Abstract
Martin Heidegger’s quest in life, his overwhelming joy, was in his experience of language. In his book, On the Way to Language, he claims that we are all called to come face to face with the possibility of “undergoing an experience with language.” He says that: “To undergo an experience with something, be it a person, a thing, or a god, means that this experience befalls us, strikes us, comes over us, overwhelms us and transforms us. When we talk of ‘undergoing’ an experience, we mean specifically that the experience is not of our own making; to undergo here means that we endure it, receive it as it strikes us, and submit to it.”1 At once, in the enjoyment that Heidegger found in language, one senses the transformational power it possesses. Coming “face to face” with a possibility has reverberations of the meaning of discovering ultimate knowledge in a “beatific vision.” It has no floor. Actually, Heidegger maintains that “In experiences we undergo with language, language itself brings itself to language.”2
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Notes
Martin Heidegger, On the Way to Language. Translated by Peter D. Hertz ( New York: Harper and Row Publ., 1971 ), p. 57.
Heidegger, p. 59.
Heidegger, p. 59.
Heidegger, p. 63.
T. S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc., 1971) “The Four Quartets,” pp. 117–148.
Heidegger, p. 59.
Heidegger, p. 53.
Heidegger, p. 54.
Plato, Republic II. In Critical Theory since Plato. Edit. Hazard Adams (Chicago: Harcourt, Brace Javanovich, Inc., 1971 ), p. 20.
Heidegger, p. 68.
L. M. Vail, Heidegger and Ontological Difference (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1972 ), p. 163. Professor Vail, in discussing language as the House of Being also makes the point that dwelling itself is contemplative through and through, insofar as any genuine dwelling takes place. It cannot be accomplished mechanically. “Language,” he says, “cannot be just another thing for then it would not be a disclosure but itself in need of being disclosed,” p. 163.
Heidegger, On the Way to Language,p. 155.
Heidegger, On the Way to Language,p. 136.
Henri Birault, “Thinking and Poetizing in Heidegger,” in On Heidegger and Language,translated and edited by Joseph Kockelmans (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1972), p. 149. Birault builds his theory on the fact that poetry, understood in the broad sense (as in Heidegger), represents the very essence of art. He says: “The poetic is not nature in this or that of nature’s productions, but the very naturalness of nature, the protecting dawn of the very birth of this nature, the difficulty of truth,” p. 162.
Heidegger, On the Way to Language,p. 77.
T. S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays. “The Four Quartets,” “Little Gidding,” p. 141.
T. S. Eliot, “Little Gidding,” p. 144.
Martin Heidegger, “Holderlin and the Essence of Poetry,” in European Literary Theory and Practice, edited by Vernon W. Gras ( New York: Dell Publishing Co., 1973 ), p. 20.
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Prochaska, B. (1998). Language and Enjoyment — Heidegger and Eliot. In: Tymieniecka, AT. (eds) Enjoyment. Analecta Husserliana, vol 56. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-1425-9_18
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-1425-9_18
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