Date: Mon, 18 May 1998 05:45:35 +0000
Subject: Re: Clarity


Robert wrote:

> i say that "this" is the heart of the matter, like a crevace, between me
> and you all.  i hold language as "that" which grants "access" to being.
> what you call a conceptualization is indeed so.  i've repeadedly warned
> that my explications are merely crude maps of an undefinable reality.  a
> wire-frame model of the actual.  but (and crucially) the "technology" that
> enables my transformation in merely a device.  it is language in that it
> grants being-ness.  in and of itself it is merely a device.

At first glance, what you say here is not unlike what Heidegger 
says in SuZ sections 34 and 35. There Heidegger says that language 
(real language, the language prior to words or symbols or "mere 
devices") is actually constitutive of the There, as what discloses 
Being. Perhaps you can go over those sections and see whether you see 
anything essentially incompatible with what you are saying. One 
problem I sense is your characterization of language as a technology 
or as "merely a device." This makes me think that you are viewing 
language not as disclosing Being not in the sense of constituting the 
There phenomenologically, but as a metaphysical "middle step" between 
us and the world, which grants access to the world which is 
independent of language. Heidegger restricts "technology" to modes of 
thought which are posterior to the world already being there, and 
therefore posterior to language in the primordial sense. So for 
Heidegger, language does "produce the result" in the sense that it is 
constitutive of the There, but in this sense, language is no longer 
"merely a device," because a "mere device" is opposed to what is "not 
merely a device," or what is "really and naturally there" if you 
will. That is the posterior sense of language - as some conventional 
construct by which we "access" the world that is there prior to 
language, as opposed to language in the sense of what is prior to 
such a device, as constitutive of the There itself.

Anthony Crifasi 


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