MY MASTERPIECE: The Crisis of Language in the Modern World (22 March 2024; Heidegger/Lysaker/Ziarek)

In this essay, I will investigate the crisis of language that Heidegger perceives to have infected contemporary society. Heidegger believes that, as modernity unfolds, something dwindles away; not only has our relationship with language degraded to a mere husk of what it once was, we also find ourselves enduring with a reduced sense of Being. I will begin by more specifically identifying the problem, what is lost, in our current historical milieu. Once I’ve sufficiently identified the issue and explained our present position, I’ll move to explain how we can improve our relationship with language, and what benefits we may realize in doing so. I’ll mainly look at Heidegger’s On the Way to Language throughout my essay, while also referencing Lysaker’s “Language & Poetry,” and Ziarek’s “Poetic Thinking.”

Section I: The Degradation of Language

The essentiality of language to Heidegger cannot be overstated. At the outset of his lectures on “The Nature of Language,” he writes that, “man finds the proper abode of his existence in language.” (On 57). The notion of abode, or home, is colloquially synonymous to the word “dwelling.” The use of “abode” here is intentional, and designed to lay the framework of what’s to come later in the lecture, manifest in the claim that, “Language is the house of Being” (On 63). The structure of our existence, Being, exists because of language. Without language, there can be no sense of Being. Additionally, “the word itself is the relation, by holding everything forth into being, and there upholding it” (On 73). What Heidegger means to say here is that, in the Saying of language itself, we are (most of the time) granted the word, which upholds our relational understanding of the world; our sense of being-in-the-world.

The series of lectures on “The Nature of Language” are about guiding, leading the reader to come face-to-face with the possibility of undergoing an experience with language (On 59). His work is not prescriptive such that it may hand us the experience on a silver platter, but so that we may get to a place where we may be able to have such an experience; he is the hunting guide leading us to the blind. Yet, he imposes a sense of doubt early on: “But now it could be that an experience we undergo with language is too much for us moderns, even if it strikes us only to the extent that for once it draws our attention to our relation to language” (On 58). This quote yields two insights into how Heidegger sees our modern world. Firstly, we get the sense that something has changed in modernity, that this elusive experience is now more difficult to attain, deemed as being “too much” for contemporary humans. He believes that modern society has moved so far from a genuine engagement with language that such an experience may not be able to cross an imposed barrier of understanding. Secondly, the experience itself may only strike us to the extent that we acknowledge our relation to language. This implies that we are not attentive to our relation with language, that somehow it is just as elusive as the experience itself. Heidegger asserts that, when asked directly how we relate to language, the relation would appear as something “vague, obscure, almost speechless” (On 58). Thus, he focuses the aim of his guidance to those who “[try] to speak of language… with the sole intent to show possibilities that will allow us to become mindful of language and our relation to it” (On 58). He is, of course, addressing those who attempt to gather information about language. Lysaker summarizes Heidegger’s opening aim well, writing that we’re “out of step with regard to language, and to the degree that we need to establish conditions for the possibility of what seems intimately at our disposal” (Martin 196).

These gatherers may take the form of linguists and philologists, specifically the discipline of analytical philosophy, as those philosophers attempt to create a super-language (On 58). It is here where he first mentions the technicalization and instrumentality of language: “Metalinguistics is the metaphysics of the thoroughgoing technicalization of all languages into the sole operative instrument of interplanetary information” (On 58). Essentially, he’s acknowledging the antithesis of what he’s setting out to do. Metalinguistics involves completely stripping language of its connection to Being through technicalization, essentially molding it into an instrument. Lysaker, in his essay “Language and poetry,” recognizes Heidegger’s intent in these so-called “missteps” in understanding language as language: “One key to Heidegger’s many responses to the phenomenon of language lies with efforts to displace views that undermine genuine experiences with language… he insists that we should not compile information about language, say through comparisons of various grammars” (Martin 198). By engaging in metalinguistics, we do not “think about how we belong to language… no amount of information about various languages will expose the character of that relationship” (Martin 198). His critique of language in modernity is never overtly stated in these early passages, but rather pieced together throughout “The Nature of Language.”

Instrument, by definition, is “a tool or implement, especially one for delicate or scientific work” (“Instrument”). One of Heidegger’s most voracious critiques of the changing relation to language we face in the wake of modernity is the instrumentalization of language, the idea that it is a tool for “a set of facts, an occurrence, a question, a matter of concern” (On 59). In fact, the ways in which we may be face to face with the experience he is guiding us towards in the first place, “have long existed. But they are seldom used in such a manner that the possible experience with language is itself given voice and put into language” (On 59). The instrumentality of language as solely a communication tool has created an environment in which “language itself never has the floor… Only because in everyday speaking language does not bring itself to language but holds back, are we able simply to go ahead and speak a language, and so to deal with something and negotiate something by speaking” (On 59). Something about our devolving relationship with language is deterring language from emerging; language must hold itself back so that we may engage in our usage of everyday language. If we wish to undergo an experience with language, “language [must bring itself] to language” (On 59), something that we evidently do not make room for in modernity. 

Lysaker expands on this, relating it more specifically to interpersonal dialogue. He claims that Heidegger believes “language does not originally occur as a medium whereby human beings express something through representations… such an account misses our basic relation with language” (Martin 199). Everything that could traditionally be explained as a representation is already in relation to language, and thus representational interpretations, such as the belief that language is merely a word tacked on to something, undermine that that very something is already arranged in language as a something distinct from everything else. Thus, “communication evidences rather than explains our basic relation with language… Our basic relation to language is not the result of some human decision to represent, express and/or address. Rather, most human decisions presume this relation, and thus Heidegger would prefer to say, it is less that we speak language than that ‘Language speaks’” (Martin 199). We do not have agency or dominion over language. We speak not language, rather, language speaks. In our claim to language, we actualize the opposite of what our relation to language should be, which involves a submission. Undergoing an experience with something involves that we “[enter] into [it] and [submit] to it” (On 57). As long as we resist language, expressing a relation of control over it, thus instrumentalizing it, making it a means to an end, we distance ourselves from our proper relation with language, fomenting this devolution. In distancing ourselves from our proper relationship with language, we distance ourselves from that which houses Being, resulting in a reduced sense of Being. 

Section II: Improving our relation to Language

Kyzysztof Ziarek’s work, “The Poetic Way of Thinking,” explores Heidegger’s take on thinking, poetry, and language. He claims that Heidegger is attempting to usher in a non-metaphysical, poetic way of thinking about the world, the need for which arises out of modernity: “Poetic thinking responds to the modern drive to maximum ability and dispose-ability of being and beings, freeing up the possibility of a path alternative to the domination of calculative thought and its technological metrics” (Research 68). Today, more than ever, it is clear that in order to restore our sense of Being, we must call “on thought to turn poetic for the sake of Being” (Research 69). 

This need for a movement towards poetic thinking, similar to the elucidation of the crisis at hand in the first place, is somewhat enigmatic and buried between the lines in Heidegger’s writing. The means, as well as the ends of this transformation are not overtly disclosed. Ziarek locates two main sources for this “declaration of need” for poetic thinking: The “realization that the ontological difference [(which I understand to be the difference between beings and being)]... has to be not just rethought but in fact left behind… the ontological difference has to be sprung over in order for the question of being to open up beyond the strictures of metaphysics” (Research 69), and that “the recognition that philosophy… will not be able to open itself truly to the question of being, let alone address it properly…hence the need… to let philosophy… come to its fulfillment in techno-scientific, calculative thought, and the parallel call to turn to the task of thinking” (Research 69). Ziarek is posing radical claims: Heidegger’s ontological difference, which was meant to address Being and beings, actually inhibits the question of Being from fully opening up. Additionally, philosophy itself, including phenomenology, is unable to open the question of Being; it must “reach its end” in the direction that modern language is trending, that is, towards instrumentality. Heidegger writes in Basic Writings, “Perhaps there is a thinking outside the distinction of rational and irrational… without effect, yet having its own necessity” (Basic 449), hinting at this poetic thinking.

In “The Nature of Language,” Heidegger writes, “There is the danger.. that we will think too little, and reject the thought that the true experience with language can only be at thinking experience, all the more so because the lofty poetry of all great poetic work always vibrates within a realm of thinking” (On 69). Heidegger conceives that poetry is concomitant with thinking, claiming that truly great works of poetry “vibrate,” or rather resonate, shine, open up, within the thinking realm. Our modern conception of thinking itself leads us to believe that “thinking is calculation… the mere thought of a neighborhood of thinking to poetry is suspect” (On 70). This points back to Ziarek’s introduction, which points out our distance from any type of poetic thinking. Of thinking, we can say that it “cuts furrows into the soil of Being” (On 70). Thinking, then, is not merely the instrument we perceive it to be today, but rather it brings us closer with Being, with the ability to open something up, provided we use it in the appropriate manner (poetically). 

But what is poetic thinking? “...the authentic attitude of thinking is not a putting of questions–rather, it is a listening to the grant, the promise of what is to be put in question” (On 71). This thinking, which dwells in the neighborhood of poetry, asks not questions based on something, or the presence of something, but rather begins with a listening, that “remains the search for the first and ultimate grounds” (On 71). This searching is itself a questioning, and is such a questioning that pursues its “quest for essential being” (On 72). Thus, Heidegger reaches the new way to look at language to bring us face to face with an experience with it: “the being of language–the language of being” (On 72), and later writes in “The Way to Language” that the “essential being of language is Saying as Showing” (On 123). In order to unravel this mess of quotes, I offer a line of reasoning: poetic thinking listens to language to put to question what may aid poetic thinking in its quest for the foundation, the ultimate grounds. “The ultimate grounds” are essential Being. It is through language that poetic thinking can question, and that is the essential being of language, thus deemed the language of being; and the essential being of language is later also deemed as the Saying of language (to the poet, in this case) as a Showing, a revealing of Being. By listening to the Saying of language, the poetic thinker is able to reveal Being. Prior to presenting our missteps in our relation to language, on page 198 of Key Concepts, Lysaker presents a passage from Heidegger’s “Letter on Humanism,” that opens with the quote:

Thinking accomplishes the relation of being to the essence of human 

beings. It does not make or cause the relation. Thinking brings this 

relation to being solely as that which is handed over to thought from

being. Such offering consists in the fact that in thinking, being comes 

to language. Language is the house of being. In language’s housing,

human beings dwell. Thinkers and poetizers are the guardians of this

housing. Their guardianship accomplishes the manifestation of being 

insofar as they, in their saying, bring this manifestation to and preserve

it in language.

In thinking, Being comes to language, which establishes the relation of being to the essence of us. We dwell, be-in-the-world, in the housing of language, as it persists as the house of being. Lysaker says that by “learning to dwell in the [Saying] of language” (Martin 198), we can “prepare for… a kind of thinking and/or poetizing, which brings being to language and preserves it there, thereby accomplishing the manifesting of being itself, which in turn engages the essence of human beings… none of this stands a ghost of a chance if we are unable to find conditions for the possibility of an experience with language” (Martin 198). It is the poet who accomplishes this best, who has undergone an experience with language, as exemplified by George in the renunciation. Thus, the language of the poem is able to “offer a language of essence” (Martin 206).

Section III: Conclusion

While we are always “with” language, by “speaking in one way or another” (Poetry 188), our proper relation to it has diminished over time as we perceive it as something owned, an instrument to an end. This emerging diminished relationship prevents us from having experiences with language; it touches us in its essence when we cannot find the right word (On 59), but we still cannot have an experience with it. Even an experience, which would awaken us to merely our relation in which we stand with language, as not its master but as its listener, is deemed potentially to be too much for us moderns.

In order to heal our relationship with language, it is necessary that we listen to the poet, who has engaged in poetic thinking, endured an experience with language, and thus gained or restored a sense of Being. It is they who have surrendered themselves to the call of language in renouncing their own claim to language, and thus allow themselves to attune to the Saying of language, revealing Being to them, and bringing to Being that which was not previously. By reading the poet’s work, we leave everyday language behind, leaving also the notion that language is strictly an instrument. Something may be revealed to us, emerge from the house of Being, which has the potential to grant us an experience with language.

Works Cited

Heidegger, Martin, and Peter D. Hertz. On the Way to Language. Harper and Row, 1982. 

Heidegger, Martin. Poetry, Language, Thought. Translated by Albert Hofstadter, Harper & Row, 1971. 

“Instrument.” Collins English Dictionary - Complete & Unabridged Digital Edition, 2012.

Lysaker, John T. “Language and Poetry.” Martin Heidegger: Key Concepts, translated by Bret W. Davis, 1st ed., Routledge, London, 2010, pp. 195–206. 

Ziarek, Krzysztof. “The Poetic Way of Thinking.” Research in Phenomenology, vol. 52, 2022, pp. 68–83.