Abstract
In his theoretical essays on language, Walker Percy criticizes contemporary linguistics for overlooking the deep, existential impact that language acquisition has on human life. This acquisition, for Percy, radically transforms the human being’s mode of existence. With the acquisition of language, the world and our role in it change. The meaning of the world comes to be revealed through the ongoing life of human discourse: through books, conversations, philosophical inquiry, and so on. This chapter clarifies and elaborates on Percy’s critique by showing how it arises as a central insight in twentieth-century German phenomenology, particularly in the later work of Martin Heidegger and in the hermeneutic phenomenology of Heidegger’s student, Hans-Georg Gadamer.
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Notes
- 1.
Aristotle (1098b) here argues that it is not the capacity for survival or perception that is distinctively human but the capacity for action in accordance with logos (language, speech, reasoning).
- 2.
- 3.
This is evident, for example, in “Symbol as Hermeneutic in Existentialism,” where Percy considers a number of Heideggerean concepts as characteristic of the broader school of “European existentialism” (MB, pp. 277–287). See also Dewey 1972, p. 278.
- 4.
Brock (1949) contained the first translations of Heidegger’s work in English. It included four essays in translation (“Remembrance of the Poet,” “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry,” “On the Essence of Truth,” and “What Is Metaphysics”) and Brock’s own explanation of Heidegger’s philosophy, particularly, Being and Time). Percy owned Existence and Being and took extensive notes in his copy of it. Brock, a student of Karl Jaspers, reads Heidegger’s work through the lens of Kierkegaard . In his earlier book, Brock (1935) presents Heidegger as an inheritor of Kierkegaard’s existentialism, particularly Kierkegaard’s insistence that philosophy must begin with the study of the distinctive features of human existence.
- 5.
Keller was insistent on using metaphors of vision and rejected the idea that they were inaccessible to the blind. In The World I Live In, Keller responds to the policy of the Matilda Ziegler Magazine for the Blind to omit stories and poems that make allusions to visually stunning scenes that would, according to the magazine, only “serve to emphasize the blind man’s sense of his affliction.” Keller responds: “That is to say, I may not talk about beautiful mansions and gardens because I am poor. I may not read about Paris and the West Indies because I cannot visit them in territorial reality. I may not dream of heaven because it is possible that I may never go there. Yet a venturesome spirit impels me to use words of sight and sound whose meaning I can guess only from analogy and fancy. This hazardous game is half the delight, the frolic, of daily life. I glow as I read of splendors which the eye alone can survey” (Keller 2005, p. 32).
- 6.
The text of the lecture has been reconstructed on the basis of student transcripts. See Heidegger 2009.
- 7.
Feldman (2006, p. 88) argues that in Being and Time Heidegger attempts to use language to reveal the limits of language and thus that the book is ultimately not a discussion of being but a performance of language’s inability to represent being. She observes that, in Heidegger’s book, “the very words of the investigation into being are wrested out of readiness-to-hand, in part by devices such as italics, scare quotes, hyphenation, invention, and etymology, which thematize or make conspicuous the word-character of the words.”
- 8.
One thinks here of Helen Keller’s reflection on what prepares one to become a writer. “You see, there is but one road to authorship,” Keller writes. “It remains for ever a way in which each man must go a-pioneering. … What I mean is, we can follow where literary folk have gone; but, in order to be authors ourselves, to be followed, we must strike into a path where no one has preceded us” (Keller, 1913, p. 120).
- 9.
For example, Heidegger writes (1971, p. 81): “There is some evidence that the essential nature of language flatly refuses to express itself in words – in the language, that is, in which we make statements about language”. Likewise, “The Way to Language” begins with a reverential invocation of a line from Novalis (Georg Philipp Friedrich von Hardenberg) that Heidegger hopes will encourage his listeners to keep the strangeness of language in mind throughout his lecture: “The peculiar property of language, namely that language is concerned exclusively with itself – precisely that is known to no one” (Heidegger 1971, p. 111).
- 10.
In his interactions with his guests from Japan, the topic of language was naturally important, since several of the guests were involved with the translation of Heidegger’s works into Japanese. Heidegger’s attention to this particular language, then, reflects his interest in these translation projects. It is worth recalling too that Heidegger’s work was first translated into Japanese in 1930, 19 years before the first English translation.
References
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———. 1991. Signposts in a Strange Land. New York: Picador.
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Culbertson, C. (2018). Walker Percy, Phenomenology, and the Mystery of Language. In: Marsh, L. (eds) Walker Percy, Philosopher. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77968-3_3
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