Right Names: On Heidegger's Closet Cratylism

Right Names: On Heidegger’s Closet Cratylism CHRISTOPHER EAGLE California Institute of Technology Abstract: In the Cratylus, Socrates discusses with Cratylus and Hermogenes the question of whether names are merely arbitrary or in some sense ‘right,’ that is, motivated by the nature of the things they designate. In this article, I examine Heidegger’s controversial project of unearthing archē Greek terms in the specific light of the Cratylus and the tradition of “Cratylisms” which it has fostered. Having demonstrated the underlying Cratylist tendencies behind Heidegger’s conviction in the inherent ‘appropriateness’ of many Greek keywords, I point out some of the problems posed by this closet Cratylism for Heidegger’s conception of primordial language as well as his critique of the correspondence theory of truth. Ist es Zufall, dass die Griechen sich über das Wesen der Wahrheit in einem privativen Ausdruck (alētheia) aussprechen?—Heidegger, Sein und Zeit The divine motion of the universe is, I think, called by this name, alētheia, because it is a divine wandering (theia alē).—Plato, Cratylus S ince Plato’s Cratylus, names have stood as a test case for language’s capacity to accurately reflect the world. Although Socrates acknowledges in the dialogue that language cannot be reduced to nomination, that naming is only one of many parts of speaking (387c), the naming-function still represents for him, as one commentator puts it,“the act of language par excellence.”1 While Plato has for this reason often been credited with opening the debate over the linguistic and philosophical role of naming, a debate which continues from the figure of Hermogenes down to his twentieth century descendant, Ferdinand de Saussure, the Cratylus in another sense does not open a debate so much as close one before it can truly © 2009. Epoché, Volume 14, Issue 1 (Fall 2009). ISSN 1085-1968. 57–75 58 Christopher Eagle begin. Cratylus, we are told, in a paraphrase of his position offered by Hermogenes, holds that, “everything has a right name of its own, which comes by nature, and that a name is not whatever people call a thing by agreement, just a piece of their own voice applied to the thing, but that there is a kind of inherent correctness in names [orthotēta tina tōn onomatōn]” (383a). As for himself, Hermogenes tells us, he “cannot come to the conclusion that there is any correctness of names other than convention and agreement [sunthēkē kai homologia]. For it seems to me that whatever name you give to a thing is its right name, and if you give up that name and change it for another, the later name is no less correct than the earlier” (384d). Socrates is generally assumed to vacillate between these two extremes, on whether names are mimetic, motivated, essential (in some sense ‘right’) or adaptable, arbitrary, conventional (not therefore necessarily ‘wrong’), eventually settling on his so-called middle position in which, “names are, so far as possible, like the things named but really this attractive force of likeness is, as Hermogenes says, a poor thing, and we are compelled to employ in addition this commonplace expedient, convention, to establish the correctness of names” (435c). If the Cratylus can be said to close a debate rather than open one, this is because Socrates never vacillates on the presupposition that underlies both Cratylism and Hermogenism, simply, that any rightness names could hypothetically possess would have to stem from their mimetic function. For a name to be right, in the Cratylus, it must offer an accurate copy or imitation of a more original thing: “A name then it appears is a vocal imitation of that which is imitated and he who imitates with his voice names that which he imitates” (423b). In his encyclopedic study of the history of Cratylisms, entitled Mimologiques, Gérard Genette has argued that the end result of this mimetic approach to language is the exclusion of the possibility of any third term between motivation and arbitrariness. As Genette writes, “the weight of Socrates’ dilemma lies in this, that language can only be ‘arbitrary,’ that is to say either the effect of chance or of an individual’s whim, or ‘necessary,’ that is, justified by a direct relation between the ‘name’ and the ‘object.’”2 All of these related claims—that names are potentially either right or wrong, that rightness must be founded on mimesis, and that truth is to be located in statements, in logos, of which names are the example par excellence—relate Plato’s dialogue to the philosophical position which has grounded the majority of Cratylisms from Plato to the present, namely, correspondence theory, where truth is understood as an accurate assertion of a clear and distinct mental representation about some given object. Based upon this view, language is conceived as the exteriorization (or ex-pression) of phonetic signs representing that interior mental state, and any truth contained in language is not thought to inhere in the primordial experience of an object (or of a world) but in the secondary determination of the nature of particular objects in statements (the logos apophantikos). On Heidegger’s Closet Cratylism 59 When this view is applied to the act of naming, as it seems to be consistently in the Cratylus and the Cratylist tradition that follows from it, a ‘right name’ would be that which accurately corresponds to or mimics the thing to which it refers by way of letters and syllables. The search for a third term in the debate between Cratylus and Hermogenes will lead us here not to the middle position of Socrates, but instead to the more phenomenological understanding of naming offered by Heidegger, who shifts the discussion away from issues of rightness and mimesis towards what is for him the more ontologically primordial ground of disclosure (alētheia, Entbergung). By closely examining his controversial project of reviving archē Greek terms such as alētheia, eon, and logos, I will pinpoint and account for evidence of a certain closet Cratylism on Heidegger’s part, through which he subscribes to the inherent rightness of Greek words based on their superior mimetic character for the phenomena they describe. At a glance, Cratylism would appear to be necessarily at odds with Heidegger’s conception of language, due to his well-known antipathy for correspondence theory. If Heidegger is in any sense a Cratylist, or if he does at least evince something like a Cratylist nostalgia for an archē language of right names, then the question to be asked is whether this tendency is better understood as a philosophical lapse, inconsistent with but ultimately separate from his phenomenology, or perhaps as a more integral component of his sometimes idiosyncratic interpretation of the Greeks. Could Heidegger’s re-reading of key Greek terms, in other words, effect a kind of Cratylism sans Cratylism, which would open up the space for an interpretation of the rightness of names outside of the correspondence theory of truth? In order to address this, my method here will be to compare Heidegger’s scattered remarks on the virtues of particular words in order to trace symptoms of this closet version of Cratylism throughout his corpus. By drawing from works ranging from the 1920s to the 1950s, it is not my intention to collapse the distinction between the early and late Heideggers, but rather to demonstrate the continuity of his manner of speaking about language’s potential for appropriateness or rightness (before and after the Kehre) and to point out some of the pitfalls of such a position for Heidegger’s views on language as well as his related critique of the correspondence theory of truth. Traditionally, these philosophical/linguistic issues have been approached not in terms of Cratylism, of course, but in terms of Heidegger’s problematically nationalist nostalgia for the Ursprache. While it would be unproductive to reduce the present topic to yet another issue of his politics, Heidegger’s questionable belief that “along with German the Greek language is (in regard to its possibilities for thought) at once the most powerful and most spiritual of all languages,” is anything but irrelevant to our concerns here.3 It is well known that, for Heidegger, the history of philosophy is in one respect a history of the mistranslation of Greek 60 Christopher Eagle words into Latin, that is, the translation of an ontologically appropriate language, one which springs from Being itself, into a rationally static and increasingly vacuous terminology in which Being becomes more and more occluded over time. While there are important political consequences to this version of the history of Being, nevertheless, we cannot ask whether his preference for certain signifiers (a-lētheia, Seyn, Er-eignis, etc.) over others reflects a philosophical misstep, until we have first taken seriously his claims about what Greek and German keywords [Leitwörter] can do that corresponding words in other languages cannot. The Alpha Privative Argument From his early lectures on Plato and Aristotle in the 1920s to his writings on the Presocratics as late as the 1940s and 1950s (collected under the title Early Greek Thinking), Heidegger repeatedly insisted on the distinctly negative conception of truth that belonged to Greek thinking. Of greater significance for our discussion here is his equally longstanding insistence on the appropriateness of the Greek word for truth, alētheia, as a so-called mot juste for the more concrete phenomenon of unconcealment [Unverborgenheit].“The Greek word for truth,” Heidegger reminded his readers again and again,“is nothing accidental” [nicht zufällig],4 and its appropriateness, what makes alētheia a better fit than other possible locutions for rendering the specific negativity of Greek truth, stems for him from what he took to be the privative structure of its morphology, with the prefix a- attached to the root of lēthē, to indicate a negation or withdrawal of concealment.5 As for the exact role that the prefix a- plays, in the Parmenides lectures, Heidegger notes, “the word ‘unconcealedness’ [Unverborgenheit] indicates that something like a suspension or cancellation of concealedness belongs to the Greek experience of the essence of truth. The prefix ‘un-’ corresponds to the Greek a- which grammar calls ‘a privativum.’”6 In his commentary on Plato’s Sophist, he further adds, “this privative expression indicates that the Greeks had some understanding of the fact that the uncoveredness of the world must be wrested, that it is initially and for the most part not available.”7 Based on the criteria established in the Cratylus for language’s potential for rightness, Heidegger’s alpha-privative argument would seem to betray not just a ‘closet’ but an overt form of Cratylism, provided that the rightness of the word is actually predicated on the way in which its verbal structure, as a-lētheia or Un-verborgenheit, is thought to better imitate the nature of the phenomenon in question. If we grant for the moment that alētheia is somehow the right word for the job, so to speak, what then is the basis for its rightness? Is it simply a matter of the appropriateness of its privative structure? If so, are we to assume that Heidegger has slipped momentarily into a derivative understanding of language as the imitation of things by way of phonetic signs, or again, is there something which the word alētheia On Heidegger’s Closet Cratylism 61 can be said to do, which its counterparts (Veritas, Wahrheit, Truth, etc.) do not? The answer to this question about the virtue of alētheia as a “guiding” or “primal word” [Leitwort, Grundwort] lies for him as much in the word’s semantics as in its morphology. In the Parmenides lecture, he stresses the fact that alētheia, as unconcealment, remains preferable to the other available terms for truth simply by still meaning anything at all: The realm of the “concealed-unconcealed” is, if we do not deceive ourselves, more immediately familiar and accessible than what is expressed in the banal titles veritas and “truth.” Strictly speaking, the word “truth” does not give us anything to think and still less anything to represent “intuitively.” We must immediately call for help from a borrowed “definition” of truth in order to give significance to the word. A special consideration is first needed if we are to introduce ourselves into the realm of meaning of the word “truth.”“Unconcealedness,” though, is different in appealing to us immediately, even if also here we first probe uncertainly for what is meant.8 Here the value of alētheia as a guiding word does not lie in any supposed accuracy of its morphology, but rather in its propaedeutic force. By retaining a semantic concreteness, the Greek word is better equipped to give something over to thinking, something which more abstract terms such as Veritas and Wahrheit, due to their relative semantic vacuity, simply cannot do. At points, however, in his elaboration of the more concrete meaning of alētheia as unconcealment, Heidegger’s more strictly phenomenological argument cannot be disentangled from the philological case he makes regarding the word’s individual parts, for instance, when he claims that the exact sense of privation contained in the alpha-privative is specific in each case to the phenomena being un-concealed: “What kind of privatio, deprivation, and taking away is at stake in a privative word-formation depends in each case on what it is that is exposed to the deprivation.”9 Not only then is alētheia thought to be charged with a kind of bethinking power, by meaning ‘unconcealedness’ and not the more indeterminate concept of ‘truth,’ but it is also charged with a certain verbal dynamism, by virtue of its compound structure, something which more morphologically static words like Veritas are said to lack. Conformality and Phenomenological Kinship If the invention of a language of right names were in fact possible, and if these signs would be right based on the appropriateness either of certain phonemes or of certain morphemes (as with alētheia) for denoting certain things, then it would logically follow that similar things would have to possess similar-sounding words. In the history of Cratylist practices, this principle (known in semiotics as ‘conformality’) has guided most if not all of those a priori philosophical projects in which a new language was invented in order to correct the arbitrariness associ- 62 Christopher Eagle ated with natural language.10 In terms of everyday human communication, one can imagine the confusions that would result from a language in which names for related things bore a phonemic proximity to each other, with words for different species of the same genus varying sometimes only by a single letter. Despite the difficulties that such a language would pose for actual communication, conformality has nonetheless been one of the hallmarks of philosophical language projects, in particular, those of Renaissance Cratylists such as John Wilkins, Edward Dalgarno, et al. To cite the most extreme example of this approach, it was one of the primary goals of John Wilkins in his Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language (1668) to create a wholly conformal vocabulary, in which the properties of a given thing would be encoded on both the content and expression planes for each and every word of his invented language. What Wilkins hoped to gain by basing a language on this unnatural principle was a transparency between the sign and the thing it denotes, such that anyone fluent in his language, simply by being familiar with the qualities assigned to different phonemes, would immediately possess a clear and distinct mental representation of something upon hearing its name. What connection can be said to exist between an a priori project like that of Wilkins and the quest for an ontologically appropriate language of Heidegger is admittedly not self-evident. Heidegger never attempted nor even posited anything resembling a comprehensive artificial language. Moreover, the metaphysics of genera and particular as well as the instrumentalist view of signification which are typically reinforced by such projects were precisely what Heidegger was attempting to overcome. At the same time, an examination of his approach to philosophical keywords, with a view towards this Cratylist principle of conformality, does reveal an aspiration on his part for what we might call an ontologically conformal language, that is, a set of philosophical terms which would lay bare the fundamental relationships between particular phenomena by way of the phonemic similarity of their root-words. To reformulate this in Genette’s terms, Heidegger’s version of Cratylism in this case exhibits itself in what Genette calls both its “primary” and “secondary” forms. It is primary insofar as Heidegger privileges the Greek language for originally reflecting a phenomenological kinship between things, as we will show, by having endowed these things with phonetically similar rootwords. Its secondary form comes in his neologistic willingness to coin new sets of terms (not just new terms on a one-by-one basis) which together reflect phenomenological kinships verbally, also by way of a common prefix or root, when the terms that are available do not already reflect those kinships. The best place to turn for examples of this conformal aspiration is the discussion of fundamental words [Urwörter] in Early Greek Thinking, in which Heidegger strives towards a thoughtful encounter with the keywords of Presocratic philosophy, and in the process valorizes the rightness of many of these words in a On Heidegger’s Closet Cratylism 63 Cratylist vein. In his essay The Anaximander Fragment, he takes up the question of the essence of on and einai, the participial and infinitive forms in Greek of ‘being’ and ‘to be’ (das Sein and sein). Regarding the etymology of these words, he writes, “on says ‘being’ in the sense of to be a being; at the same time it names a being which is. In the duality of the participial significance of on the distinction between ‘to be’ and ‘a being’ lies concealed. What is here set forth, which at first may be taken for grammatical hair-splitting, is in truth the riddle of Being.”11 The richness that is said to come from this interplay between the nominal and verbal senses of the root word on has been lost, according to Heidegger, both through the translation into Latin and through the covering over of the original meaning of the Greek that came with Platonism. One of the goals of his essay is to recover some of that richness by translating our thinking over to the nexus of meanings contained in all of these related words (on and onta, estin and einai, ēn, and en, etc.). It is only when he raises the question of the relatedness as such of these related words, however, that his aspiration for a conformal vocabulary becomes fully apparent: In Plato and Aristotle we encounter the words on and onta as conceptual terms. The later terms “ontic” and “ontological” are formed from them. However, on and onta, considered linguistically, are presumably somewhat truncated forms of the original words eon and eonta. Only in the latter words is the sound preserved which relates them to estin and einai. The epsilon in eon and eonta is the epsilon in the root es of estin, est, esse, and “is.” In contrast on and onta appear as rootless participial endings, as though by themselves they expressly designated what we must think in those word-forms called by later grammarians metokē, participium, i.e., those word-forms which participate in the verbal and nominal senses of a word.12 It is easy to hear his preference in the above passage for a conformal expression in which a more dynamic sense of Being could be preserved among several terms at once. One finds a similar remark in the Moira essay, when he takes up the essence of the Greek name for thinking, noein. After stressing the relatedness of noein to einai for Parmenides, he laments the fact that,“noein, in not sounding the same as einai, gives the appearance of actually being an allo, something different, something set opposite Being and therefore apart from it.”13 On the contrary, noein, he informs us, shares a fundamental link to einai, as that which lets “what is present lie before us in its presencing,” and his conviction that this fundamental link ought to be reflected in the keywords for both phenomena is evident there as well. The extent to which we might attribute Cratylism to moments such as these, of which there are many in Heidegger’s writings on the Greek language, depends as we have said on the extent to which his project aims to correct not just our manner of thinking along with the Greeks but our manner of wording that thinking as well. As often as Heidegger cautions against the unthinking practice of “mere etymologizing” 64 Christopher Eagle as a substitute for an actual engagement with the things themselves, it is not always so easy to separate his own “grammatical hair-splitting” from his stricter contemplation of the phenomena, particularly in those moments when he fixates on the appropriateness of certain morphemes or even certain letters for rendering those phenomena. In each case, it is important to ask whether Heidegger’s conviction about the appropriateness of certain Greek signifiers is truly necessary to his phenomenological project and also whether it does not force him back into the very conception of language he was trying to avoid. With respect to philosophical terminology, Heidegger’s preference for one word over another is more often a matter of avoiding the wrong term than of finding the right one. To return to the discussion of on and eon, his preference for eon is not based solely on some phonetic effect of the letter epsilon, but rather on his desire to avoid the philosophical baggage which has attached itself to the other available term historically. The history of “to on” as a term is over-determined for him by its usage in the schools of both Platonism and Aristotelianism as part of the general conceptualization of Being which we have inherited from metaphysics. In turning to a more original word, what he hopes to avoid is an understanding of Being as the supreme genus or, as he puts it in Being and Time, as “the most universal or emptiest of concepts.”14 In one respect, it is precisely by being an obsolete form that the more original eon offers something of an escape from these conceptual trappings. In the sayings of the Presocratics, eon stands along with words like estin as an example of what he calls a “preconceptual word” [vorbegriffliche Wörte], a word which is said to spring from the thoughtful encounter of the early Greeks with Being itself, versus those “Platonic-Aristotelian conceptual terms” which, by abstracting away the meaning of Being, have driven Ontology into the background of philosophy.15 While the preference for eon over on, then, is largely a matter of the respective histories embedded in these two terms, one cannot ignore the iconic power Heidegger attributes to the very letter epsilon itself.16 In fact, in his privileging of the one term over the other, he seems at points almost to be arguing that the loss of the letter epsilon has largely determined those histories. Taking a somewhat puzzlingly literal approach to the etymological relation between roots, he tells us that, “the epsilon in eon and eonta is the epsilon in the root es of estin, est, esse, and ‘is.’”17 Without the epsilon, the essential link that exists between eon and estin, between ‘being’ and some form of ‘is-ness,’ is not made sufficiently manifest. What results from the loss of this letter is the so-called rootlessness of the later, abstracted forms, on and onta. Because of this concealment, keywords like on and onta are forced to stand apart from their related words, and this etymological deracination makes the conceptualization of Being that eventually takes place that much more possible. On Heidegger’s Closet Cratylism 65 In order to restore the link marked by the epsilon, Heidegger turns to Parmenides, whose thoughtful utterance of the word estin (‘it is’) is said to bring forth the resonance in all of the related words for being, in the specific terms of “eon, the presencing of what is present.”18 Just as alētheia was said to restore a more concrete meaning of truth as unconcealment, so eon in the same way restores the more concrete determination of being as presencing. This more determinate resonance, concealed and eventually forgotten in the conceptual terms on and onta, is said to be visible not just in eon but in all of the terms for being by way of the phonemic conformality which they share by virtue of this single letter. As a set of related words, they are even said to speak together in their relatedness, almost as though they were but one single word: “the word in question, with all its modifications, estin, ēn, estai, einai, speaks everywhere throughout the language.”19 In short, the Greeks both thought this connection and reflected this connection primordially in their speaking, through all of the related terms for being, and the mark of this relation is the letter epsilon itself.20 Essential Equivocation Heidegger’s reflections on the etymologies of the keywords of Greek thinking bear an intriguing resemblance to the discussion held in the Cratylus between Socrates and Hermogenes regarding many of the very same terms. After Socrates has analyzed the names of the divinities, followed by the names of the virtues, so as to uncover a possible basis for their rightness, Hermogenes redirects their discourse towards what are for him the four “noblest words,” namely, to on, alētheia, pseudos, and the name for name itself, onoma. In one of his more fanciful etymologies, Socrates does not divide alētheia privatively, as Heidegger does, but instead splits the word in half, into alē-theia, which he claims is a veiled reference to the motion (alē) of the Gods (theia) that allows truth to show itself. Pseudos, as its opposite, is understood to be a motionless term, and it is therefore thought to be rightly derived from a more sedentary noun for slumber (eudousi). The name for name itself, onoma, is said to have its origin in a phrase for searching, on ou masma estin (“the being of which the search is”), a derivation which is only recognizable in the adjectival form onomaston. Interestingly, when Socrates turns his attention to the name for being, to on, he determines that it is the letter iota, not epsilon, which has gone missing from the word: “The words to on (being) and ousia (existence) agree with alēthēs, with the loss of iota, for they mean ‘going’ (ion). And ouk on (not being) means ouk ion (not going), and indeed some people pronounce it so” (421b). What these slight variations in spelling indicate to Socrates is not a myth of the dawn of language in which one Namemaker proceeded rightly while all others proceeded wrongly, but a more pluralistic sense that there is more than one way to be right when it comes to letters and syllables. Letters, in other words, 66 Christopher Eagle may be the tools for rightness, but they are never for Socrates its ultimate source. Nor for that matter is the evidence for the rightness of names to be sought solely in the letters themselves, but rather in the eidetic nature of the things which the Namemaker is said only to embody or mimic through those letters. For Socrates, the dogmatic position assumed by Cratylus, who believes that wrong names are not names at all, comes from what we might refer to now, after Saussure, as a conflation of the signifier and the signified. The lesson to be learned from the possibility of having alternate words for the same thing, Socrates explains for the benefit of the reticent Cratylus, is that “whether the same meaning is expressed in one set of syllables or another makes no difference; and if a letter is added or subtracted, that does not matter either, so long as the essence of the thing named remains in force and is made plain in the name” (393d). In keeping with his middle position, however, Socrates also resists the equally dogmatic position held by Hermogenes, that whatsoever name we posit for something is as right as any other simply by virtue of consensus. To persuade him against this, Socrates reminds Hermogenes of the elevated status of the skill practiced by the Namemaker: “not everyone is an artisan of names, but only he who keeps in view the name which belongs by nature to each particular thing and is able to embody its form in the letters and syllables” (390e). In this, another presupposition of the dialogue emerges. First, if names can be right, their rightness would have to stem from their mimetic function, and second, there can be no rightness of names without some authority on the part of a Namemaker, whether that authority is derived from the Namemaker’s having right names (Cratylism) or from his having the right to name (Hermogenism).21 Although it remains to be seen whether Heidegger’s faith in the appropriateness of the Greek language should be understood as a kind of Cratylism, it probably goes without saying that one does not search after original words in the hopes of finding them wrong. On a methodological level, however, the parallels between Heidegger’s project and that of Socrates are by this point clear. Both are engaged in a search for the prōta onomata, the first names, and both assess the appropriateness of names to their corresponding phenomena in terms of the relative motivation of their morphologies. Both also express a kind of faith in the primordial rightness of an original Namemaker. In Heidegger, we hear this faith expressed in that refrain, uttered often in his works but not sufficiently questioned, that there are no accidents [nicht Zufall] when it comes to the Greek saying of Being. Evidently, Heidegger believes “the Greek word for truth,‘unhiddenness’, is nothing accidental [nicht zufällig].”22 So too, “the equation of to on and to einai is not an accidental, external, whimsical word choice [ist keine zufällige äußerliche Laune des Sprachgebrauches] but the first utterance of the fundamental question and answer of philosophy.”As for that blending of participial and infinitive senses in to on discussed above, Heidegger assures us that,“we are not dealing here with On Heidegger’s Closet Cratylism 67 a meaningless and arbitrary choice of words [eine nichtssagende Willkür des Sprachgebrauches]; all the more so because language is the source and wonder of our Dasein, and we may assume that philosophy did not misspeak at the time of its inception.”23 Were we to seek out the prototype, then, for a specifically Heideggerian Namemaker, this figure would certainly have to be based on his faith that in the dawn of Being philosophy could not have misspoken, that there is an inevitable appropriateness to the structure of the Ursprache. The most obvious place to look for this Namemaker would be Heidegger’s conception of the Poet as the one who lets language speak from out of a primordial encounter with Being. We might also though turn to his conception of the good Phenomenologist, whose descriptive language would draw out the kinships that exist between certain phenomena conformally, that is, through the use of similar-sounding words. As we have already noted, what makes conformality desirable for him has little if anything to do with its traditional role throughout the history of Cratylism, as a principle for the construction of rationally ordered languages rooted in the metaphysics of genera and particular. The ultimate goal of these projects was to provide their speakers with an accurate and adequate nomenclature, corresponding to clear and distinct ideas, which would remain impervious to the linguistic ‘vices’ of ambiguity and equivocation. But since there are essentially no accidents when it comes to the Ursprache, even those aspects of natural language traditionally seen as vices begin to look more like linguistic virtues, in the way Heidegger interprets them. More specifically, the emphasis on relationality which is one of the hallmarks of his ontology opens up the paradoxical possibility of there being rightness even to acts of equivocation. This is not to say that all verbal equivocation must be motivated, necessary, or somehow right. Heidegger is careful to distinguish between mere equivocation, in which several phenomena share an accidental (or unmotivated) homonymy, and what we will term here essential equivocation, in which several meanings are said to revolve around a central keyword necessarily, due to a fundamental relatedness that ties each of the phenomena together. To put this more plainly in Heidegger’s own idiom, the virtue of essential equivocation would lie in its power to set one on the path to thinking the relatedness as such of related phenomena. Heidegger’s most extended remarks on the difference between mere and essential equivocation come in his commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics: Book Theta, where the difference between the two is couched in terms of homonymy versus synonymy: If beings are addressed in various ways, then being is articulated in as many ways. Therefore the word “being” has a multiple meaning: for example, being as being true or being possible or being at hand or being accidental; in each of these meanings, being is referred to. Or is it only the linguistic expression 68 Christopher Eagle that the above-mentioned words have in common, whereas their meanings have absolutely no connection to each other? Just as [in German] the word Strauss can mean a bird, a bouquet of flowers, or a dispute. Here only the aural and written forms are the same in each, while the meanings and the things referred to are entirely different. Only the words are the same—a homoiotēs tou onomatos. Does the word “being” have only this sort of mere sameness of name? Are its many meanings (as Aristotle says) only said homōnumōs? Clearly not; we understand being in being true and being possible in such a way that it expresses a certain sameness in each differentiation, even though we may be unable to grasp it. The being [Sein] that is expressed in the various meanings is no mere homonym; it implies a certain pervasive oneness of the understood significations. And this one meaning is related to the individual ways of being as koinon ti, as common. What then is the character of this koinon? Is the koinotēs, the commonness of the on, somewhat like when we say, for example, “The ox is a living being” and “The farmer is a living being”? To both we ascribe what belongs to living beings in general. “Living being” is said of both of them, not simply homōnumōs (aequivoce) but sunōnumōs (univoce). We do not here have simply a sameness of names; the two have the name in common, jointly, because each concretely defines what the name means through this one thing (living being). The farmer is a rational and the ox a nonrational living being; in contrast, Strauss, meaning a bouquet of flowers, is not a kind of bird.24 In all of the previous examples, the case for Heidegger’s closet Cratylism was a matter of his conflating two strata of language, primordial language versus signification, (Sagen versus Sprache or Rede) in his rhetoric on the keywords of Greek thinking. Again, this would only be truly Cratylist insofar as he bases his sense of the appropriateness of particular words on their phonological or morphological characteristics. In the comparison of Sein and Strauss, the distinction between language as disclosure of Being and language as signification is maintained much more carefully, yet the viability of a very different kind of rightness (in this case an ontological rightness to acts of synonymy) emerges to take the other’s place. One is hard pressed to find an example, in fact, apart from his discussion of the word Strauss, in which Heidegger does not revalorize an equivocation into the more positive terms of a synonymy that is motivated by Being itself. Regarding the relatedness of the equivocal senses of doxa, for example, Heidegger makes the related claim in An Introduction to Metaphysics that, “the many meanings of this word are not the result of careless speech [keine Nachlässigkeit der Sprache]. They are a playing deeply grounded in the mature wisdom of a great language.”25 His approach to early German equivocations as well, such as those revolving around the word bauen in Building Dwelling Thinking, or the word Helle in The Essence of Truth, reflect the same insistence on the motivated character of what might On Heidegger’s Closet Cratylism 69 otherwise seem to be ordinary verbal accidents caused by the arbitrariness of natural language.26 Instead, what we find again and again is the same underlying conviction that occurrences of equivocation among the keywords of early Greek (and German) thinking cannot be the result of a haphazard or arbitrary speech, but that each must be motivated by (and reflective of) an ontological insight on the part of an early Namemaker. The instance of this essential equivocation most central to his thinking comes in Heidegger’s approach to the nexus of meanings revolving around the keywords logos and legein: Who would want to deny that in the language of the Greeks from early on legein means to talk, say, or tell? However, just as early and even more originally . . . it means what our similarly sounding legen means: to lay down and lay before. . . . All the same it remains incontestable that legein means, predominantly if not exclusively, saying and talking. Must we therefore, in deference to this preponderant and customary meaning of legein, which assumes multiple forms, simply toss the genuine meaning of the word, legein as laying, to the winds? Dare we ever do such a thing? Or is it not finally time to engage ourselves with a question which probably decides many things? The question asks: How does the proper sense of legein, to lay, come to mean saying and talking?27 The answer to this question, of course, is that legein, as saying, is simultaneously a kind of gathering, that in its saying, the logos always gathers and lays before (lesen). The outcome of this collapsing of the difference between equivocation and synonymy is the very same quasi-Cratylist conviction in the appropriateness of the Ursprache. In the examples cited above, Heidegger was basing that appropriateness on a phenomenological similarity made evident by the phonemes of several related words (eon, estin, etc.). Here he is arguing in a reverse manner for the rightness of various meanings, meanings which might seem unrelated to one another, being contained within a single word. From the vantage-point of traditional Cratylisms, such semantic co-incidences would be simply that, mere coincidence, and representative of what is wrong with natural language in which one word may stand for unrelated things. By contrast, for Heidegger, the disclosure of the synonymy of gathering and saying is nothing short of an ontological event, “an event whose immensity still lies concealed in its long unnoticed simplicity.”28 Evidently, this simple event is anything but an accident. The Rightness of Right Names With some light now shed on Heidegger’s relationship to the question posed in the Cratylus concerning the possibility of right names, we are still left with the question of the exact nature of rightness as such. What is rightness and what does it mean to be right when it comes to language? The Greek term employed throughout the Cratylus for the rightness or correctness of names is orthos, the senses of which 70 Christopher Eagle include ‘right,’ ‘straight,’ ‘erect’ or ‘upright,’ and from which we derive words such as orthodoxy, orthography, etc. “Right names” (onomatos orthotēta), according to Cratylus himself, are those which in some sense reflect a “natural correctness” (tēn phusei orthotēta [391a]) with respect to the things that are named. In their etymological dictionary, Liddell and Scott list “straight” as in “height, upright, standing” as the primary definition of orthos. They also note its usage in astronomical discourses (i.e., “ortha zodia” meaning “signs which rise vertically”), and one can see how the astronomical sense of ‘uprightness’ would apply to the perpendicular angle of ninety degrees we refer to as either ‘right’ or ‘orthogonal.’ Heidegger’s own interpretation of rightness [Richtigkeit] hinges on what is for him one of the most significant events in the history of Being, the shift from an understanding of truth as unconcealment to truth as the correctness of statements. His idiosyncratic reading of the word orthos is inextricably tied to that history, and in the Parmenides lectures, he attempts to retrieve a more original meaning for this keyword, by distinguishing it as completely as possible from any metaphysical connotations of rightness as rectitude which it is usually thought to possess: The Greek orthos means “straight ahead,” on and along the way, namely the way of the view and prospect toward the unconcealed. The basic meaning of orthos is different from the Roman rectum, that which is directed toward what is above because it directs from above and commands and “rules” from above. The Roman rectitude has also misconstrued the Greek orthotes, which belongs to homoiōsis, whose essence is originally attached to alētheia. The disclosive assimilation to the unconcealed within unconcealedness is a going along, namely along the way leading straight ahead, orthōs, to the unconcealed. Homoiōsis is orthotes. Orthos, thought in the Greek manner, has, primordially, nothing in common with the Roman rectum or with our “right.”29 The dismantling of our commonplace sense of rightness could hardly be clearer here. Orthos, as the early Greeks understood it, has nothing at all to do with that sense of rightness which grounds correspondence theory, and presumably along with it, all traditionally Cratylist approaches to language. Moreover, homoiōsis acts as a kind of bridge between the related meanings of rightness and unconcealment which were in a sense disconnected with the fundamental transformation that took place in the essence of truth. The question then seems to be when to date this transformation, whether with the Presocratics, with Plato, or with Aristotle, and partially to address this, Heidegger gestures to the central role homoiōsis plays in the Metaphysics, as an indication of the radical shift in Western thought that is about to be completed. But if homoiōsis is still in any sense orthotes for Plato when he writes the Cratylus, and if orthos is to be thought not just mimetically, but directionally as well, not as the mirroring of reality by words, but as the route offered by words along the path to the unconcealed, this would seem to require an entirely different understanding of the theory of right names in the Cratylus as well. On Heidegger’s Closet Cratylism 71 If Heidegger allows us therefore to rewrite the terms of Cratylism in a way that situates it outside of the correspondence theory of truth, he has made this possible by shifting the sense of rightness away from an epistemological ground towards an ontological one. Rightness in language never being for him a matter of accurate, stable terminology (based on a twofold epistemological/linguistic determination), as it was with the Renaissance inheritors of the Roman conception of rectitudo (i.e., Wilkins), Heidegger’s ontologically appropriate language is characterized instead by what he refers to in the Sophist lectures as “delotic naming,” a term which he derives from the Greek verb dēloun (to show, to reveal), in order to designate the manifestness of phenomena which primordial language makes possible. Whatever the nature of rightness may be, this phenomenological power of language to make manifest is, both for Socrates and for Heidegger, a matter not just of the rightness of letters and syllables but of the force (dunamis or Kraft) of their saying. In his compromise between Cratylism and Hermogenism, Socrates emphasizes again and again “this attractive force of likeness” [to dunaton homoia] between word and thing (435c), and the related power of a right name to “make its force plain” [dēloumenēn tēn dunamin],” despite any superficial changes to its letters and syllables from one dialect to another (393e). Likewise, Heidegger stresses in the Sophist lectures, “words have a genuine dunamis koinōnias as dēlōmata as ‘revealing,’ i.e., revealing beings, as dēlōmata peri tēn ousian ‘as showing something in the field of presence.’”30 It is in this light that we should take his declaration in Being and Time, that “the ultimate business of philosophy is to preserve the force of the most elemental words [die Kraft der elementarsten Wörte] in which Dasein expresses itself.”31 Neither uncovering right names nor creating them anew is sufficient because, without the philosophical force contained in the “thoughtfully-spoken word” (denkend gesagten Wort), the rightness of right names could never become manifest. Within what is still a fundamentally Cratylist framework in which words could potentially be right, Heidegger thus introduces this second-order possibility of our voiding right words of their philosophical force when we use them in an unthinking way. While this insistence on the force of language’s disclosure (beyond the rightness of mere signification) does seem to mitigate his Cratylism, it also raises difficult questions about the usefulness of his project of unearthing archē words. If the possibility exists, after all, of uttering a ‘right’ word such as alētheia in an unthoughtful, unforceful way, something which he assures us is indeed possible, then does the alternate possibility of thoughtfully, forcefully uttering a ‘wrong’ word like Veritas not exist as well? If this were the case, it would seem to beg the question of why one needs to retrieve elemental words at all. Of course, one can imagine Heidegger’s resistance to such a suggestion, and it is precisely in that resistance that his complicated relationship to Cratylism reveals itself. 72 Christopher Eagle NOTES 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. Gérard Genette, Mimologiques: Voyage en Cratylie (Paris: Éditions de Seuil, 1976), 17. Ibid., 134. Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1959), 57. Cf. The Heidegger Controversy (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993), 114. Heidegger never veered from his belief in the philosophical superiority of the Greek and German languages. In his final public interview conducted for Der Spiegel in 1966, and only published after his death in May 1976, he makes the following remarks regarding the merits of the German language: “I have in mind especially the inner relationship of the German language with the language of the Greeks and their thought. This has been confirmed for me again today by the French. When they begin to think, they speak German, being sure that they could not make it with their own language.” Martin Heidegger, The Essence of Truth, trans. Ted Sadler (New York: Continuum, 2002), 11. Cf. Paul Friedländer, Plato: An Introduction, trans. H. Meyherhoff (New York: Pantheon, 1958), 221–9. Friedländer famously critiqued the philological validity of Heidegger’s etymologies, especially his reading of alētheia as unconcealment. Of course, the philological merit of Heidegger’s claims do not affect our argument here. On the contrary, it is in those moments of ‘creative’ etymology where Heidegger’s Cratylism is most apparent. Martin Heidegger, Parmenides, trans. André Schuwer and Richard Rojcewicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 13. Martin Heidegger, Plato’s Sophist, trans. Richard Rojcewicz and André Schuwer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 11. Heidegger, Parmenides, 13. Ibid., 14. Cf. Umberto Eco, The Search for the Perfect Language, trans. James Fentress (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, Inc., 1995), 22–4. The Danish linguist Louis Hjelmslev, to whom Eco refers in his account of the differences between a priori projects and their more natural counterparts, characterizes natural language according to the two principles of “double articulation” and “non-conformality.” The second principle of non-conformality holds that similar-sounding words need not be related to one another lexically. A ‘dog’ is a canine mammal, a ‘log’ is a piece of wood, a ‘bog’ is a swampy marsh, and so on. The referents of each of these similar-sounding words bear no relation to one another because the expression-plane and the content-plane of natural languages are ordered along completely separate lines. Martin Heidegger, Early Greek Thinking, trans. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1975), 32. Ibid. Ibid., p. 95. On Heidegger’s Closet Cratylism 73 14. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: SUNY Press, 1996), 22. 15. Heidegger, Early Greek Thinking, 30. 16. Examples of the two other major types of Cratylist practice outlined by Gérard Genette—what Genette terms “graphic” and “phrastic” Cratylisms—are less prevalent in Heidegger’s writings than the phonological and morphological examples cited above, however, they do merit our attention briefly here. Graphic Cratylism refers to those written practices which reflect a conviction not just in right-naming, but in something like ‘right-writing’ or “orthography” (ortho graphē). Rightness here would be predicated on the written medium’s capacity to imitate things not only phonetically, but also in a visual or pictorial way. Although there is nothing hieroglyphic per se about Heidegger’s approach to language, nevertheless, he repeatedly brings the role of writing as a visual medium into play for the purpose of defamiliarizing certain philosophical terms and/or shedding them of their metaphysical connotations. Hence, Heidegger’s reliance on orthographic tricks like the altered spellings of Dasein, a-lētheia, Er-eignis, and of course the silent respellings of Sein as either Seyn or Sein. His idiosyncratic use of the hyphen (especially in the numerous hyphenated coinages in Being and Time like “In-der-Welt-sein”) also betrays a graphic Cratylism through which Heidegger visually (and silently) emphasizes the relational aspects of his ontology. Perhaps the most telling example of his sensitivity to the visual possibilities of philosophical writing comes in Early Greek Thinking, when he laments the transliteration of Greek words into Latin script: “Meanwhile an epoch of Being soon comes in which energeia is translated as actualitas. The Greek is shut away, and to the present day the word appears only in Roman type” (56). This sensitivity to the visual dimension of philosophical texts, as we know, has been vastly influential in the poststructuralist traditions that follow from Heidegger, however, the logic that underlies this mimetic approach is perhaps misguided, since it seems necessarily to depend upon a conception of language as the accurate imitation of phenomena. Lastly, phrastic Cratylism is a way of ascribing rightness on the broader plane of syntax to the ordering of whole phrasings—the phrase juste instead of the mot juste. The epistemology of subject and object that traditionally accompanies phrastic Cratylisms (cf. Mimologiques, chap. 9) seems no more compatible with Heidegger’s project than the use of conformality in John Wilkins’ a priori system. Still, we find Heidegger at points insisting on the potential rightness of certain word-orderings over others, for instance, his approach to positional syntax in his interpretation of two key-phrases by Parmenides and Bishop Berkeley (cf. Heidegger, Early Greek Thinking, 85). Another example comes in Heidegger’s cryptic saying, “Das Wesen der Sprache: Die Sprache des Wesens.” In On the Way to Language, Heidegger treats this chiasmic saying in much the same way that he treated the set of words revolving around eon in the Anaximander essay. That is to say, he treats the phrase almost as though it were a single keyword and insists on the correctness of the internal arrangement of its parts: “Within the whole, there plays a discourse and a beckoning that point to something which we, coming from the first turn of phrase, do not suspect in the second; for that second phrase is more than just a mere rearrangement of the words in the first” (94; emphasis added). The implication here—that certain word orders 74 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. Christopher Eagle can correspond more adequately than others to phenomena—again associates him with correspondence theories in which language is understood as a medium in which word (or in this case, phrase) corresponds to thing. Ibid., p. 32. Ibid., p. 39. Ibid., p. 31. To my knowledge, Heidegger never broaches what would be the ultra-Cratylist question, that is, whether the very sound of epsilon is the ‘right sound’ with which to render presencing. Nevertheless, in his nostalgic aspiration for a conformal vocabulary of similar-sounding rootwords, something like a Cratylist approach to language is certainly at work. One of the vestiges of this aspiration for conformal terms is the position taken by certain translators of Heidegger about how best to render his own conformal keywords into other languages. The most telling example of what we might call a conformal approach to translating Heidegger is the recent translation of Contributions to Philosophy by Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly. It was the stated hallmark of this translation to reflect as much as possible in English the “phenomenological kinship” expressed in Heidegger’s choice of words for related phenomena. In their Foreword to the Bëitrage, Emad and Maly elaborate on the phenomenological kinship amongst the sets of related terms that surround keywords such as bergen, rücken, werfen, and of course words with the prefix er-. The soundness of this as a technical principle of translation is not of concern here, however, Maly and Emad go on to insist that “this phenomenological kinship must at all costs be reflected in the English translation in order for this translation to belong to the domain of phenomenological thinking.” The quasi-Cratylist presuppositions to this approach are left wholly unexamined, but the philosophical questions it raises are hopefully clear in the light of our discussion here. Cf. John Sallis, Being and Logos: Reading the Platonic Dialogues (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), chap. 4, “Logos and Its Parts: Cratylus.” Heidegger, The Essence of Truth, p. 11. Martin Heidegger, Aristotle’s Metaphysics Book Theta 1–3: On the Essence and Actuality of Force, trans. Walter Brogan and Peter Warnek (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 20, 16. Ibid., p. 28. Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, 105. Heidegger, The Essence of Truth, 40. On the synaesthetic link between Helle (brightness) and hallen (to echo), Heidegger insists,“such linguistic transferences from the realm of the audible to the visible are never accidental [nie zufällig] and generally indicate an early power [Kraft] and wisdom of language.” He goes on to add that this kind of association “can only happen on the basis of an essential kinship between the two phenomena” [eine Wesensverwandtschaft beider Phänomene]. Heidegger, Early Greek Thinking, 60. Ibid., 63. Heidegger, Parmenides, 81. Cf. Heidegger, The Essence of Truth, 27, and Basic Writings, 390. On Heidegger’s Closet Cratylism 75 30. Martin Heidegger, Plato’s Sophist, trans. Richard Rojcewicz and André Schuwer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 408. In the same chapter, Heidegger makes his only explicit reference (of which I am aware) to the Cratylus, when he comments dismissively on the relationship of onoma and rhēma in the dialogue: “Plato had already employed these terms in earlier dialogues, e.g., in the Cratylus, but there he still had no genuine understanding of onoma and rhēma and certainly not of their sumplokē” (402). 31. Heidegger, Being and Time, 262.