On the Essence of Language and the Question of Art

By: Martin Heidegger, Adam Knowles (Translator)

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Hardcover | 23 February 2023

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Hardcover
200 Pages

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23.6 x 16.0 x 1.8

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The texts and notes collected in this volume offer unique insight into the development of Heidegger’s thinking on language and art from the late 1930s to the early 1950s – a tumultuous period both for Heidegger personally and for Germany as a whole. Following Germany’s defeat in World War II, Heidegger was banned from teaching at Freiburg University, where he had been a professor since 1928, and his thinking underwent significant changes as he began to cultivate different modes of silence and non-saying in his philosophy of language. This volume illuminates these shifts and charts the evolution of key terms in Heidegger’s philosophy of language during this key period in the development of his thought.

The central theme of Heidegger’s reflections on language in this volume is his repeated engagement with the character of the word, silence and the unsaid, and his rejection of the instrumental conception of language, where he instead prioritized conversation as the “homeland of language.” Alongside references to Hölderlin and von Hofmannsthal and shrewd scrutiny of aural phenomena such as silent thought and speechlessness, speech is demonstrated to be intimately connected to the human essence. In a later section, Heidegger examines the place of art, in particular the plastic arts, and the role of the artist in conjunction with the new industrial landscape and architecture of his time, and in juxtaposition with ancient Greek attitudes to space and the polis.

This key work by Heidegger, now available in English for the first time, will be of great interest to students and scholars of philosophy and to anyone interested in Heidegger’s thought.

About the Author

Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) was one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century and the author of numerous works including Being and Time.

Industry Reviews

"This volume invites us to follow Heidegger as he thinks on paper and to join in his explorations of being, language, and art. Adam Knowles' thoughtful translation conveys the dogged inventiveness of these texts."
—Richard Polt, Xavier University

"These starkly polysemic notes on language, poetry, and art dramatically elaborate Heidegger's later phenomenological understanding of how poetry gives rise to both art and language, how that emergence gets disastrously eclipsed and forgotten by Western metaphysics, and what it means to rediscover being's poetic emergence today. Here Heidegger finally thinks clearly through the distinction between 'the being of entities' (or 'beingness,' the domain of metaphysics) and 'beyng' (or 'being as such,' the heart of the matter for poetic thinking), that crucial distinction which both destroys the early 'metaphysical' project of Being and Time and launches his later work of thinking beyond metaphysics (and the nihilistic history metaphysics underwrites)."
—Professor Iain Thomson, University of New Mexico

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