REFLECTION ON THE NATURE OF LANGUAGE MARTIN HEIDDEGGER'S PHILOSOPHY

REFLECTION ON THE NATURE OF LANGUAGE IN MARTIN HEIDDEGGER’S PHILOSOPHY

INTRODUCTION:
Martin Heidegger was born in Baden and educated at Freiberg in the phenomenological tradition of Edmund Husserl. There, in Freiberg, became Husserl’s assistant and later succeeded to his chair in 1928. Heidegger in his book Being And Time which he published as a critique of Husserl’s philosophy, launched an attack on traditional metaphysics. He seek establish a grounding for philosophy independent of traditional metaphysics-which postulate a hierarchy of Beings. Heidegger replaced this conception of being with a single ultimate being “Dasein”, which means being there or being in the world. Being manifested itself through man. However, in his later writing Heidegger completely overturn this relation between man and being. Being, here, manifest itself in different ways, one of which is through language. Language do not require man for its existence but maintains and ontological transcendence over man. This unorthodox conception of language underlines our reflection.

ONTOLOGICAL TRANSCENDENCE OF LANGUAGE
Language does not required man for its existence. It is a being on its own right independent of man and human society. It is language that speaks not man, for man can only echo the speaking of language by listening that is meditating. Man speaks only as he listens and language lands him utterance. Man thus, is subservient to language. Language, here, is not a means of social control or communication, which man can manipulate at will. It is independent of all human linguistic systems. Though language speaks, it is its nature to remain unspoken. Its speaking, however, differs from the ordinary sense of the word. It speaks by (Sagen) showing.
TRANSFORMATION
Man needs to reconceptualize the nature of language and his relationship with it. We need to discard the orthodox conception of language that gives man the status of a master. Languages has become the master and man its servant. Without this transformation, according to Heiddegger, man cannot experience language; he cannot bring himself to language; he cannot bring himself to language and be lent utterance by it.
ECHOING OF LANGUAGE
To all men is not granted the privilege of echoing the speaking of language. The greater majority of men only babbles but never echo the speaking of language. This privilege is given to select few, to poets and thinkers who have undergone experience with language by ardently listening to the speaking of language. They speak by the inspiration of language. Hence, their speech is not ordinary communicative signs but an unveiling of imaginaries surrounded by the mystique of primordial existence. Poets and thinkers are, so to speak, the high priests of language, for language speaks only through them. The medium through which language speaks to them is by unveiling (showing) them the primordial structures of existence that are not discernible to those who do not listen, those the course of whose lives are spent in the gilded and pleasurable surface of phenomenal existence.
These people have not penetrated the surface to the noumena (so the unspeakable and undescriptive holy of holies) of existence. Poets and thinkers, on the other hand, disdainfully brush aside the enchanting phenomena of temporal existence, they sequester themselves from the joys and follies of life, they say like the English poet, John Milton, in his poem Il Penseroso
Hence, vain deluding joys
The brood of folly without father bred!
How little you bestead
Or fill the fixed mind with your toys!
Dwell in some idle brain,
And Fancies fond with gaudy shapes possess
As thick and numberless
As the gay notes that people the sunbeams,
Or likest hovering dreams
The fickle pensioners of Morpheus’ train

But hail, thou goddess sage and holy,
Hail, divinest melancholy!
Whose saintly visage is to bright
To hot the sense of human sight
And therefore to our weaker view
Overlaid with black, staid wisdom’s here….
Thus, we can aptly assert that the echoing of language is granted to poets and thinkers - who wonder in dark causes. Language is the spirit that moves them, that inspires and lends them utterance. They have subjected themselves to the lordship of language by listening.

POETICALLY MAN DWELLS WITH LANGUAGE
It is their nature of language to be hidden to be unspoken. Just as the ancient Chinese philosopher Laotzu says of Tao, “if Tao can be Taoed, its not Tao. If its name can be named, its not its name.” So language is not spoken, for speaking depraved it. Hence, language is not analyzable , it is not a subject of study. The phase “poetically man dwell” was borrowed from the poem of the German.
Poet Holderlin by Heiddegger. We in our office as interprefers, being entitle to be prerogative of a poetic licence, will bring our own experience to bear on this phase as it relates to the nature of language.
Man is a product and part of nature or the natural order of things. As such he partakes in the natural processes of generation and destruction. However, man transcends nature. He is able to create what defies the laws of nature, such creations includes symbols, works of arts, signs, etc. How does he do all this? This man does by the inspiration of the mysterious, by the agency of language - that is by responding to the appeals of language. Poetry is the art, in our own conception, of transcending nature in order to understand, to shape and portray it. It is by this art which entails, listening to language that man responds to language and through language create a permanent universe of meaning of symbols within which alone his existence is differentiated from the myriad of natural phenomena that encompasses him within this symbolic universe man dwell poetically with language as it is language alone that support and maintain this universe. Thus language speaks by showing: showing man a world beyond the phenomenal within which his essence can be appreciated. Language, through the art of transcending and listening which is poetry, shows man himself as clearly as a mirror, with sufficient illumination, reflects an image.
CONCLUSION
From what we have said so far, it s obvious that language is a spirit that moves man, when man submissively obeys it, to see meaning transcending the phenomenal reality. Man is not the master, but language is. Man can only understand language not by analyzing it but by submitting himself, through meditation (listening) to it.
Thus, language speaks and man listens. Language exists independent of man.