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.