Marking silence: Heidegger and Herder on word and origin

Studia Philosophiae Christianae UKSW 49(2013)4 Peter Hanly Boston College, USA Marking Silence: Heidegger and Herder on Word and Origin Abstract. It is clear that the question of language is of utmost importance to Heidegger’s work from the late 1930’s, the period of the so-called seynsgeschichtlich treatises. This preoccupation has become increasingly evident thematically, but is equally apparent in the interruptive and fragmentary presentation of the writing itself, a writing which seems to seek to bring into question the very possibility of philosophical discourse. This paper will argue that decisive, in these texts, both to the development of Heidegger’s conception of language and to its mode of enactment, is an engagement with Herder’s work on the origin of language. This engagement is evidenced by the intensive address to that text that we find in the seminar notes from 1939: Vom Wesen der Sprache: Die Metaphysik der Sprache und die Wesung des Wortes. Zu Herder’s Abhandlung über den Ursprung der Sprache (GA 85). Herder’s text allows Heidegger to develop a relation to the fragmentary that is decisive for the unfolding and development of his thinking. Keywords: Heidegger, Herder, language, listening, mark, silence “The word fails”, writes Heidegger in the Beiträge, “not as an occasional occurrence (…) but originarily”1. But this originary failing of language points in that text not to an expressive incapacity, but rather to a positive intimation of a renewal of thinking. The philosophical discourse that marks the Beiträge, and the surrounding texts of the so-called M. Heidegger, Beiträge Zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis), Vittorio Klostermann, Frankfurt a.M. 1989 (English: Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event), transl. R. Rojcewicz, D. Vallega-Neu, Indiana University Press, Bloomington 2012). Translation modified. 1 70 PETER HANLY [2] seynsgeschichtlich period might be understood as responding to this sense of a ‘failing language’, by initiating a kind of writing that opens in particular ways onto silence, onto spaces and interruptions in which this originary failing can appear: a fragmentary writing. This paper will argue that decisive to the unfolding of the question of language and the performative mode of its exploration is the confrontation with Herder, which becomes explicit in the 1939 seminar on the latter’s Treatise on the Origin of Language. Little attention seems to have been paid to this text: By contrast, a far greater emphasis has tended to be placed on the influence of Humboldt in the development of Heidegger’s thinking of language2. Whilst in no way disputing the significance of Humboldt’s presence, I would like to suggest that the particular mode of engagement with language that occurs in the texts of the late 1930’s is forged more directly out of the confrontation with Herder than in relation to Humboldt’s thinking3. It is the notion of originary ‘mark’ that Herder develops that enables Heidegger to conceive of the word as dislocation, as disruptive in its very essence. In this conception, a fragmentary and interruptive discourse must become the paradigm for an address to the question of language itself. Additionally, Herder’s multi-layered centralization of listening allows for a re-configuration of the discourse of subjectivity in terms of a ‘gathering’ towards a listening which is always grounded in, and directed toward, this interruption. See, for example, the invaluable account of the significance of Humboldt for Heidegger’s thinking of language in G. Figal, Objectivity: The Hermeneutical and the Philosophical, transl. Th. George, SUNY Press, Albany 2010, especially 191–197. 2 There are important accounts of Herder’s work on language to be found in K. Terezakis, The Immanent Word: The Turn to Language in German Philosophy, 1759––1801, Routledge, New York 2007; in Ch. Taylor, The Importance of Herder, in: E. Margalit, A. Margalit, Isaiah Berlin: A Celebration, Chicago UP, Chicago 1991; and in M. Forster, After Herder: Philosophy of Language in the German Tradition, Oxford UP, Oxford 2012. The second of these, in particular, discusses the question of the relation between Herder and Humboldt’s conceptions of language. For a valuable account of this and other controversies surrounding the reception of Herder’s work on language, see J.H. Zammito, Herder, Sturm und Drang, and “Expressionism”, Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 27(2006)2, 51–74. 3 [3] MARKING SILENCE: HEIDEGGER AND HERDER 71 I. Herder writes as follows: “Now, it is in the face of this sort of deep abyss of obscure sensations, forces, and irritations that our bright and clear philosophy is horrified most of all”4. The enthusiasm of this claim, but also its anxieties, might serve well to describe the ambience of Herder’s thinking in general, a thinking that plays always in the space between clarity and obscurity, caught in the pull of both. Nowhere is this truer than in the Treatise on the Origin of Language, whose central insights seem generated in an intertwinement of obscurity and illumination. On the one hand, a ‘listening’ that occupies the central ground of the possibility language, but which cannot be clarified in terms of a subjective capacity; on the other, a conception of the word as ‘mark’, a ‘marking’, that is neither the externality of sound nor the index of a silent internal registration. Heidegger’s reflections on Herder revolve in and around the orbit of this tension, leaning on the difficulties of the text, forcing open its radical possibilities, and watching, too – sometimes with palpable frustration – its withdrawal, its retreats. The reflections take the form of a series of notes or short fragments composed for a seminar that Heidegger gave in the Summer of 1939. They are elliptical and condensed, seeming – structurally and stylistically – to have much in common with the series of so-called seynsegeschichtlich treatises with which Heidegger was privately engaged at the time. Indeed, to the extent that those texts oblige us to re-frame our understanding of the relation between public and private discourse, between ‘note’ and ‘essay’, perhaps more broadly between the fragmentary and the systematic, the notes on Herder, too, suggest a kind of between-space, neither exactly “lecture notes” nor still expository discourse, but a different kind of utterance, one whose lacunae, whose uncertainties are as much a function of the writing itself as the index of an incompleteness. For this reason, too, it is possible to wonder whether the dynamics of Heidegger’s reading of Herder do not pertain most directly to the writings of this period, and J.G. von Herder, On the Cognition and Sensation of the Human Soul, transl. M. Forster, in: J.G. von Herder, Philosophical Writings, Cambridge UP, Cambridge 2002, 196. 4 72 PETER HANLY [4] whether the reflections on origin that Herder imposes on Heidegger might indeed not be decisive for an understanding of these tex (...truncated)