ABSTRACT
So far, Heidegger’s account of the human way of being has isolated several of its defining limits or conditions – Dasein’s worldliness; its communality; and its thrown projectiveness. It has also sketched in their interconnectedness – Dasein’s world being intersubjectively structured and determinative of the available range of individual passions and projects. However, this picture of human conditionedness needs one further element, an element that derives from and determines the communal structures of Dasein’s world – language. And Heidegger’s analysis of language generates a distinctive account of the nature of truth and reality – one that overturns some of the pivotal assumptions of the post-Cartesian philosophical tradition. We will therefore break off from a purely linear treatment of Heidegger’s text and devote this chapter to the two separate sequences of sections in which he examines these complex and tightly intertwined matters.
