, it is only utmost unfitting to use the two jargons. The cancellation of any concept/ conceptualization is of primary importance to the paper, as is to any reading of Heidegger. Therefore, language and thought get translated as saying and thinking, respectively, avoiding any objectivity therein.
The idea of partnering the two was induced mainly through a reading of ‘Letter on “Humanism”’ .In order to formulate the arguments on coupling speaking and thinking one need to necessarily lay down Heidegger’s interventions regarding the two and the differences one countered while interpreting those theories. For that reason, I would first talk about language and then about thought. I have taken up ‘A Dialogue on Language’ as the point of initiation. Language becomes central to this dialogue once Heidegger posits the question of difference between an East- Asian and a European man on account of the differences in language. Heidegger has widely been criticized for cultural snobbishness for having asked this. However, the other side to him asking such a question would be, I believe, on account of the differences between the scripts of the western languages as opposed to that of the Japanese (which is a mixture of ideographic symbols and two phonetic scripts). The questions concerning the nature of language were first dealt via logos by him, which happened to be a series of lecture on Logic. It was using logic that Heidegger established a hermeneutic foregrounding of language, where he sought that the relation between Holy Scripture and theological speculative thinking could be analogous with that between language and being.
The dialogue that follows looks at language not merely as a tool to communicate or a linguistic theorization but as a “gathering” (18) of various bearings, gestures and expressions. I would want to emphasize here, the nature of this gathering which has a recurrent tendency. It keeps coming back to itself, as if in a flux. Every time completes a momentary circle, justifying the hermeneutic analysis of Heidegger. It is present through its absence and absent through its presence. Language is a part of the reality but its source is hidden somewhere far outside of this reality. Expression holds the key to that path and that is why tracing the path becomes more important here than merely recounting the contents discovered during the course of the journey. Every expression is functionally entwined with appearance. Heidegger gives precedence to the Greek notion of beings appearing through radiance or unconcealment, over Kant’s idea of presupposing appearance as a representational object.
This appearance does not lie in speech/ speaking alone. It goes beyond to the event of saying. Saying includes not only what has been said but also what is to be said. Saying creates a spacing; overruling both temporality and spatiality. This spacing is pregnant with present, past and future simultaneously, while also being (contradictorily) vacant of the three. Nothing ever gets etched as the absolute in saying because what goes, comes back to complete the circle. Saying is like a spring. Saying is more like a showing. It lets appear. Poetry is an example of such saying. It debunks speech. How does language become home to beings? It is home, a dwelling of sorts because it is self sufficiently powerful. Therefore, it becomes more fitting to say beings belong to language than the vice versa. Saying does not need a hearer. It does not even need speech. Silence too, is saying. “Language speaks and solitary with itself” (397) . Once we understand this, we would be able to discover that language does not come from speech but from the unspoken. The unspoken is like an index which is functionally contained with the not- yet- spoken as well as with not- to- be- spoken. Again, it needs to be asserted that the trajectory of showing is more important that the content of speech.
What makes this trajectory so important? There is a chain of questions attached to it, all of which have to be specified in order to move further. Where do messages come from, to the message bearer? What causes a showing in saying? What is the junction between message and the message- bearer? To find out answers to these questions, one needs to imperatively bring in thinking. Any language, speech or saying cannot occur in isolation from thinking. This was initially slightly confirmed in the dialogue when J refers to language as a construction site where the “wondrous” thinking is deployed at the task of road- building, and I agrees with him . (21)
What one failed to understand was, why is there then, a need to keep coming back to the site left behind?
The first set of hints is to be discovered in ‘On the Way to Language’ when this constructive work is referred to as enframing or “gestell” (420). The path of language is laid down through thinking. What we also come across here Is the idea of propriation. Propriation is the tool that thinking uses while constructing language, to gather the mortals and to hold them there. Propriation is the mode by which we discover our respective relationships with language. This makes language historical. However, we need to stop here and ask- what is this history constitutive of? If language is constitutive of something, it means, an attempt was made to build it in the first place. The idea of building is what connects us to the answer, which is, thinking. Before moving to the idea of building, which involves both thinking and saying, one needs to think about thinking. Is this possible?
The redundancy lies with the idea that we use language to talk about language and thinking to think about thinking. We have always already been a part of the ‘concepts’ of thinking and language. This is what even Heidegger says, I believe, when he says that the most thought- provoking is that we are still not thinking (370). This very assertion, almost as if takes away the surface from underneath our feet. Heidegger takes this as the point of contention, invoking and urging to think through the fearfulness of the thought- provoking. About two thousand years of thinking and yet no thinking? The attempt to think cannot be denied but with each attempt that was made, that which had to be thought, moved farther away. All thought was futile just like God is dead. Or rather, all thinking was futile just as god is dying because we incarcerated our labour of thinking and cognition inside the violence of conceptualization. These concepts took the shape of ontic sciences, which ironically enough, thought about everything but ontology. Thinking withdrew just as god did. This event of withdrawal neither became known to us through its happening, nor did we intervene to stop and know about it. The oft pessimistic word “withdrawal” here, is pregnant with potential. It is through the feeling of something withdrawing that one tries to hold on to the withdrawer.
This is better explained by Heidegger using Hölderlin’s hymn of Mnemosyne, where Hölderlin writes,
“We are a sign that is not read.
We feel no pain, we almost have
Lost our tongue in foreign lands.” (26)
What is it that language says about and thinking thinks about? The arguments constructed so far, at least have cleared out what is not to be said or thought about. We have to demolish the edifice of metaphysics to think beyond thought and say beyond language. The question of prime importance then, to any of us would be the question of our own Being. A question that was long forgotten in thinking about beings, which presupposed Being. To be able to think about Being, we need a leap, a leap outside of the metaphysical concepts of language and thought. This leap will form the basis of the ereignis (event) that is to take place now. The flux of events that went unnoticed while working on thought an language can be redeemed by this event of leap that we are willingly invoking. Heidegger complicates this by placing the source in a linguistic verb here. When we ask what is called thinking, we undergo a verbal change of “call”. This does not answer my questions completely but it does provide a stepping stone further. The idea of calling is similar to the idea of speaking, where as mentioned before, nothing gets etched. What goes, comes back to complete the hermeneutic circle. This proves that a couple between saying and thinking is possible. In fact, the couple is sustained by a symbiotic relationship. One cannot think without language and one cannot speak without thinking.
Now that the couple has been substantiated, we can go back to the question of dwelling that we had left a few paragraphs before. Building is not alone one of the acts taking place, serving as nourishment between the kinship of saying and thinking. Whenever we think of saying or say of thinking, building will have to be looked at in conjunction with dwelling. Heidegger uses the old German word bauen for “build”, which also means to dwell. Dwelling does not occupy an adjunct functionality here. It is dwelling which creates a necessity to build. Dwelling becomes important to us because Heidegger’s further writing on thinking is based on the idea of the fourfold; as contained in the act of dwelling. The fourfold includes the mortals, divinities, earth and sky. At the crossroad, is situated the thing. The thing can be anything. However, what interests me here is to know, whether thinking or saying can be designated as a thing? Neither is tangible. Thinginess does not depend on tangibility either. A thing, irrespective of its form, revolves around an identity. It either comes in proximity to embrace an identity or dissembles in order to evade it.
So, the couple of saying and thinking is to be considered as a thing and further one intends to find out what relationship this thing bears with identity. I have tried to look at the aspects of ‘thing’ and ‘identity’ using Heideggerian ideas on aesthetic theories. Identity is interlaced with the thing. Any thing is differentiated on the basis of its identity; which also means that identity is a presupposed imposition on every thing. The traditional notion of identity as deriving from sameness makes it homogeneous. Such a conception of identity will not help us in looking at the couple of saying and thinking as a thing. It is this homogeneity that has caused saying and thinking to remain undeveloped and concealed in the garb of language and thought, respectively. This sameness or homogeneity is aimed at a single unity, a fusion existence. As opposed to this would be a multiplicity of heterogeneous saying and thinking. This again would be challenging because it would make this world an extended Tower of Babel. The solution lies in rising above the dichotomy between homogeneous and heterogeneous. A nuance approach needs to be adopted.
The first step is to liberate identity from the fetters of a concept and make it flexible. Identity lies in opening up. It is like Heraclitus’ river; never same. The second step would be to establish a connection between Being and identity. This relation will be characterized by relentless fluctuations because Being is not a constant. A different identity will be observed each time, depending upon the reaction of being towards its Being. Theorizing the relation between being and Being is easy but experiencing it is not. The dynamicity of this relationship can be attributed to, as an event here. The relationship between Being and being is characterized by a series of such momentary events. Heidegger calls each, an event of appropriation. It is to experience this relation that we need the couple of saying and thinking, as a thing. Saying and thinking, it can be said, act as an index filled with potential. Can this ‘thing’ have an identity independent of the Being- being relationship? Or does its identity get subsumed within the larger framework of Being and being?
Saying- thinking couple bears a dialectical relationship with being, grounded in the nothingness of Being. They both tend to identify in each other. This framework could not have sustained even if one of the elements were missing. It is almost as if a new fourfold is being created by being, Being, saying and thinking. At the crossroad lies an engulfing nothingness. “From the nothing all beings as beings come to be” (95). Every saying and thinking too, emanates from the empty slate of nothingness, about nothingness. This new fourfold serves as a spring of leap. This leap dismantles the conceptual boundaries of time and experience within it. Each experience is distended with the distention of language and thought into saying and thinking, respectively. The couple work to make the unconcealment of nothingness possible.
Bibliography
• Heidegger, Martin. Pathmarks, translated by Frank A. Capuzzi, Cambridge University Press, 1998
• Heidegger, Martin. On the Way to Language, translated by Peter D. Hertz, Harper &Row, 1982.
• Heidegger, Martin. Basic Writings: From Being and Time(1927) to the Task of Thinking(1964), translated by David Farrell Krell, Harper Collins, 1993
• Cattin, Emmanuel. “Leaving Philosophy? Heidegger, Bauen, Lassen” Beyond Deconstruction: From Hermeneutics to Reconstruction, edited by Alberto Martinengo, Walter de Gruyter, 2012
• Heidegger, Martin. Identity and Difference, translated by Joan Stambaugh, Harper & Row, 1969
• Heidegger, Martin. Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister” translated by William McNeill and Julia Davis, Indiana University Press, 1996
• Heidegger, Martin. The Event, translated by Richard Rojcewicz, Indiana University Press, 2013
• Heidegger, Martin. Ontology: The Hermeneutics of Facticity, Translated by Jon van Buren, Indiana University Press, 1999
• Heidegger, Martin. What is Called Thinking?, translated by Fred D. Wieck and J. Glenn Gray, Harper & Row, 1968
• Heidegger, Martin. Logic as the Question Concerning the Essence of Language, translated by Wanda T. Gregory and Yvonne Unna, University of New York Press, 2009