Paragraph 15
April 7, 2007
The later Heidegger goes ever further than Gadamer in locating meaning constitution in language, as indicated by his affirmation of the poet Stephan George’s line, “Where word breaks off no thing can be.” The later Heidegger even attempts to demonstrate, rather than merely state, the disclosive possibilities of language, eschewing traditional modes of philosophical argument in favor of a “mytho-poetic” reverie, seeking thereby to invite the reader into the experience of language as open thinking toward emergence. Compared to most philosophers concerned with language, the later Heidegger interests himself less in the utterance, sentence, or proposition, and more in the word itself. What he intends here is no mere statement of a purported matter of fact or state of affairs, but a calling forth, an evocation, via a name. It is, in fact, a stretch to say that the later Heidegger still concerns himself with praxis even to the extent that Gadamer does, though the quasi-mystical experiences he indicates perhaps still involve an encounter with Being qua Being revealed in praxis.
