The critical consequences of Heidegger’s examination of language...

The critical consequences of Heidegger’s examination of language, I argue, bear deep parallels to some of the most decisive results of the analytic tradition, most centrally to the twofold consideration of “rule following” and the idea of a “private language” that marks the main critical movement of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations .

The two skeins of criticism are indeed linked, I shall argue, in the problematic of self-identity that defines the modern philosophical conception of the thinking and experiencing subject.

Once made explicit, this problematic suggests new ways of thinking about difference and heterogeneity within a broader consideration of the priority of language for the human “form of life.” Characteristically, Heidegger’s own engagement of language over the entirety of his career is determined by his pervasive concern with the question of the meaning of being .

From his first writings, Heidegger sought to open a fundamental questioning regarding the possibility of expressing the basic character of “being itself.” He came to see this possibility of expression, or the lack thereof, as conditioned by determinate, historically specific interpretations of the factual as well as “ontological” relationships among different kinds of beings or entities, including significantly the kind of beings we ourselves are.

These interpretations themselves, according to Heidegger, find expression in the forms of language open to speakers at various historical times, and are at least partially discernible through reflection on these forms. Since the beginning of philosophical ontology with the Greeks, the history of the linguistic forms of the expression of being and the modes of thought they make possible has been, according to Heidegger, one of ever-greater forgetfulness and obscurity.

The progressive withdrawal of being from any possibility of positive expression has been marked by an ever-greater development of determinate interpretations and assumptions that tend to obscure its real character and make it deeply inaccessible to us. Over the course of the 1930s, Heidegger accordingly began to speak of the entire period of this history of successive forgottenness as the period or epoch of metaphysics .