Language: Where Literalism & Experience Meet

I think that a person’s usage, expectations, and efficacy of language is directly linked to his/ her cognitive balance between the two types of thought Heidegger puts forth in his “Memorial Address,” calculated and meditative. The purely meditative Sage, for example, feels that “the best speechisnospeech.” WhilethepurelycalculativeAnalyticthinksthatliteraryobjectivismis possible. But if the Sage never speaks, s/he would be excluded from society, and if the Analytic only speaks literally, s/he is guaranteed to be misunderstood. So obviously, both sides of the equation, working alone are impractical. But in combination, the virtues of each can work together, thus producing an emergent clarity.

Heidegger advocates this combined effort when he speaks of technology as a necessity in our natural world. He does say, though, that there must be limits on technology. Technology mustO’Brien 10 not overcome our lives be exploitive of nature, but ideally, technology should “mesh with nature.” The example he gives of balanced technology meshing with nature is the windmill. He argues that if the windmill, a purely mechanical piece of technology, can be “tailored to the winds” so as to “mesh with nature,” that is, utilize the natural, meditative world, then it must also be possible for humans to use meditative and calculative thought, together for emergent advantage (Poggeler 54).

Heidegger provides another example of meditative and calculative thought “meshing” with one another in the very writing of “Conversation on a Country Path About Thinking.” In this piece, Heidegger uses methods from the calculative world (careful writing, pursuit of publication, etc) to convey the virtues of meditative thinking, knowing that his teachings can be transfered in readers’ minds from the academic realm of particulars, to the experiential realm of Being. It is the possibility of this cognitive transfer which truly legitimizes language’s attempts as conveying Being.

The conflict that arises, that is, the question of language’s communicative power, comes from committing too much to either calculative or meditative thinking. Language is inherently divisive in its specificity, but the potential for this division to be self-defeating can be overcome by following the thinking of Laozi, Confucius, and Zhuangzi who all call for a prescriptive use of language which is grounded by actions and facilitated by a diction in flux. By holding less regard to literalism, and more to experience, the self-referentialism of definitions can be avoided, and a more thoroughly inclusive understanding can be established.