Language as a Means of Being

While reading Heidegger's Being and Time, one of the parallels I was able to draw is the notion of language and the ways in which we superimpose meanings and function on objects through such language. I thought of Loyd F. Bitzer's The Rhetorical Situation, in which he quotes anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, stating, "In its primitive uses, language functions as a link in concerted human activity, as a piece of human behaviour. It is a mode of action and not an instrument of reflection” (Bitzer 4). This means that although society has gradually integrated language more for reflective and thought processes, during its earliest stages, language was imperative to humanity solely for action and behavior. Many learned it for business purposes and, essentially, to survive.

Heidegger expresses that the "world" holds meaning through our experiences and dealings with it, and everything in it is defined through its "equipmentality...[or] something in-order-to" (Heidegger 97). Objects are given their names and expressed functions through the language that we express. Clocks, for instance, are unaware of their "character as equipment," meaning that a clock is just a clock until someone gives it meaning. One must assemble its parts, give the object a name, and posit its overall function in context of a situation--as well as what that function is down to the meaning of the hour, minute, and second hands. The idea of it being is a possibility through language, through the ways in which one experiences it. Yet, this item's being would not truly exist, according to Heidegger, until someone is able to realize its function, using and experiencing it.

Considering Bitzer and Malinowski once more, there is an emphasis on the primordial stages of language within Being and Time, pertaining more towards the ways in which one experiences the world, exhibiting action, rather than using language for reflective processes. I find it interesting that Heidegger utilizes both, in a sense, since Being and Time is an example of the latter, yet many of the concepts and examples he uses throughout his third chapter correlate with the former.




Bitzer, Loyd F. "The Rhetorical Situation." Philosophy and Rhetoric Supplementary Issue (1992): 1-14. Print.