Wittgensteins, Heideggers, and Gadamers, Oh My!

Cristina Lafont’s Heidegger, Language, and World-Disclosure is quite a book. Against both those (such as Gethmann) (p. 12) who see Being and Time as merely an adjustment from the philosophy of consciousness (p. 2, note 3)(particularly, of course, as propogated by Husserl) and those (such as Okrent in Heidegger’s Pragmatism, Dreyfus in Being-in-the-World, Lorenz and Mittelstrass in “Die Hintergehbarkeit der Sprache,” and, presumably, Schatzki and perhaps Rorty and those Pittsburgh Hegelians who take note of Heidegger) who interpret the early Heidegger as some sort of pragmatist (p. 12), Lafont marshalls an impressive range of quotations from a number of sources, particularly Heidegger’s lectures from the 1920s but also from several of his works after his Kehre, to argue that language, rather than Dasein or praxis, was always the “house of Being” for Heidegger, though at times in his early writings he lost sight of this commitment.

Ultimately Lafont will wish to indict Heidegger for the unfortunate reification of language that she believes his resulting “linguistic idealism” commits him to, and it is unclear to me what position Lafont herself would ultimately prefer. Her focus is largely exegetical, and so from the fact that she thinks that the early Heidegger committed himself to linguistic idealism in lieu of some sort of practice theory it does not follow that Lafont herself would reject the latter view. That matter remains unclear. In any case, in line with things I have said on this blog before, whether or not Lafont is correct about the early Heidegger’s views is of less interest to me than how she articulates the case for language as the source of human meaning.

She begins by noting that in Being and Time Heidegger attempts to overcome the classic subject-object opposition while still remaining, perhaps against his own ultimate inclinations, within that framework. He does this by reconceiving the subject as Dasein, objects as equipment, and adding the world to this arrangement: hence subject/object gives way to Dasein/world/equipment. Lafont notes that this attempt to escape the transcendentalist enterprise, via the substitution of understanding for perception, hinges on the efficacy of the ontological difference between the ontic (things, including Dasein) and the ontological (Dasein alone). But Lafont argues that even in the context of Being and Time it becomes repeatedly clear, no matter how much Heidegger tries to contend otherwise, that language, too, is like Dasein in being both ontic and ontological. In other words, Lafont contends that even the early Heidegger is committed to the claim that the understandings that comprise the world into which each Dasein finds him or herself always already thrown are at root linguistic.

Even in the pre-thematic dealings with equipment characteristic of life in the Heideggerian workshop, linguistic signs take precendence. Chastizing Heidegger a bit in passing for attempting to treat language as a mere tool, in keeping with the philosophy of consciousness he is trying to overcome (but also in keeping with the more pragmatic approaches derived from Heidegger to which Lafont pays little attention), Lafont argues that the fact that “the being of equipment…always [belongs (to)] a totality of equipment” is “not constituted by equipment itself” (p. 32). Instead, Lafont urges, Heidegger’s immediately following analysis shows, almost against his will, how this referential totality is disclosed by the sign, which is “an item of equipment which explicitly raises a totality of equipment into our circumspection so that together with it the worldly totality of equipment announces itself” (p. 34, quoting BT, p. 110).

There’s much going on here that will take a while to unpack. I think that Lafont is arguing that early Heidegger held, though he did not fully appreciate the implications of this conviction until later, that language discloses to Dasein even those world-ly relations at play in wordless, ready-to-hand, transparent coping. We are close here to the repeated theme, taken up by Charles Taylor and Robert Brandom among many others, of language’s power to articulate, or make explicit, that which is somehow already there, implicitly (inarticulately), in praxis. Lafont’s Heidegger goes a large step further, however, to allege that what language really does is to disclose possibilities of being that would, absent language, never appear at all. This is a much stronger claim, arguably parallel to, though quite different from, Sellars’s critique of the Myth of the Given. Furthermore, both of these critiques seem to me to be oriented toward so-called philosophies of consciousness, and thus not necessarily to touch on praxis theories. It might help to sketch these three possibilities:

1. Philosophies of Constitutive Consciousness — Cartesianism, Husserlian Phenomenology, and early analytic empiricisms;

2. Philosophies of Constitutive Language — Sellars and Lafont’s Heidegger; and

3. Philosophies of Constitutive Praxis — Taylor, Dreyfus, Schatzki, and Heidegger and Wittgenstein as interpreted by each of them.

The challenges for approaches of type 3 are (a) showing how they avoid 2’s critique of 1 (b)successfully overcoming 1 themselves, and (c) clarifying the relationship between praxis and language. For this article we’ve set (c) as our main task. Accomplishing (a) and (b) here as well might make the project too big, but I think it could be done in principle.

Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations exhibits a series of what he calls “language games,” which are simple practices in which words and other linguistic units have uses. Many of these games amuzingly involve the genderless, perhaps inhuman “builders” known only by the names ‘A’ and ‘B’. In the first of these activities, presented in paragraph 2, A and B build an unidentifed structure or structures with building stones and communciate solely (at least verbally) with the words “block”, “pillar”, “slab”, and “beam”. With these words A calls for a stone and B responds by fetching an appropriate exemplar. Wittgenstein ends this passage typically cryptically with the injunction that we should “(c)onceive this as a complete primitive language.” Presumably this means that no other linguistic resources should be necessary for this language game to be meaningful to the participants.

The words of this building game play different roles than the stones, but I propose first that they are meaningful in effectively the same way as the stones are, i.e. by having a functional role in the carrying out of the practice, and second that this means of being meaningful is essentially that which Heidegger attributes to the pragmata encountered in transparent coping.

That is to say, Wittgenstein provides here an account of how something that could reasonably be termed “language” could derive its meaning from its elements’ (i.e. its words’) place in the equipmental totality. “Slab” means what it means because it references (in Heidegger’s sense of the term) not only slabs or a particular slab, but also the structure that A and B are building, the walkway on which B must walk to fetch a slab, and so on; and this meaning is effectively of the same type as, though not identical to, the meaning of the slab itself, which also references the structure under construction and the walkway, as well as the word “slab”.

As with my earlier post on Heidegger I am not primarily attempting historical scholarship here, but am instead drawing on resources from a prominent philosopher to sketch a view that he himself would almost surely not have endorsed, at least in full. Wittgenstein’s accounts of language games such as the one above aphoristically echo the early Heidegger’s contributions to the concept of primal praxis while indicating further how language itself might derive its meaning from such praxis rather than the reverse being true. If language gets its meaning by being embedded in practices, just as is true on this view for other sets of objects, then it becomes less intuitive to suppose, as most philosophers since the linguistic turn have, that the human capacity for linguistic meaning is temporally and conceptually prior to meaningful behavior. Perhaps primal praxis comes first.

Using the old Macquarrie and Robinson translation of Being and Time one finds on p. H. 68 Heidegger’s referencing of the ancient Greek term for things (pragmata) which he glosses thus: “…that is to say, that which one has to do with in one’s concernful dealings,” which dealings he further denotes as the ancient Greek praxis. So “praxis” refers to concernful dealings with “pragmata,” or things as they figure in those dealings — which is not as they appear to distinterested contemplation.

Heidegger then designates these pragmata as “equipment,” and notes that equipment is always part of a totality, is something one uses in order to do something else by means of further equipment. The relationship of equipment to other equipment is that of Verweisung, translated here as “reference.” Heidegger states that we encounter a totality of equipment, an arrangement, first, and only within the context of such arrangements do we use and become aware of particular bits of equipment. For example, I encounter the road and stop lights and my car and other cars all together as an arrangement, and only within this context do I deal with my steering wheel and the gas pedal.

 Heidegger goes on to stress that our original engagement with such equipment is ready-to-hand and hence non-thematic. That is, equipment such as a hammer appears to us first not as a distinct thing, an object, set over against us as subjects and distinct from other objects, but instead fits in seemlessly as that which is transparently referenced by our activity in the workshop. When we need to hammer, we reach for the hammer. When our coping in this manner works smoothly, we need not even be aware of the hammer in the sense of awareness priviledged by most Western philosophy.

This account reverses the order of meaning presumed by most philosophers since Descartes and even Plato. The more traditional account begins with the individual mind’s representations of that which it encounters, from the sum of which are eventually somehow built up the subject’s valuings of and involvements in the world. In this always already thematized world it is easy to discern where language would fit. Language provides extensive resources for representing entities to subjects (a point not contradicted by those such as Brandom who conceive of language primarily as means of making inferences rather than representations), and thematic thought can easily be understood as language-spoken-to-oneself.

My question here is whether the early Heidegger’s alternative account of being human effectively elides this link with language. As I stated in my last post, clearly Heidegger’s account in Being and Time does give a prominent place to language. So, what I’m asking is not whether early Heidegger actually showed how language is unnecessary for a meaningful existence, but whether he provided resources for making such a case. 

Assuming for the sake of argument that his account of transparent coping with equipmental totalities is basically correct, we can ask whether language is necessary for such experience, and if so, whether such a languageless experience is in fact meaningful. For now, simply to stake a claim without yet supporting it, I will posit that language, in any appropriate sense of the term, is not necessary for transparent coping with equipmental totalities, either proximally (i.e. actually employed in the experience) or foundationally (i.e. providing a prior structure for the understanding at work in such endeavors), and that the hammer and the nails, the steering wheel and the road, are indeed all meaningful to the Dasein engaged with them. And this is primal praxis.