Sei sulla pagina 1di 21

Heidegger's Etymological Web Author(s): Howard Eiland Source: boundary 2, Vol. 10, No. 2 (Winter, 1982), pp.

39-58 Published by: Duke University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/302895 Accessed: 04/11/2009 08:59
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=duke. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Duke University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to boundary 2.

http://www.jstor.org

Heidegger's Etymological Web

Howard Eiland
In An Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger compares language in general to a well-worn streetcar in which everyone rides "without hindrance and above all without danger."l A singularly reactionary complaint, we may say. Do we really need more danger in the world at present? But, then, what might we mean by 'danger'? The question seems impertinent until we realize that in German Gefahr, related to fahren, go, derives from an old substantive vare, which meant not only ambush, peril, fear, but also endeavor, aspiration, a word which, moreover, in its oldest historical form is cognate with Latin periculum, trial, danger, and its verbal offshoot, experiri, to try, test, prove ("placet experiri" being Hans Castorp's initiatory motto in The Magic Mountain). Danger is literally cousin to experience (Erfahrung). The German and Latin terms, together with the Greek peira, trial, experience, and empeiros, experienced (>'empirical'), go back to a reconstructed Indo-Europeanroot form per-, meaning specifically to try, undertake, risk. To try is metaphorically to lead over, press forward, and this verbal base belongs to a more general word family, built around the phoneme per, in which we may trace the extension

39

and spread of the notion of "throughness," of going through, a notion central to Heideggerian thinking.2The issue further ramifies when we think of the Middle English sense of daunger, as echoed, for example, in Hopkins's lyric to the masterful falcon. In the light of such farreaching fossil evidence, it is as if the word, lying there inscribed opaquely on the page, has suddenly turned strange. The idea of a "word family" may itself seem strange, though it is an established term in historical linguistics, dating back to the beginning of comparative philology in the eighteenth century. Herder, for example, in his prize essay of 1770, "On the Origin of Language," speaks extravagantly of the "Familie von Worten" as "a tangled undergrowth around a concrete fundamental idea [sinnliche Hauptidee]." Gripped by the incipient spirit of organicism, he suggests that each root-word [Stammwort] with its family, classified properlyand naturally developed, would be a chart of the progress [Gange] of the human mind, a
history of its unfolding, and ... a demonstration the inventive art of the human soul.3 of

The word family consists specifically in the constellation of cognate terms deriving from an inferred root form and root idea, terms which share not only a verifiable phonetic kernel-as with the permutations of per- adduced above-but also some common denominator of meaning, like "going through," which unfolds, as Herderwould say, in various directions (going forward, back, over, between, etc.). To appreciate the phonetic-semantic connections among apparently disparate terms, to uncover concealed linguistic neighborhoods or kinship-ties, is in effect to broaden, or render problematic, the very concept of "word." It is to raise the question of individuation and boundary: Erfahrung and Gefahr, though clearly differentiated by grammar and usage, are nonetheless in a complex sense the same word. Heidegger's use of etymology thus provides a new linguistic dimension to the attack on atomism begun by Nietzsche. It is Heidegger's contention, as I shall try to show, that both words and things are properly defined, neither as discrete material particles nor as empty differential values, but as multidirectional gatherings that elude metaphysical or dualistic formulations. Now it may be objected that not hypothetical roots but the actual usage of speech communities determines the meaning of words, and that archaic definitions, however interesting, are not necessarily relevant to such usage. This objection presupposes that speakers control the language they use and that past meanings are just that: past, gone by. To these commonsensical assumptions, Heidegger responds, first, that etymology is concerned not with past but with concealed meanings. He argues that the meaning of a statement may have implications or conditions unrecognized by the speaker, that it is not personal intention or speech act that is primary in discourse but rather subject matter, and that the expanse of subject matter
40

(Sachbereich) adumbrated in our words, particularly our most idiomatic words, necessarily contains depths. But even the specialized technical vocabulary of the philosophers conceals unacknowledged notions or images, and it is well known by now that Heidegger, from the beginning of his career, sets out to retrieve the subterranean associations informing classical philosophical topoi.4 In Being and Time, he names, as the foremost task of thinking, the mining and preservation of "the force of the most elemental words."5It should be emphasized that this project of retrieval, of bringing near what is far, eschews Wortmystik, if not mystery. Etymology, like all research, subserves understanding. The objections to etymology ultimately concern the uses, indeed the conception, of history. If the present is understood in pragmatic linear, or "monological," fashion as the consequence of a series of past moments, then we may question what seems like a reduction of effect to cause, living to dead. But if, by a leap of thought beyond traditional metaphysics, the present moment or epoch is understood actually to harbor the past-the past as a deep reservoir of possibility-if the blossom actually manifests the root, then we cannot avoid being historical (see BT, ? 65). This is at once a critique of conventional presence, the here and now conceived as discrete objects of consciousness, and (pace Derrida)an invitation to think the approaching-withdrawing fullness of presence. For the present, in both spatial and temporal senses, inheres globally within a constellation of nears and fars, nows and thens. Sheltered in twofold absence, the 'is' subsists in the 'has been' and the 'will be.' Heidegger writes untranslatably, because etymologically, "Herkunft aber bleibt stets With genealogy thus enmeshed in futurity, an origin cannot Zukunft."6 be a cause in any Aristotelian sense, except perhaps in the sense of end, telos, that is, revolution of a cycle. This sounds paradoxical, but it is also proverbial to find in a beginning an end. The origin marks the advent and adventure of presence; it appears as both the veiled point of emergence of a thing and its circumscribing proper sphere. Mythically speaking, it is both earth and sky, where we were born and where we project ourselves. In terms of linguistics, the etymon is immanent and at work in the derivative. Inthe older precincts of the word 'danger' or 'Gefahr,' therefore, if we step off the streetcar for a while and wait for the rattling to subside, we may hear a call to perilous undertaking. Our hackles will rise at such presumptuous talk, but Heidegger wishes to challenge us. Most dangerous, he says, may well be what is most thought-provoking. If we persist in defending the autonomy and priority of the speaker, he wants to know: whose psyche? Who is it that speaks? Can we be so sure that we speak language, and not vice versa? Or, better, do we write/speak language while language speaks/writes us? In such provocative questioning he is abetted, of course, by the native ambiguity, plasticity, and depth or transparence of the German language. It is quite possible, as Ortega y Gasset has said, almost in a spirit of approval, that Heidegger is too deep, that, in his case, Tief41

sinn has turned into Tiefensucht. At any rate, Ortega goes on, his consistent exploitation of the verbal "humus," of concealed metaphor and the like, offers a certain unexpected advantage to the educated foreign reader, particularly to one with a literary bias, who is less likely to be stymied by more recent idiomatic significations that may have congealed in the foreground of a word.7Of course, such naive insight is no substitute for mature Sprachgefuhl, feel for the operation of a language. In this regard, the German usually claims a greater sensitivity to roots in his words than the Frenchman or Englishmanfrom which it supposedly follows that German philosophy can be more profound. Saussure has observed that the feeling for word-parts (radicals, suffixes, etc.) generally appears less acute in modern European languages than in Old Latin, Greek, or Sanskrit, but that it is stronger in German than in French, where "the feeling for roots scarcely exists."8 English would seem to occupy a middle position between the latter two, insofar as the various foreign sedimentations, making for both elegance and abstractness, are balanced by an Anglo-Saxon core that allows more direct access to the ways of an aboriginal Indo-European mind. No doubt the speaker can learn to tune in a more radical dimension in the words of a language, including etymological as well as morphological elements. Thus we may come to hear in such commonplace locutions as "in a sense" (about which more below) something like ancient formulas. But modern English remains a more analytic language than modern German, evidently less capable of the sort of "chordal," multidimensional thinking Heidegger has perfected. The contrast is perhaps nowhere so salient as in the very term 'die Sprache,' which, it is generally recognized, transcends the difference between language and speech, langue and parole. The French term langage indicates more nearly the ambiguity we have in mind, for, according to Saussure, langage (universal thought or language) subsumes langue (language-system) and parole (speech act) and, taken as a whole, can only be described as many-sided and heterogeneous; straddling several areas simultaneously-physical, physiological, and psychological-it belongs both to the individual and to society; we cannot put it into any category of human facts, for we cannot discover its unity.
[S, p. 9]

Whereas our tongue conditions us to think of language as a selfcontained whole, the German 'Sprache' confounds all boundaries, most crucially that between the "linguistic" and the "non-linguistic." We are always speaking, says Heidegger, and always encountering speaking. What seems to us a mystical hypostasis of the medium of language (as, even before Heidegger, in Grimm's or Humboldt's "Sprachgeist") may thus be seen to follow from the vocabulary and make-up of German itself. We cannot escape the presumption of a
42

genius of the language (Sapir).We should not forget, however, that the Germans were the first to criticize themselves in this usage. In the socalled manifesto of the neogrammarian movement, which effectively inaugurated modern descriptive linguistics, Karl Brugmann criticizes historical philology for its comparative inattention to living dialects, spoken sounds, and analogical modification, together with its exclusive preoccupation with reconstructing a parent language "out of the original Indo-European fog." Mocking the hypothesis that languages decay, Brugmann insists: first, that language is not a thing which leads a life of its own outside of and above human beings, but that it has its true existence only in the individual, and hence that all changes in the life of a language can only proceed from the individual speaker; and second, that the mental and physical activity of man must have been at all times essentially the same.9 A classmate of Brugmann and Leskien, Saussure continues, as is well known, the neogrammarian emphasis on the present "espace de temps," wherein living language appears, and on the principle of arguing from the known to the unknown, while he distinguishes more explicitly between diachronic and synchronic points of view and qualifies the alleged centrality of the speaker: "For the distinguishing characteristic of the sign-but the one that is least apparent at first sight-is that in some way it always eludes the individual or social will" (S, p. 17). We postpone for now a comparison of Heideggerian and Saussurian conceptions of "difference" and "circuit."'0I want only to indicate something of Heidegger's critique of scientific linguistics. When Brugmann writes that "the human speech mechanism has a twofold aspect, a mental and a physical," he is moving within the classic parameters of metaphysics-that is, the structure of antinomies that constitutes the scientific "grid"and enforces a doctrine of truth as correspondence or correctness. His grounding of linguistics in psychology, reiterated by Saussure, is predicated on the basic assumption of a process of expression-from inside to outside, ideal to sensuous form. From this distinction arise the twin objects of linguistics: vocalization (phone) and signification (semainein)." These, in turn, are studied as phonology and semantics respectively. (Heidegger tacitly conflates grammar and morphology under the heading of semantics.) With the conception of phoneme, the system of sound laws emerges, in Brugmann's phrase, as the "mainstay of our whole science." It becomes possible to treat of linguistic "forms," properties of the word body, in complete isolation from any "content." Thus Bloomfield can conclude "that linguistic study must always start from the phonetic form and not from the meaning ... to define this (or any other) meaning exactly, lies beyond the domain of linguistics."'2 Insofar as it figures at all, meaning is understood as a
43

function of habit, of the situations in which a speaker has heard a given form (Bloomfield, pp. 407, 151-152). Benveniste refers to "meaning" in quotation marks as the totality and distribution of the uses and associations of a linguistic form.l3Even in diachronic linguistics the environment for any form is conceived synchronically as a corpus of idiolects or a language stage: "a morpheme is defined synchronically, that is, by all the other morphemes of the same stage, and their correspondence relationship from stage to stage is discovered by a separate step."'l4In what is apparently the most general view afforded by linguistic science, we may speak of the cybernetic exchange of information, or communication. Now for Heidegger, as I have suggested, human utterance and communication cannot be the primary properties of Sprache. Indeed all talk of properties is secondary and consequent upon the technological "Ge-Stell," the calculative framing of the world which sets up the methods and materials of research. Only after the object is first posited, is "disengaged" and fixed as object lying before one, can a set of properties be formulated. But no thing is truly defined quantitatively or synchronically. The language stage, as much as the phoneme, is an abstraction, a product of the "levelling" tendency of all rigorous science. The immediate linguistic datum is what is said.'5 In order to perceive a phoneme as pure sound (Lautschall), we must first willfully listen away from the words, just as, in order to hear bare noise or undifferentiated acoustical sensations, we have to listen away from things-that is, listen abstractly. We do not first hear a throng of impressions but rather the distant roar of an engine, a door slamming, a dog barking. Even in auditing an unknown language, we never hear mere sounds but unintelligible words. Heidegger's position is sufficiently clear but nonetheless vulnerable. For he rejects the concept of phoneme while extensively relying on etymological reconstructions, which of course are conditioned on the discrimination of phonemes. And so he acknowledges that philology provides him now and then with hints (Winke),even as he maintains that his use of such data does not entail acceptance of the foundations on which linguistic research proceeds, any more than his use of historical facts entails endorsement of historiography. Indeed his express intention is to expose such foundations as "sham."'6 Sign and referent, to be sure, can be usefully objectified, and the relation between them can likewise be thematized as a secondorder or meta-object, but we the subjects should not forget our complicity in what we objectify. Contrary to all pragmatic rationale, the sign is emphatically not an instrument-say, a vessel from which we scoop out contents. More precisely, its being is not restricted to instrumentality. (Saussure, with his penchant for metaphors, compares the system of phonemes to an instrument we play in order to articulate the words as melodies [S, p. 94].) For we come across instrumentality itself only in signs (BT, ? 17). On those who cannot see past the Saussurian structure of signification Heidegger pulls the ontological undermine by asking: what about the signification of struc44

ture? Language is not a system of signs, or any other Seiende (entity), but instead "one great [emergent] moment" leading back behind itself. But even this grand formulation is problematic because "we ourselves are in the text and texture [Gewebe] of the question" (WCT, p. 116)-the question being, fundamentally, the puzzling status of the word. Throughout his published writings Heidegger seeks continually anew to think the difference between word and thing. If we could only hear what is properly said in the grammatical copula, he early suggests, in that seemingly most empty of forms, then we would understand with Parmenides that the word is the thing-for a thing is a meaning. At any rate, the word does not drape over or cap some ready-made material; the thing exists only as it is spoken. (We should remember that speaking may be silent, that, for Heidegger, the potter's shaping of his clay is a form of speaking. Compare Saussure: "nothing is distinct before the appearance of language" [S, p. 112].) The word, then, gives being to things, evokes and realizes them. A word in itself may be considered a relational "may be," a Verhaltnis (literally, a holding back and together) which clears a way for a thing to come to light and be preserved. The thinker is obliged to use such quasi-mythical diction, to the annoyance of positive-minded readers, because there is "no word for word." Speaking perforce analogically and approximately, he designates the word a wellspring both found and dug, a blossom, a gesture, a beckoning hint. Before all naming, "rigid" or otherwise, there is calling. Heidegger's word is heissen, which is more involved than the English equivalent. Cognate with Greek kinein and English 'hight' and 'hest,' it suggests at center a dispatching and setting into motion (antreiben). The word is called forth at the behest of what is to be said, and it in turn calls to mind and lays claim to a particular matter. A name is at once a summons and a dispensation, invocation and investment. The thing draws the denominating word after it, while the name "scents" and heads for the thing. (Gadamer has called attention to "the hidden and unnoticed dialectic that attaches to all essentially Heideggerian assertions."'7) Perhaps most generally, a call is a gathering in the sense of lesen, which, influenced by Latin legere, means both to read and to gather or glean. Although Walter Biemel and others downplay the analogy, and although Heidegger distances himself from the causa sui of "ontotheology," it is instructive to compare his conception of the word with the biblical Logos, which involves a power that calls things suddenly into being by reciprocal gathering and dividing. Resident in the same general semantic field as legere and logos, the Greek noun kosmos, which some scholars trace back to a juridical order, probably hides a verbal root signifying to proclaim, speak solemnly (kens-, AHD), and we may conceive such cosmic discourse as an ontological "dif-ference"-- literally, a carrying apart of world into things. Contrary to the Saussurian difference without positive content (S, pp. 120-123), however, Heidegger propounds a notion of essence (Wesen), though this is to be understood in a verbal or
45

dynamic sense. To some extent, the contrast in views here between the Frenchman and German goes back to the ancient debate between the Anomalists and Analogists (Bloomfield, p. 4), those who argued by convention (these,) and those who argued by nature (phusei).'8 The contrast can also be seen within the context of twentieth-century eventism-the problematic of the elementary particle, or monad, the relativity of boundaries: whereas Saussure concludes that "the ultimate law of language is, dare we say, that nothing can ever reside in a single term,"'l9 Heidegger follows Nietzsche in his preoccupation with the principium individuationis. Things emerge, not purely as differential values, but as constellated entities-this bridge, this tree, this book-though, at the same time, they belong to an encompassing it world. The thing appears and lingers in a "Zueinander-Weilen":20 stands forth for a while within a "between," but in its very self-seeking it corresponds to all other individuated beings. (Like Kierkegaardand Nietzsche, Heidegger thinks of tragedy as an ontological condition.) Thinghood, therefore, is periodic, consists in a burst of articulated "whiling"-perhaps something as in nuclear physics, where the particle comprises its history. It may be, if we can juxtapose still more disparate fields, that the difference between Saussure and Heidegger on this question of individuation is analogous to the famous disagreement between Niels Bohr and Einstein, the former convinced on Einsteinian principles of the necessity of an "empty" formalistic and statistical framing of atomic phenomena as pure states, the latter dissenting from epistemology and complementarity, and arguing monistically for a local field-unity, a knot in space-time, determined by body as dynamic, complex center. If not exactly in terms of positive content, Heidegger understands the thing in terms of operative meaning, mattering, weight. So "Way and weighing ... On a single walk are found."21 runs one of Heidegger's etymologizing poems. With these lines we are at the heart of his thinking, for in both German and English way and weight are akin. The terms derive from the Indo-European wegh-, to go, transport in a vehicle; move, draw, fare; swing, vibrate, spring (AHD, Pokorny, Duden). Among their congeners are Old Norse vegr, meaning way or region, Latin vehere, vector, and probably via, and Old Irish fecht, journey, period of time. Besides Weg and Waage, the German derivatives include wagen, wagen, wiegen, wogen, and the Swabian dialect term wegen, which Heidegger renders as "einen Weg bahnen," to open or pioneer a way-a usage subsequently appropriated, together with the Freudian "Bahnung," by Derrida for his skeptical metaphorics of the fraying trace. In the scope of this word family, we find a fascinating interplay of notions for setting out on a journey, pondering and wagering and surging, placing (oneself) in the scales and seeking a balance, founding a territory,staying a while, going after. To make way is simultaneously to weigh out, to carry weight (forward and backward, step by step), to be aweigh-but also to give way. A word is a way of weighing, a Denkweg. (Compare the root spen-, to draw, stretch, spin, which eventuates in 'pound,' 'pendant,'
46

'ponder,' 'pensive,' 'impend,' 'span,' 'spontaneous,' etc., and the derivation of 'serious,' serius, from wer-2, to bind, hang on the scale; heavy.) In this now dizzying array of seemingly commonplace terms, which in part exemplifies how fluid may be the line between homonymy and polysemy,22 we glimpse a kind of thinking prior to metaphor in the conventional, univocal sense.23 Broadly regarded, "waying" appears as the condition and mode of all semantic change. We may now better appreciate Heidegger's characterization of 'Weg' as "ein Urwort der Sprache," synonymous with the ancient Chinese tao, and his orphic dictum that "Alles ist Weg" (UWS, p. 198). Hermeneutics, after all, gets its name from the god of ways and commerce, "the Wayfinder," as Homer calls him. The interpreter or go-between interpres belongs to the family of per- -negotiates his way through asking appropriate questions; to question, quaerere, means to seek. The connection of thinking with trailblazing and being underway is borne out by numerous other etymologies. We have already adverted to heissen, from kei-, to set in motion. The idea of track or furrow specifically constitutes the kernel of Old English lar and leornian (from leis-); lore and learning involve following a course. (Compare educare.) An etymology more fundamental to Heidegger's vocabulary, and one he has discussed in several places, is that of Sinn, sinnen, senden, 'sense.' The root of these words, sent-, means to head for, go; to take a direction; to look for a trail or scent. Sinnen, to
think over, brood, goes back to the Old High German sinnan, which

meant to aspire, in the sense of directing one's thoughts toward something, and, more originally, meant simply to go, travel. Old High German sin, sind, meant way, course. The Old English doublet sinnan signified to care for, mind, heed, and sand denoted a sending, message, messenger. Herder's usage, in the essay of 1770, of besonnen, circumspect,

a Heideggerian point of view, "on the track." Our apparently negligible phrase 'in a sense' likewise reverberates with the idea of thoughtpath, Denkweg. The Latin sentire, to feel, is construed as to go mentally; in this verb there may perhaps be indicated a kind of sentience prior to the distinction of Sinn and Bedeutung, sense and reference, word and sentence. Primordially thought, a sentence is a scenting and sensing, a godsend consented to, a going and sending. No less important for Heidegger is the relation of Sache, thing, subject matter, affair, to suchen, meaning to seek. The latter verb is cognate with our 'seek,' 'seize,' and 'forsake,' with Latin sagax (>'sagacious') and sagire (>'presage'), and with Greek hbgeisthai, to lead (>'exegesis'). The whole word family is rooted in sag-, to seek out (AHD),witternd nachspuren (Kluge). The Old High German sense of Sache as sahha, lawsuit (compare the French chose, from Latin causa, and the Old English thing), comes from a verb sahhan, to litigate, dispute, related by ablaut to suchen, and meaning originally to follow a trace (Spur),to track down. The early legal reference of the notion of subject matter is thus itself evolved out of a still earlier context of hunting, in which we must imagine a primal intimacy between
47

to characterize the human creature, suggests,

from

hunter and hunted. This idea of trailing or following after, to give one final and fairly well-known example, similarly makes up the gist of 'method,' methodos. Heidegger never tires of pointing out the derivative character of logical construction; authentic meta-hodology knows no prescribed way, hodos. (Compare Saussure's comment that etymology "is not methodical, for it follows no fixed course" [S, pp. 189-190].)As wanderer and scout, the thinker cannot be expected to offer credentials or proofs in the manner of mathematical knowledge. Ambiguous, errant, his way takes him across fields, but that does not mean that it is arbitrary (PLT, pp. 183-186). Heidegger speaks of a play of mind ("Spiel des Denkens") that is more binding than the rigor of science (UWS, p. 121). His phrase recalls the "strengere Logik" of the religious thinker and early philologist, J. G. Hamann, the "Magus of the North," who himself echoes Pascal's reasons of the heart, of which reason knows nothing. In his Socratic Memorabilia of 1759, Hamann refers to a "subterranean truth" running beneath the claims of reason, a truth which his highly compressed and "archipelagic" style is meant to intimate. Looking through Socrates to Heraclitus, he forms ironic sentences that resemble "a group of small islands for whose community life the bridges and ferries of system [Methode] are lacking." Such sentences require "readers who [are] able to swim."24Heidegger likewise wants "to live in the meta," in the hermeneutic between, where he can search for "a grammar without logic," a reckoning before all number and conceptualization (WCT,p. 98; BT, ? 34; OWL,pp. 94, 121). In such a region, thinking opens onto poetry and wonder.
II

"What science is more necessary to the poet?" asks Francis Ponge of etymology,25 by means of which he would descend, like Heidegger, into the radix of words and things-words as things and things as words-into a realm beyond the rational distinction of poetry from noesis. Following Ponge's dictum, I would like to pause in order to indicate some of the applications of etymology, of this antimethodological method, for the critic of poetry. Paul Bove has shown how a poet like Charles Olson, in circling over and through a situation or occasion, penetrates "layers" of the ordinary, "until the closest details... are suddenly 'energized' to disclose something previously unnoticed."26 Etymology may be said to "energize" the commonplaces of idiom. To illustrate how one may penetrate well-known verbal layers, I shall look briefly at some Joycean and Shakespearean words before returning to the Heideggerian prose poetry. Of course, etymological analysis is not equally applicable to every literary text. It depends partly on the interests of the writer and partly on the historical situation of the language in which he works. Joyce, for example, who owned a well-thumbed copy of Skeat's etymological dictionary, seems to have deliberately chosen a name
48

for his hero in Ulysses that would have ancient Germanic and IndoEuropean resonances, so as perhaps to mingle in one figure, the Jewish Irishman, both Aryan and Semitic traditions. The '-pold' in Leopold, which Molly playfully turns into "Poldy," comes from Old High German bald, meaning bold. It is also, significantly, the root of 'bawd,' and it is cognate with Greek phallos, with Latin follis, bellows, source of our 'fool,' with Old English beallucas, testicles, and Old English bolla, from which we get 'bowl.' (Thinkof the "bowl of white china" and the "bowl of bitter waters," by which Stephen Dedalus associates his mother and the sea, death and life, female bile and female genitalia, in "Telemachus.") These words all derive from an Indo-Europeanroot form, bhel-, meaning to blow and swell, with connotations of tumescent masculinity. The 'Leo' comes from Old High German liut, multitude of people, and more anciently from IndoEuropean leudh, to mount up, grow. The meaning of Bloom's surname is obvious, though it is not obvious that his penname, "Flower," is actually cognate with his real name: both Latin flos and Old Norse blom derive from a root bhel- (possibly an extension of the bhel- informing 'Poldy'), meaning to bloom and thrive. Other examples could be mentioned to show that etymology reinforces the thematic association of Joyce's hero with life-force, with people and populism, with foolishness and bawdiness, and with a half mocking, half serious notion of manhood whose insignia is "the new womanly man." In the case of Shakespeare, it is perhaps not so much conscious intention-about which it is likely fruitless to speculate-as the relative fluidity and transparence of Elizabethan English, its receptivity to Latin and Greek borrowings, and its nearness to the dialects of Middle English and Anglo-Saxon. Speakers in Shakespeare's day presumably wielded a more concrete medium, in which root elements might be experienced something as they are in German today. As I have suggested, it is modern English, particularly the English of the twentieth century, that has become, in linguistic parlance, "analytic." When Hamlet, in l.iv., breaks toward the ghost shouting, "My fate cries out," it is plausible that Shakespeare, or the Elizabethan Sprachgeist, is playing on the derivation of 'fate' from Latin for, fari, to speak. Fate (fatum) is literally what is spoken, though it is characteristic of Hamlet's career that such speaking should be a passionate crying out. (We may note here a connection between Hamlet's idea of fate or providence and Heidegger's understanding of Seinsgeschick, of a mittence that "speaks" through the coil of world history.) Earlier in the same scene, when Hamlet refers to the "dram of evil" that "doth all the noble substance often doubt," his much disputed usage of 'doubt' similarly calls up Latin associations. Dubitare means originally to waver or vibrate, and it could be that the evil "dram" (which comes from a Greek verb meaning to grab) is conceived as agitating, as making waver, the otherwise noble substance of "particular men"-an idea which accords with the imagery of fermentation ("o'er-leavens") in this speech. It is worth mentioning, in addition,
49

that dubitare derives from the Indo-Europeandwo, two, which gives to the dram of doubt agitating Hamlet its root idea of ambivalence. Scholars have identified other etymological goings on in Hamlet, such as the cognation of 'kin' and 'kind' ("a little more than kin, and less than kind"), both deriving from a form gena -, to beget, which is also the root of 'nature' (gnasci). Let me conclude this excursus on the literary uses of etymology, however, with a concept that is central to Heidegger's philosophy: the concept of play. Everyone knows that play is a radical metaphor in Hamlet, that the action of the drama climaxes, first with the dumb show and then with the duel, in kinds of play, and that the idea of a cosmic play comes in the hero's mind to modify or replace the idea of a cosmic garden. What is less generally appreciated is that, when Hamlet determines "frankly [to] play" (V.ii. 232), he is simultaneously pledging and plighting himself. 'Play' comes from a West Germanic verb, plegan, meaning not only to exercise, but to pledge for, stake, risk. It is the source also of the verbs 'pledge' and 'plight,' the latter developing from Old English pliht, danger, peril. Huizinga has thoroughly explored the provenance of these words and their immediate relation to German Pflege, care, cultivation, and Pflicht, duty.27His analysis makes clear that play, as Hamlet understands it, is not to be opposed to work or seriousness: that it is in fact a form of dangerous committal, and that the player is essentially, not passive, but at stake-auf das Spiel, as Heidegger says. For both Hamlet and Heidegger, letting be28transcends the metaphysical distinction between freedom and necessity. The player lets the game-or the conversation-be as it will by giving his uttermost; he must be ready for openings and must leap in. Play, in this conception, is the highest form of care.
Ill

Heidegger's idea of a rigorous and rhythmic Spiel des Denkens is at the center of his project of originary philosophy, of speculative Dichtung-a project obviously inherited from Nietzsche (who also, harking back to Heraclitus, develops an idea of cosmic play). Where Heidegger most decisively differs from his predecessor, however, is in his prose style and in his linguistics. Although indebted to the Nietzschean aphorism, he breaks, as we have seen, with the representational linguistics that, for all his emphasis on interpretation as the beginning of perception and "facts," Nietzsche presupposes in consistently distinguishing a world of symbols from a world of things, linguistic from non-linguistic (see the fragment, "On Truth and Lie in an Extra-MoralSense," and Beyond Good and Evil, sections 21 and 268). Nietzsche's view of language as a mask and "a beautiful foolery" reflects, not only a wavering between truth as creation and truth as correctness,29 but also an acceptance of the sign-referent structure that Heidegger criticizes. When Nietzsche, in The Will to Power (number 522, according to the Grossoktav arrangement,
50

adopted by Kaufmann and Hollingdale), emphasizes that "rational thought is interpretation according to a scheme that we cannot throw off," he signals his frustration with this representational linguistics, in which he nevertheless remains caught. We cannot throw off reason, he says in this same note, because reason constitutes the forms of language and we think in language. He thus names the inherence of consciousness in Sprache-anticipating Heidegger's position-but he never gets past the instrumentality of words. It is Heidegger's intention to throw off the scheme of rational thought, which, however, has nothing to do with irrationalism. Where Nietzsche considers that the word kills, Heidegger maintains, as we have seen, that the word evokes, that it yields things. His style, therefore, is deliberately evocative, even at times incantatory (and exempt from Nietzschean irony), in its exposition of what Ortega calls the verbal "humus." Nietzsche etymologizes on occasion, particularly in Zarathustra, but not so radically or purposefully as his successor. Erasmus Schofer determines that Heidegger became aware of the possibilities of the figura etymologica, the ringing of functional changes on a particular word-stem, in his work with Greek texts and appropriated it for German in a way, one may assume, that it was originally used in common Indo-European. His paronomastic constructions represent not so much an undermining of syntax as a stretching and working out of grammatical propensities, until the settled places of "parts of speech" are shaken loose and distributed ambiguously in an interpenetrating, new-old dance of differences: noun and verb change places and mirrorone another. I suggested at the beginning that etymologizing raises the question of individuation and boundary. In this speculative play of identities and differences among verbal kin-involving a disciplined improvisation of idioms and dialectal forms-Heidegger shows how the individual word belongs in a manifold, a web, of overlapping horizons, in which individuality, as Nietzsche understood, does not exclude plurality of essence. What is true of the word holds for the thing. At stake in Heidegger's etymological play, in which words "thing"-that is, gather and emerge from out of tangled depths-is ultimately the issue of dwelling. The word family is a model for the way things exist in the world, the way things "world." In tracing the network of cognate terms comprising a word family, we gain access to historical neighborhoods of meaning. The concept of neighborhood, in fact, was already a key in Nietzsche's perspectivism (see The Willto Power, number 637), and Heidegger, as it were, ontologizes it. In this familiar agglutinated form-coming from Old English neah-gebur, near-dweller-he locates another urword, or Leitwort, for his philosophy. The crucial element in the term, for our present purposes, is bur, dwelling space, which derives from the Indo-Europeanbheu-, to be, exist, grow (AHD),to come into being, become (Buck), schwellen, wachsen, gedeihen (Pokorny). As one of the sources of the forms of the verb 'to be,' this root has received extensive and controversial treatment from philologists. Heidegger
51

discusses it in section 2 of the Introduction to Metaphysics, where he is concerned to expound the meaning of grammatical inflection, ptosis (frompiptein, to fall), as a diverse falling away from priorundifThe filiation of bheu- proferentiated fullness lying at the verbal root.30 vides an especially suggestive instance, not only of such falling into abstractness, but also of a counter process, what Heidegger calls the topology of being. As Herder already knew, however, the charter of semantic neighborhoods must essay to translate himself out of a kind of thinking that compartmentalizes into a kind where everything "crisscrosses." The congeners of bur, to be sure, appear initially far removed from one another in significance. Even if we discount Quine's "indeterminacy of translation," where is there to be found a common denominator among the concepts of byldan, gebur, Baum, fieri, futurus, phulon, phuein, etc.? Heidegger answers, in the polyvalent meaning of emergence (Ereignis),which defines the root bheu- and its most general derivative, the verb 'to be.' In this lexical Umkreis, or circuit, hinting at "notional ties" (Jespersen), there permeates everywhere the sense of being as bringing forth out of the deep and coming to light-a sense celebrated, for instance, in the archetypal kore (PersephonelDemeter). We encounter this meaning immediately in Greek phusis, nature, growth (and hence in phulon, tribe, stock, kind), in Latin fieri, to become, happen, and in German Baum, tree, more obliquely in futurus, coming to be, and bur. Byldan, to build or furnish (about which more below), may be interpreted as signifying to bring forth into appearance, to increase; we must not presuppose a human agency in this activity, for nature too, in a primary sense, measures and builds. The meaning of 'being'-to illuminate which always remained, of course, Heidegger's overarching aim-traverses and participates in the whole sphere and lineage (Stammesbereich) of branching word-paths within the family of bheu-. In order to find more than an "evanescent vapor" in the copula of being, we thus have to penetrate an ectoplasm of ordinary usage and linger in a between, attending to what lies submerged and unthought in the neighborhood of
beon.3'

Heidegger returns to this weird neighborhood, specifically to elaborate the relation of beon/bin to byldan/bauen and gebur, in a "Building Dwelling Thinking,"32 representative essay (originally a lecture) from the fifties, with which I wish to conclude my discussion. As the title suggests, this essay brings to the foreground the exploration of synonymy which practically everywhere motivates Heidegger's thought. What is synonymous is: "the Same." Not to be confused with the merely equal, "das Selbe" refers to a paradoxical sameness in distinction, a chiming together of what is said through a multiplicity of names, as through the concordant notes of a chord (see EGT, p. 118). Synonymy is an expression of linguistic neighborhood, and it points to the relativity of lexical boundaries. Properly considered, such relativity does not leave us in the lurch, though it may expose us to "the uncanny." A boundary (horos) is no less real, as I have argued,
52

for belonging in a context of overlapping horizons. A limit is literally a cross path. The view of relativity as something anarchic reflects an absolutist conception of space and time, such as is found in Newtonian science, a refusal to think in terms of field. In "Building Dwelling Thinking," Heidegger adverts succinctly to the Einsteinian unifiedfield dynamic as a recognition (in spite of the mathematical grid) of the priorityof place, Ort, to absolute or "empty" space. Together with the theoretical physicist, but in a wholly different way, he defends a
principle of locality:33

The banks emerge as banks only as the bridge crosses the stream.... Nor do the banks stretch along the stream as indifferent border strips of the dry land. With the banks, the bridge brings to the stream the one and the other expanse of the landscape lying behind them. It brings stream and bank and land into each other's neighborhood. The bridge gathers the earth as landscape around the stream. Thus it guides and attends the stream through the meadows.... [PLT,p. 152] Like the Greek temple and the peasant farmhouse, the bridge, as thing, opens up and evokes (einraumt) its proper environment, its distinctive world. We may always abstract from this particular locality, with its nears and fars, to a set of equivalent points extended along geometric intervals, and from there to purely analytic-algebraic relations with an arbitrary number of dimensions, but we should not forget, argues Heidegger, that such measurable distance (extensio) must have been made room for by localities. Raum, space-from rewa -, to open-means "a place cleared or freed for settlement and lodging." This clearing, in turn, involves a demarcating (Abgrenzen), such as figures in the Old High German form of the word for place. With his attack on metaphysical extension, Heidegger has prepared the ground-to be sure, bottomless-for an understanding of dwelling. To dwell (wohnen) is not simply to reside in or take up space; we may in our thoughts, or in reading the philosopher's description, dwell nearer to the bridge than someone who heedlessly crosses it every day. This "in our thoughts" is the rub. It is not a question of mental representations of distant objects, for "in itself thinking gets through, persists through, the distance [die Fernel to that location." The medium of its getting through and coming near, of its outstretching-appropriating care, is the word. "When we go to the well," writes Heidegger in a famous passage, "when we go through the woods, we are always already going through the word and do not think of anything relating to language" (PLT, p. 132). Whether we reflect on it or not, language remains "the house of Being." (Compare Saussure: "The word is like a house in which the arrangement and function of different rooms has been changed several
53 'well,' through the word 'woods,' even if we do not speak the words

times. Objective analysis adds up and schematizes the successive arrangements, but for those who live in the house there is always but one arrangement" [S, pp. 183-184]. For our going through or abiding anywhere is conditioned upon our prior dwelling among things that are named. As mortals, we already pervade the world into which we set forth: When I go toward the door of the lecture hall, I am already there, and I could not go to it at all if I were not such that I am there. I am never here only, as this encapsulated body; rather, I am there, that is, I already pervade the room, and only thus can I go through it. [PLT,p. 157] It follows from this startling train of thought that we do not dwell because we have built, but rather we build and have built because we are dwellers. Both byldan and bauen come from words meaning dwell. "Building is really dwelling," though not every building is a dwelling place. How it is possible for us to lose sight of the essential meaning of 'to build'-or of any word-is something, says Heidegger, we have scarcely begun to ponder: "language withdraws from man its simple and high speech." The word dissimulates. The irony is that where we are most settled (gewohnt) in language, we appear least capable of proper dwelling, least ready to stay the power of forgetting. The meaning of dwelling itself, the germ of bheu-, unfolds and settles into two complementary senses of building: cultivation, as of the soil and vine, and construction colere and aedificare (aedes-facere). The former is evidently the more fundamental; in early usage, it signifies to dwell or inhabit (compare incola, inhabitant). It derives from the root kwe/-1, to revolve, move around; sojourn, dwell (AHD),and it is cognate, mirabile dictu, with Greek te/os (see above) and kuklos, circle. Intimating an ancient teleology (but one without a "why"),the derivation makes explicit the rootedness of colere in a cyclical or global idea of dwelling. Building as cultivating, together with building as the raising of edifices, implies a nurturing, preserving, and protecting, a provident "letting dwell." This idea of cultivation, furthermore, may be compared to a word that has received signal emphasis in Heidegger's later work:der Brauch, which suggests use, in the sense of usage and custom, as well as need. Heidegger employs the word in a manner that recalls, for one reader, the barely grasped vision of "true need" in King Lear. "Es brauchet" approximates to "es gibt" (there is, ii y a), and der Brauch translates Anaximander's to khreon, necessity, derived from a verb whose radical sense is: to give what is needful (EGT, pp. 51-55). Brauch itself stems from the Indo-Europeanbhrug-, meaning fruit; to make use of, have the enjoyment of; usufruct, a verbalsubstantival root belonging to an agricultural context. Brauchen, originally signifying to take nourishment, is cognate with our 'brook,' to stomach, and with Latin frui, to have the benefit of, enjoy: con54

sumption and need and nourishment are here interwoven. Elemental usage builds, and building renders and apportions, yielding economy conjugate with joy.34 But joy, Heidegger says elsewhere, echoing Nietzsche, is the same as care and sorrow (Sorge). We see now how Heidegger constantly harks back, in a manner characteristically German, if no longer metaphysical, to a multifarious conflicted oneness presumed to underlie all antinomies. Attuned to a time before the separation of logos from phusis, he seeks the immanence of knowing in doing.35 His search leads him repeatedly to an investigation of the essence of technology-which he takes to be the decisive type of doing in Western history-an essence which itself "can be nothing technological." Tekhne he derives from tiktein, to bring into the world, beget, engender, which accords with his sense of building as bearing and bringing forth. As it happens, this etymology, which one finds in the lexicon of Liddell and Scott, has been amended by more recent authorities, who differentiate a root form teks-, or tekth-, as the source of tekhne and texere (>'text'), from the perhaps more general form tek-1, to beget, source of tiktein. But the revision plays fatefully into Heidegger's hands, for teks- means at center to weave or intertwine (flechten). We note that weaving is not confined to human construction. Animals and other natural forces weave; the fates proverbially weave. Thinking weaves-which is to say, it exceeds stitching together. Tekhne suggests handicraft, and such craft implies a knowing resolve (as in "Handwerk des Denkens"). The craft of the hand, Heidegger maintains, is richer than we commonly imagine: "the hand's gestures run everywhere through language... [and] all the work of the hand is rooted in thinking" (WCT,p. 16). It is thus that he locates thinking in the crisscrossed neighborhood of building and dwelling, where manifold meaning gathers and nears, even while receding, where interpretation negotiates a cluster of unfolding ways, dangerously deep, and where all making comes painstakingly as a gift. Boston College NOTES
1 MartinHeidegger, An Introductionto Metaphysics, trans. RalphManheim(New Haven, Conn.:Yale Univ.Press, 1959),p. 51. Einfuhrungin die Metaphysik(Tubingen: Max Niemeyer, 1953), pp. 38-39. The designation 'root' is used here primarilyin its etymological, rather than morphological, sense, though the distinction is not absolute. For German etymologies, I have used Friedrich Kluge, Etymologisches Worterbuchder deutschen Sprache, 20th ed. (Berlin:Walter de Gruyter,1967), and Das Grosse Vol. 7 - Etymologie (Mannheim:Dudenverlag,1963).For English Duden-Lexikon, etymologies, see the convenient Appendix of Indo-Europeanroots, ed. Calvert Watkins, in TheAmerican Heritage Dictionary(Boston: Houghton Mifflin,1969). This latter, hereafter cited as AHD, abridges and qualifies information presented in the standard workof reference and synthesis in the Indo-European field, Julius Pokorny's Indogermanisches Etymologisches Worterbuch(Bern: A. Francke, 1959).

55

3 4

J. G. Herder,Abhandlung uber den Ursprungder Sprache, ed. Wolfgang Pross (Munich:Carl Hanser, 1979), pp. 45-46. Translations are my own. On Heidegger's etymologizing, see George Steiner, Martin Heidegger (New York:Viking, 1978), pp. 5-12, 21-28; Erasmus Schofer, Die Sprache Heideggers (Pfullingen:Neske, 1962), pp. 103-117,202-217;Jan Aler, "Heidegger's Conception of Language in Being and Time,"in On Heidegger and Language, ed. and trans. J. Kockelmans (Evanston:NorthwesternUniv.Press, 1972),pp. 37-44;and my review of Steiner's book, "Prophetic Heidegger," boundary2, 8 (Spring 1980),309-319. Being and Time (hereafter cited as BT),trans. Macquarrieand Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), p. 262. Sein (nd Zeit (1927), Gesamtausgabe, Vittorio Klostermann, 1977), p. 291. Band 2 (Frankfurt: Unterwegs zur Sprache (Pfullingen:Neske, 1959),p. 96 (hereaftercited as UWS). The immediate context, in English, reads: "Without this theological I background[Herkunft] should never have come upon the path of thinking. But origin always comes to meet us from the future." On the Way to Language trans. Peter D. Hertz (New York:Harperand Row, 1971), p. 10. (cited as OWL), Jose Ortega y Gasset, "MartinHeidegger und die Sprache der Philosophen," Universitas, 7 (1952),897-903. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, ed. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye with Albert Riedlinger, trans. Wade Baskin (New York: McGrawHill, 1966), pp. 167-168, 186-187 (hereafter cited as S). Hermann Osthoff and Karl Brugmann, "Preface to Morphological Investigations in the Sphere of the Indo-European Languages 1"(1878),rpt.in A Readerin Nineteenth-Century Historical Indo-EuropeanLinguistics, ed. and trans. Winfred P. Lehmann(Bloomington, Indiana:IndianaUniv.Press, 1967), pp. 197-209, esp. p. 204. Compare the earlier criticism of the Sprachgeist by Rudolf von Raumer, ibid., p. 72. As a start at such a comparison, see Donald G. Marshall,"TheOntology of the Literary Sign: Notes toward a Heideggerian Revision of Semiology," boundary2, 4 (Winter 1976), 611-631. This number has been reprinted as Martin Heidegger and the Question of Literature,ed. WilliamV. Spanos (Bloomington: IndianaUniv. Press, 1979). Marshallis interested in "overcomingthe presumed opposition of philological to formalist criticism." See Heidegger's lectures on Heraclitus and Parmenides: "Logos" and "Moira" in Vortrage und Aufsatze (Pfullingen: Neske, 1954), pp.204, 220-221, 236 (hereaftercited as VA).Translations by David Krelland FrankCapuzzi in Early Greek Thinking(New York:Harperand Row, 1975),pp. 64, 77-78,90-91 (hereafter cited as EGT). Leonard Bloomfield, Language (New York:Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1933), pp. 162, 172. See also pp. 139-157, 271. Emile Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics (1966),trans. MaryE. Meek (Coral Gables, Fla.: Univ. of Miami Press, 1971), p. 249. See also pp. 10-11, 99-100, 107. Henry M. Hoenigswald, Language Change and Linguistic Reconstruction (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1960), p. 27; "meaning content... is not introduced at all into our picture" (p. 19n.). In his monumental Dictionary of Selected Synonyms in the Principal IndoEuropean Languages (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1949), p. 1261, Carl

7 8

10

11

12 13

14

15

56

Buck states that "Wordsfor 'word'originally denoted something said, 'saying, utterance' . .. and only secondarily the individual 'word.'" 16 What is Called Thinking?,trans. J. Glenn Gray (New York:Harperand Row, 1968), p. 200; see also pp.117-143 (hereafter cited as WCT). Was Heisst Denken? (Tubingen:Niemeyer, 1954), pp. 122, 81-95, 150-153(hereaftercited as WHD). Hans-GeorgGadamer,"Heidegger and the Language of Metaphysics" (1967),in Philosophical Hermeneutics, trans. and ed. David Linge (Berkeley, Calif.: Univ.of California Press, 1976), p. 231. See Otto Jespersen, Language (1922; rpt. New York:Norton, 1964), pp. 19-21, 396-442. Plato's Cratylus,which presages more sophisticated Stoic etymologizing, is the classic locus of the debate in Greek philosophy. For a largercontext to the debate (as phusis vs. nomos), see WernerJaeger, Paideia: the Ideals of Greek Culture, 2nd ed. (1945), trans. Gilbert Highet (New York:Oxford Univ. Press, 1965), I, pp. 321-331. Quoted from Saussure's notebooks in Jonathan Culler, Ferdinandde Saussure (New York:Penguin Books, 1977), p. 49. See "Der Spruch des Anaximander," in Holzwege (Frankfurt:Klostermann, 1950), p. 326. "The AnaximanderFragment,"EGT,p. 40. "The Thinkeras Poet," in Poetry, Language, Thought,trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York:Harperand Row, 1971), p. 3; compare pp. 103-104(hereaftercited as PLT). Aus der Erfahrungdes Denkens (Pfullingen: Neske, 1954), p. 5. Probablythe most importantcontemporarystudy of polysemy, focusing on lexical families and subfamilies, is Benveniste's Indo-EuropeanLanguage and Society (1969), trans. Elizabeth Palmer (Coral Gables: Univ. of Miami Press, 1973).Workingboth to trace "paths of dialectal differentiation"and "to restore a unity dissolved by processes of evolution, bringing buried structures to light and harmonizing divergencies of technical usages," this analytical etymology may be profitably compared to Heideggerian methods. On metaphor Heidegger writes: "Weil unser Horen und Sehen niemals ein bloss sinnliches Aufnehmen ist, deshalb bleibt es auch ungemass zu und Er-blickensei nur als Ubertragunggebehaupten, das Denken als Er-horen meint, namlich als Ubertragungdes vermeintlich Sinnlichen in das Nichtsinnliche. Die Vorstellung von 'ubertragen' und von der Metapher beruht auf der Unterscheidung, wenn nicht gar Trennungdes Sinnlichen und Nichtsinnlichen als zweier fur sich bestehender Bereiche.... Das Metaphorische gibt es nurinnerhalb der Metaphysik." Der Satz vom Grund (Pfullingen: Neske, 1957), pp. 88-89. Hamann's Socratic Memorabilia,bilingual ed. with trans. and commentary by James O'Flaherty(Baltimore:Johns Hopkins Press, 1967), p. 143. The phrase, "strengere Logik ... als in den Begriffen lebhafter Kopfe,"is quoted from a letter to Kant, p. 62. Francis Ponge, The Voice of Things, trans. with an introductionby Beth Archer (New York:McGrawHill, 1974), p. 8. Paul A. Bove, Destructive Poetics: Heidegger and Modern American Poetry (New York:Columbia Univ. Press, 1980), p. 253. Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens, English edition (Boston: Beacon Press, 1950), pp. 38-40.

17

18

19 20 21

22

23

24

25 26 27

57

28

In a symposium on postmodernism, William Spanos develops the idea of "letting be" (Gelassenheit) in terms of "Negative Capability,"of a dis-closure that is at once a dwelling in Mysteries-as opposed to a will to power that would A banish depths. See Par Rapport: Journal of the Humanities, 2 (Summer1979), 107-122. See Heidegger's Nietzsche (Pfullingen: Neske, 1961), I, pp. 620-621. See George Vick, "Heidegger's Linguistic Rehabilitation of Parmenides' 'Be(New Haven: ing,' " in Heidegger and Modern Philosophy, ed. Michael Murray Yale Univ. Press, 1978), pp. 203-221. On "Topologie des Seins," see Otto Poggeler, Der Denkweg MartinHeideggers (Pfullingen: Neske, 1963), pp. 280-299, and Joseph P. Fell, Heidegger and Sartre:An Essay on Being and Place (New York:Columbia Univ. Press, 1979), esp. pp. 188-243. Compare Benveniste's analysis of "The Linguistic Function of 'To Be' and 'To Have,' " in Problems in General Linguistics, pp. 163-179,and Derrida'sincisive commentary on both Heidegger and Benveniste in "TheSupplement of Copula: Philosophy Before Linguistics," Georgia Review, 30 (1976), 527-564. Collected in VA, pp. 139-156; PLT, pp. 145-161. On Beon as a translation of Seyn, and on the "topology of Beon" in its proximity to "the Simple," see William J. Richardson, Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1963), pp. 553-556. Apropos Einstein's theory of general relativity,in which the local presence and distribution of matter is understood to condition the curvatureof space-time, KurtGodel speculates: "Thestructure of the world (i.e., the actual arrangement of matter, motion, and field) may offer quite different aspects to different observers, and it may offer a more 'natural' aspect to some of them and a distorted one to others. The observer, incidentally, plays no essential role in these considerations. The main point, of course, is that the world itself has certain distinguished directions, which directly define certain distinguished local times." "A Remarkabout the Relation between RelativityTheoryand Idealistic Philosophy," in Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist, ed. P. A. Schilpp (1949; Open Court, 1970), pp. 557-562. rpt. LaSalle, III.: On the principle of locality, compare Derrida: "there is no homogeneous space... space orders itself wholly for the habitation and inscription in itself of the body 'proper.'" Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore:Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1976), p. 288. Comparethe derivationof 'function,' fungi, frombheug-2, to enjoy, and of Greek dunasthai, to be able (>'dynamic'), cognate with bonus, bellus, and beare, from deu-2, to do, perform, show favor, revere (AHD).Considered as a multidirectional potentiality, this latter root-discussed by Nietzsche in The Genealogy of Morals, I,v.-instances an original unity of ontical, moral, and aestheticreligious ideas. On the secession of logos from phusis, see An Introduction to Metaphysics, pp. 170-189. On the interrelationof knowing and doing, compare the derivation of 'skill,' from Old Norse skil, incisiveness, discernment, knowledge; distinction, difference. In his Etymological Dictionaryof ModernEnglish, Vol. 2 (1921; rpt. New York:Dover, 1967), Ernest Weekley cites an archaic locution, 'it skills not' (see Twelfth Night, V.i.287), meaning it matters not, which we may set beside Miranda'sline in The Tempest (llI.i.53),"How features are abroad I am skilless of." Note also the etymology of German Kunst, art, from konnen, to gno-, to know. know, be able, from Indo-European

29 30

31

32

33

34

35

58

Potrebbero piacerti anche