Language: Where Literalism & Experience Meet

The characters are quick to realize that philosophy is carried out through language, and that all we study is dependent on our linguistic method. The Scientist makes this admission, speaking: “I am coming to trust in the inconspicuous guide who takes us by the hand–or better said, by the word–in this conversation (Heidegger 60). The word “guide” here is optimistic because usually the necessity of language in philosophy is seen as a restriction. Apparently though, the Scientist feels that the word can “take you by the hand.” Heidegger shares Zhuangzi’s belief in what the everO’Brien 7 changing multiplicity of perspectives means for literalism. He says, “If we now say this is the region, and say it with the meaning we just gave it, then the word must name something else” (66). Like Zhuangzi, Laozi, Confucius, the cast of Conversation believe there is an object truth (Being, or Tao), but that language cannot capture it, because what they have designated by a word “never has that word hanging on it like a name plate” (66). A short passage exemplifies this well:

• Scientist: I’ll be glad to try [to define a term], providing I don’t have to run the risk that you will at once pin me down to particular words.
• Teacher: In our conversations, we don’t usually do that.
• Scholar: Rather, we see to it at we move freely in the realm of words.
• Teacher: Because a word does not and never can re-present anything; but signifies something, that is, shows something as abiding into the range of its expressibility.

What the Scholar calls moving “freely in the realm of words,” is exactly like Zhuangzi’s theory that only “language which flows constantly over, as from a full goblet, is in accord with God” (Giles 363). Over the course of the Conversation, the characters are always pursuing the same elusive answer, but use different words in reference to it. Among these words are: Human nature, thinking, re-presenting, willing, releasement, transcendence, horizon, region(ing), waiting, openness, path, naming, determining, truth, Ayxivasie (going toward/near). Throughout the Conversation, we see that the words designated to ideas change and flow, just as the ideas themselves evolve.

Heidegger presents thinking, which divides existence, and in opposition to thinking, there isO’Brien 8 experience, which exposes the unity of Being. The concept of selective division that is seen in Heidegger’s thinking, is also seen in our literal use of language, furthermore, this selective division is is representative of how we think of the world, and our place in it. Within Heidegger’s “Conversations on a Country Path About Thinking,” and Traditional Chines thinking there is an implication that challenges the traditional western emphasis on categorization, this is the implication that if we so chose to open ourselves up to Being, or Tao, we will be provided with universal knowledge. The Zhuangzi passage “From Here, on the Bridge, over the River Hao,” also known as “The Joy of Fishes,” exemplifies this implication particularly well.