V. Further Reading

The three lectures that follow bear the title “The Nature of Language.” They are intended to bring us face to face with a possibility of undergoing an experience with language. To undergo an experience with something – be it a thing, a person, or a god – means that this something befalls us, strikes us, comes over us, overwhelms and transforms us. When we talk of “undergoing” an experience, we mean specifically that the experience is not of our own making; to undergo here means that we endure it, suffer it, receive it as it strikes us and submit to it. It is this something itself that comes about, comes to pass, happens.

To undergo an experience with language, then, means to let ourselves be properly concerned by the claim of language by entering into and submitting to it. If it is true that man finds the proper abode of his existence in language – whether he is aware of it or not – then an experience we undergo with language will touch the innermost nexus of our existence. We who speak language may thereupon become transformed by such experiences, from one day to the next or in the course of time. But now it could be that an experience we undergo with language is too much for us moderns, even if it strikes us only to the extent that for once it draws our attention to our relation to language, so that from then on we may keep this relation in mind.

Suppose, specifically, we were asked head-on: In what relation do you live to the language you speak? We should not be embarrassed for an answer. Indeed, we would at once discover a guideline and not point of reference with which to lead the question into channels where it can safely be left.

We speak our language. How else can we be close to language except by speaking? Even so, our relation to language is vague, obscure, almost speechless. As we ponder this curios situation, it can scarcely be avoided that every observation on the subject will at first sound strange and incomprehensible. It therefore might be helpful to us to rid ourselves of the habit of always hearing only what we already understand. Thus my proposal is addressed not only to all those who listen; it is addressed still more to him who tries to speak of language, all the more when he does so with the sole intent to show possibilities that will allow us to become mindful of language and our relation to it.

But this, to undergo an experience with language, is something else again than to gather information about language. Such information – linguistics and philologist of the most diverse languages, psychologist and philologists of the most diverse languages, psychologists and analytic philosophers supply it to us and constantly increase the supply, ad infinitum. Of late, the scientific and philosophical investigation of languages is aiming ever more resolutely at the production of what is called “metalanguage.” Analytical philosophy, which is set on producing this super-language, is thus quite consistent when it considers itself metalinguistics. That sounds like metaphysics – not only sounds like it, it is metaphysics. Metalinguistics is the metaphysics of the thoroughgoing technicalization of all languages into the sole operative instrument of interplanetary information. Metalanguage and sputnik, and rocketry are the Same.

However, we must not give grounds for the impression that we are here passing negative judgment on the scientific and philosophical investigation of language and of languages. Such investigation has its own particular justification and retains its own importance. But scientific and philosophical information about language is one thing; an experience we undergo with language is another. Whether the attempt to bring us face to face with the possibility of such an experience will succeed, and if it does, how far that possible success will go for each one of us ­– that is not up to any of us.

What is left for us to do is to point out ways that bring us to face to face with a possibility of undergoing an experience with language. Such ways lave long existed. But they are seldom used in such a manner that the possible experience with language is itself given voice and put into language. In experiences which we undergo with language, language itself brings itself to language. One would think that this happens anyway, any time anyone speaks. Yet at whatever time and in whatever way we speak a language, language itself never has the floor. Any number of things are given voice in speaking, above all what we are speaking about: a set of facts, an occurrence, a question, a matter of concern. Only because in everyday speaking language does not bring itself to language does not bring itself to language but holds back, are we able simply to go ahead and speak a language, and so to deal with something and negotiate something by speaking.

But when does language speak itself as language? Curiously enough, when we cannot find the right word for something that concerns us, carries us away oppresses or encourages us. Then we leave unspoken what we have in mind and, without rightly giving it through, undergo moments in which language itself has distinctly and fleetingly touched us with its essential being.

But when the issue is to put into language something which has never yet been spoken, then everything depends on whether language gives or withholds the appropriate word. Such is the case of the poet. Indeed, a poet might even come to the point where he is compelled – in his own way, that is, poetically – to put into language the experience he undergoes with language.

Among Stephan George’s late, simple, almost songlike poems there is one entitled “The Word.” It was first published in 1919. Later it was included in the collection Das Neue Reich. The poem is made up of seven stanzas. The first three are clearly marked off from the next three, and these two triads as a whole are again marked off from the seventh, final stanza. The manner in which we shall here converse with this poem, briefly but throughout all three lectures, does not claim to be scientific. The poem runs:

The Word

Wonder or dream from distant land