Where do you dwell?
This question is not meant to elicit a town or street number in response, rather, more something like ’speak to me and I will discern by your words and emphasis where you dwell in the house of being.’
Amos Wilder wrioe: ’The language of a people is its fate.” (in The Language of the Gospel: Early Christian Rhetoric).
Martin Heidegger wrote that “Language is the house of being.” (in Letter on Humanism)
For many of us, increasingly, our fate is to be unhoused.
2. What is “language”?
In his earlier work, “language” names a totality of words or a totality of utterances - a systematic whole of signs that we can draw on in expressing ourselves linguistically (see GA36/37: 105ff). In his later work, by contrast, Heidegger uses “language” to refer to the background constitution of significance. In the later Heidegger, ‘language’ (‘Sprache’) replaces ‘discourse’ (‘Rede’) as Heidegger’s preferred translation of the Greek logos. But Heidegger (more or less) consistently understands logos in the Greek sense as a gathering of meaningful elements into a unified structure, a meaningful articulation of the world on the basis of which entities can be unconcealed and linguistic acts can be performed. This ‘language’ conditions the languages we speak, but it is not itself something linguistic. Thus, Wrathall for instance argues that the later Heidegger’s emphasis on language is, to a considerable degree, a terminological change, rather than a new substantive appreciation of the role played by ordinary language in disclosing the world (see Wrathall 2011: 130). Evidence for this can perhaps be seen in the fact that, as late as 1957, Heidegger still insisted that “discourse and discoursing … can never be determined by speaking and language” (GA79: 160).
In his later work on language, then, Heidegger consistently draws a distinction between, on the one hand, language in the ordinary or customary sense, and, on the other hand, what he calls “original language” or “the essence of language”:
What is language? …—Everyone knows that. To the question of what language is, there has long been a customary answer. Language is an expression of our inner experiences, ideas, opinions, wishes and statements in the form of sound and writing. And because it is such an expression, it serves to present what has been experienced, for communicating and understanding. This characterization of language, which even today, seen more or less clearly, underlies all thinking about it—this characterization is correct and yet it is deeply untrue because it only grasps of language that which is a consequence of its essence—but not the essence itself. (GA16: 329; emphasis supplied)
(--from, Heidegger on Language, in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
While walking at Snow Bowl, listening to words about Bhagavan Sri Ramakrishna (1836-1886), I hear the reader talking about having the name of God in mind and on lips at the moment of death. This, he infers, is determinative of where one goes next.
But which name?
Which ‘Being’ wherein to dwell?
I just hope I’m not saying ‘Oh shit!’ when my time comes. Unless, of course, it's the third person singular of the Latin verb “scio” (scit) -- namely, 'he, she, or it, knows or understands’.
