Wednesday, April 15, 2009

Heidegger's Dialogue

Sorry for the late and abbreviated post. I just got my book back today and didn't make it through all of the reading... need to go to bed.

With that said, I've always been fascinated by my bilingual friends that come to know the languages they do very intimately and can shift from thinking in one language to the other or one of the others, even if it takes some doing or some meditation to do so. What they talk about is an experience that changes the parameters of what it means to be as Being is. They've always explained this as things being available or unavailable in one language compared to another and that by knowing these two languages they see how much we are defined by the language that we use.

For this reason, I've always considered language to be a trapping of Being, but at the same time, the only way that Being can be to begin with. In our reading today I did get to the point where the Japanese is talking about shifting back and forth between the languages of his native tongue and German and seeing something that was there in the inbetweeness of languages. It is this deficiency that I think Heidegger is after - to see the limitations of language to understand the thing that is beyond language that exists for us just as poignantly, although unrecognized, as the realm of the spoken.

No comments:

Post a Comment