ABSTRACT
From well before Being and Time, Heidegger had conducted his own ‘linguistic turn’, consistently emphasizing that the character of human being was indissociable from the phenomenon of language. The Aristotelian definition of human being as the zōon logon echon (‘the living being having logos’) accompanies his thought in almost the entirety of his paths of thinking. As he put it in his 1923–24 lectures on phenomenological research, ‘Language (Sprache) is the being and becoming of human beings as such’. 1 ‘Language’ does not here carry the more restrictive sense it has in some twentieth-century philosophy and linguistics, merely what it means in ‘average everyday’ English, in which it also largely overlaps with ‘language as it is spoke’, i.e., ‘speech’ or ‘discourse’. Thus, in lecturing in 1924 on the basic concepts of Aristotelian philosophy, Heidegger starts out from a rather straightforward interpretation of the Greek logos as, simply, ‘speaking’ (sprechen) or, more precisely, ‘speaking about something’, which is both a matter of speaking with others and self-expression (Sich-selbst-ausprechen). As such, ‘Speaking out as “speaking about” is the basic manner of the being of life, i.e., of being-in-a-world’. 2 In speaking about something with others in this way, one also effects a kind of disclosure, letting what is at issue in the conversation be seen as it is (Heidegger references both apophainesthai and dēloun).
