The danger of reading two different people in both of whom one has an interest [1] is that one will naturally see affinities between the two which are perhaps not legitimate, and the likelihood of this happening increases as the amount of time spent on one, or the other, increases. At least, there exists a one for whom that is true, and one such one is: me.
So, for instance, reading section 44(a) of Being and Time, I thought, hey, this is reminding me of Austin's theory as put forward in section 3 of "Truth"! Perhaps this is illegitimate, but I do think it's true that fairly few changes are necessary to change this statement from 44(b):
Nevertheless, the ultimate business of philosophy is to preserve the force of the most elemental words in which Dasein expresses itself, and to keep the common understanding from levelling them off to that unintelligibility which functions in turn as as source of pseudo-problems.
into a bit of Austinian programmatics. (Maybe few textual changes, unless you want to read "common understanding" as meaning "common philosophical understanding".)
[1] sentence structured especially for standpipe.
Nice isolated 'Being and Time' moment...
I ask; What is that "force of the most elemental words" of which man uses to express himself?
I don't want to appear clueless, and I am not way seeking inflamatory conclusions but seriously, if a person is to except the idea that there is a "force of the most elemental words," are they accepting an essential idea in the essence of human, akin to some 'divine force'? And should we delight in this hypothetical "force of the most elemental words" are we enjoying something unethical, as in, the destructive force in the human's need to understand itself (and build the world around his/herself)?
In summary, I want to know more about the "force of the most elemental words," and I want to know what it means to want to know more about it.
Posted by: oaeoeao | February 16, 2006 at 08:06 AM
Ask not for whom the whom whoms; it whoms for me.
Posted by: Standpipe Bridgeplate | February 16, 2006 at 02:41 PM
I, too, am not certain about the role of language in Heidegger, and I'm made very uncomfortable by the uses to which he puts etymology generally. I had a too-brief conversation (which was rather one-sided, I was just asking questions, really) with a professor about this, and he said that late in his life Heidegger said that he had gotten aletheia all wrong—I don't know if he meant the etymology of it, but suppose that he had gotten the etymology wrong, and the Greeks didn't really mean a-letheia—that doesn't seem like a good reason to dismiss large swaths of Heidegger wholesale. Say that wasn't how the Greeks—any of them—thought of truth: that wouldn't mean that it was an illegitimate way of thinking about it, any more than their having thought that way valorizes it.
Anyway, that whole approach invites the question, why not go back to Sanskrit? Why not PIE?
I don't really have a problem with Nietzsche's use of etymology in On the Genealogy of Morality, but it seems that there he's not appealing to earlier etymology as having been right for some unexplained reason, so much as illustrating a conceptual change.
Posted by: ben wolfson | February 16, 2006 at 02:53 PM
Greek and German are the native languages of Being.
Posted by: Adam Kotsko | February 18, 2006 at 03:34 PM
I Being asked, What is loose? And Being to me said, All that is not tied down. That joker, Being.
Posted by: Standpipe Bridgeplate | February 18, 2006 at 07:17 PM