On the Way to Language by Martin Heidegger
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Naming the Unknown

The first part of On the Way to Language is a discursive fictional dialogue between Heidegger and an unnamed Japanese professor. The ostensible subject of the dialogue is the meaning of the Japanese word Iki and the possibility of its translation into German. The word refers to an aesthetic embodied in things like minimalist Japanese gardens and the extremely arcane symbolism of No theatre. If I read the piece correctly the conclusion is that such translation is almost ( but not quite) impossible.

In the first instance the word Iki is defined by and in the context of all other Japanese words. Therefore the entire Japanese vocabulary would have to be incorporated into the German language. But, even more fundamentally, those wishing to understand the meaning of the word would also have to participate in the mundane details of Japanese social life. Essentially they would have to become Japanese.

But I think there is also further significance to this short piece. Heidegger was a contemporary of the tremendously influential Swiss theologian, Karl Barth. Heidegger was a philosopher with an acute but largely silent engagement with Christian theology. Barth had started publishing his massive 13 volume treatise, Church Dogmatics, in the early 1930’s just after Heidegger’s seminal Being and Time, his initial work on thinking about thinking. The content of A Dialogue on Language appears to me not only a clarification of Being and Time but also an implicit refutation of Barth.

Barth’s work is in fact more anti-philosophical than it is theological. He says comparatively little about the historical doctrine of Christianity and concentrates mainly on the inadequacy of reason when confronting the certainty of faith. In this sense, Barth is an irrationalist who condemns the impertinence as well as the impiety of philosophers who have tried to reconcile faith and reason. He cites numerous paradoxes and contradictions in Christianity - original sin, divine justice, the Incarnation, and divine omnipotence, among others - as impenetrable to human thought. He sees these not as flaws to be defended but as marks of true revelation. For him, reason is untrustworthy and knowledge is incoherent.

Heidegger’s dialogue confronts Barth’s fideistic defence of Christianity head on in a highly creative way. He starts by undermining Barth’s concept of rationality. Rationality is a commitment to dialogue not a process of logic for Heidegger. In fact, the flaws of reason are even more profound than they are for Barth. According to Heidegger, we never know what we are talking about at all. Words take on meaning from other words. And therefore meaning is in a constant state of flux. Pushed far enough to defend any position or opinion, we will eventually be forced to recognise entirely circular reasoning which is likely contrary to any historical reasoning using similar words.

Heidegger even goes beyond Barth in insisting that we never are able to acquire knowledge - not just of God but of anything at all - by seeking it. Heidegger’s dramatic claim (contrary to all pragmatism) is that our own selfish interests get in the way of learning:

“Thirst for knowledge and greed for explanations never lead to a thinking inquiry. Curiosity is always the concealed arrogance of a self-consciousness that banks on a self invented ratio and its rationality. The will to know does not will to abide in hope before what is worthy of thought.”

This apparent concession to Barth is, however, followed by a strategic attack. Heidegger claims that we talk in order to find out what we mean by the words we are using. Heidegger’s Japanese interlocutor in the dialogue points out that language conceals as much as it reveals, thus hiding reality. As he says “We recognize that the danger lies in the concealed nature of language.” Heidegger agrees and replies:

“I believe, of every dialogue that has turned out well between thinking beings… as if of its own accord, it can take care that that undefinable something not only does not slip away, but displays its gathering force ever more luminously in the course of the dialogue.”

In short, we can only avoid the dangerous trap of taking language literally by talking about things interminably in order to discover what we’re taking about (much like pragmatism). To arbitrarily cut this process of discovery off results in a form of idolatry - the divinisation of language itself (and of course the rationalisation of our own interests). The dialogue explains this rather un-European point of view: “We Japanese do not think it strange if a dialogue leaves undefined what is really intended, or even restores it back to the keeping of the undefinable.” That which is not language is thereby respected, including, of course, Barth’s “wholly other” God.

For Barth, however, the term ‘God’ is not part of language at all. It is “a denotation without connotation.” That is to say, it has no connections with any other words. It is something that really cannot be talked about at all (although he spends more than 1000 pages talking about it). But if it can’t be talked about (and Barth recognises the inadequacy of even biblical narratives; see https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...), then it is an empty cipher with no content. This is the ultimate heresy, not only because it makes God (or Jesus Christ) a meaningless symbol, but also because revelation itself is rendered suspect by its own revelation.

Thus Heidegger’s little Socratic dialogue has a theological as well as philosophical significance. It attacks Barthian fideism on its own terms and shows how it contains a fatal impiety. Naming the unknown is what we do everyday. It is when we stop thinking we need to reconsider what we have named - for example by establishing fixed dogmatic formulas - that we become the most blasphemous.

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