I’ve read quite a lot over the past two weeks, but because I’ve been bottling up a paper I haven’t managed to write notes in time. Still, I’ll jot down a few lines offhand, since this may also have something to do with the paper I’m about to write (about Heidegger’s ready-to-hand and guidance, and so on), so I won’t follow the order of the books.
In other philosophy, especially early analytic philosophy, language is often analyzed as proposition, and what is called “truth” is also taken to be some kind of proposition or something that corresponds to a proposition. For example, Tarski said, “‘It is raining’ if and only if it is raining,” and this is said to be a definition of truth.
Phenomenology does not regard the world as a collection of propositions, nor does it take propositional judgment to be the main meaning of language. In fact, I am even wondering whether, when language appears in the form of propositional judgment, it is precisely not appearing as authentic language. According to Heidegger’s distinction, things have two states for human beings: one is the ready-to-hand state, and the other is the present-at-hand state. Take a hammer, for instance: only when it is handy in use, so much so that the hammer itself is entirely unobtrusive, is the hammer most authentically given to us as a hammer; but when something goes wrong with the hammer—for example, when it is missing or damaged—we begin to look for it and direct our attention to it. At that point it becomes a present-at-hand thing for us, confronting us as an objective object. Yet at that moment the role the hammer plays is no longer the role of the hammer itself.
In my own words, when a medium is perceived by me as a medium, it is transparent; I pass through it and directly contact what is presented through it (the goal, the content). But when it is no longer transparent, when I take the medium itself up and contact it as the goal or content, it has lost its original mediality. This process can be called de-medialization or added medialization: by “de-” I mean that something that originally existed as a medium no longer functions as a medium but becomes the content of perception; by “added medialization” I mean that, in order to turn what was originally a medium into content, we need to create distance from it, that is, insert another medium; or rather, we need to make a “cut,” severing the medium as an extension of the body from our body so that it becomes an alien object.
Language is such a tool, or rather such a medium. It is precisely the most universal medium, which is to say, it can be inserted almost anywhere in order to separate us from things; language can most easily turn anything into content.
So when language functions as language, it is like glasses functioning as glasses, or a hammer as a hammer, in a ready-to-hand state: what it plays is the role of a medium. It must point toward something, or bring something to presence, or, one might say, “draw out” something. Like any ready-to-hand medium, it always functions within a specific context; waving a hammer at empty air does not count as the hammer’s proper state. The ready-to-hand state is always contextual.
And when we use language in the most natural way, it is also always within some context, playing the role of a medium—that is, pointing toward other things. For example, if I say “It is raining,” depending on the specific context, I may well be pointing to: you should take an umbrella before going out; or, we should bring in the clothes hanging outside; or, in the simplest sense: why don’t you look out the window too? The person who hears this sentence will not direct attention to the sentence “It is raining” itself, will not regard it as a proposition to be judged true or false, but will instead go straight through it and attend to the umbrella, the clothes, or the window outside. Only when this sentence has a problem—just as only when glasses have a problem do you begin to notice them themselves and take them as a present-at-hand object—only then does speech become a “proposition.” In other words, the “proposition” is language in its inauthentic state, the present-at-hand state of language as medium, the result of de-medializing or added-medializing speech. By de-medialization I mean that at this point the proposition no longer points to what it originally meant; you set the umbrella, the clothes, and the window aside and scrutinize the sentence itself. By added medialization I mean that, in order to examine this sentence as content, you need to insert another medium. This medium may also be language: for example, “What did you just say?” “Really?” “It is said that ‘It is raining.’” It may also be symbols or gestures. Only when “It is raining” is taken as content and pointed to by another medium does it become a “proposition.”
Of course, someone may say that language as “proposition” is still more basic after all, because if you cannot understand “It is raining” in the sense of propositional judgment, how could you then use that sentence to pay attention to the umbrella? This is like saying that if you do not first produce the hammer as a present-at-hand object, if you do not first have the glasses as a present-at-hand object in hand, how could you use them in a ready-to-hand way? But I can also ask in return: if there were not already some prior understanding of the intention of “hitting,” how could we ever possibly make an instrument for hitting? If there were no “seeing,” where would glasses come from? In Heidegger’s terms, “what for” or “for the sake of what” is the more basic thing.
2010年4月29日
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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