ND I.II., The Child’s Question
The child, fundamental ontology could argue, if it wasn’t too ontic-psychological to do so, inquires into being. The reflection drives this out of it, and the reflection of the reflection would like, as ever in idealism, to render compensation for this.
The child’s question is the naive “why” question, e.g., the series of whys leading to being itself, as the ontologist might see it. The child asks without reflection, and later, as the child grows, reflection drives out this immediate orientation towards being—again, as the ontologist might see it. Then reflection on this reflection, including in the form of philosophy and particularly idealism, tries to recover what has been lost in reflection, providing stand-ins. But there’s no way of getting back.
But the doubled reflection hardly asks immediately, as the child does. Philosophy paints the latter’s conduct with the anthropomorphism, as it were, of the adult, as that of the childhood of the entire species, as pretemporal- supratemporal.
Reflection and/or philosophy misinterprets the child’s “why” questions as questions about being, but this is a kind of anthropomorphism, projecting our world/thing, subject/object dichotomy back on to the child’s experience. What is actually happening is that the child is learning to use language, struggling to replace its practical engagement with a matching of word and thing.
Its naivete is unnaive. As language, culture migrates into the earliest impulses of its consciousness; a mortgage on all talk of originality.
The question, “Why is the bench called a bench?” is not naively directed immediately at the bench in itself. The child is asking about words as much as about the bench. There is no pure origin.
The meaning of the words and their truth-content, their “position towards objectivity” are not yet sharply defined from each other; to know what the word bench means, and what a bench really is – which does include the existential judgement – is one and the same to that consciousness or not at all differentiated, and which by the way in countless cases can be distinguished only with difficulty.
Word and thing, subject and object, have not been fully separated. This means that the immediacy is, in the beginning, an immediacy with a unitary bundle of word and thing.
Oriented to the storehouse of words it has acquired, childhood immediacy is to this extent mediated in itself, the preformed boring into the why, into the first.
So childhood immediacy is mediated, because it always already goes through language. That we “see” through words from the beginning is something we forget, projecting an immediacy back on to it mistakenly.
It is in Heidegger’s favor that there is no non-linguistic in-itself; that therefore language is in the truth, this latter is not in language, as something merely signified by such. But the constitutive share of language in the truth does not establish any identity of both.
Language is involved in truth from the start; we cannot get to the pure pre-linguistic thing. But it doesn’t follow that language is truth, i.e., that there is no non-linguistic remainder.
The power of language proves itself by the expression and thing stepping out of each other in the reflection. Language becomes an office of truth only in the consciousness of the non-identity of the expression with what is meant.
This is a clear and elegant formulation of non-identity. It’s a bit like a negative correspondence theory.
He goes on to say that Heidegger stops at this point, turns back, and tries to bestow the power of the “more” through a naming ritual: naming it “being” and applying his special neologisms, as if they held magic power. But we are past all that.
It is more than a sign only through its signifying power, there where it most exactly and densely holds what is meant. It is, only insofar as it becomes, in the continuous confrontation of expression and thing …
The sign exceeds what it signifies when it signifies well. This happens contingently, in ongoing linguistic and conceptual refinements—not because language is a sacred code for being, as Heidegger seems to think. Thus he is guilty of a kind of mysticism, Teutonic Kabbalistics, i.e., a version of Kabbalah for the German language.
This manner of destroying traditional metaphysics is blind to its own cultural embeddedness, and does not stop to question it as any truly radical philosophy would.