Most of the people think languages are merely a kind of tools we need in order to communicate, to communicate, to express one’s own ideas, to connect with other people etc. In order to achieve all this we hardly can do without language. Language is seen as the means to another end, it is regarded as something coming after something more important. The real life comes first, and then comes the language which provides us with the tools to talk about it.

But does this view make sense? Without any kind of language we can’t communicate about the world, we can’t communicate at all, we can’t have any contact with others, maybe apart from the kind of contact babies have with the outside world. If we can’t talk about the world, the world, in some sense, does not exist for us. Of course, it exists regardless of us, but it has no meaning to us, if we can’t express our thoughts, feelings, opinion about it.

This might be the meaning of Heidegger’s famous sentence in his ‘Brief über den Humanismus’: “Die Sprache ist das Haus des Seins.” (Language is the house of the being). But let’s see what he wrote: “Im Denken kommt das Sein zur Sprache. Die Sprache ist das Haus des Seins. In ihrer Behausung wohnt der Mensch. Die Denkenden und die Dichtenden sind die Wächter dieser Behausung. Ihr Wachen ist das Vollbringen der Offenbarkeit des Seins, insofern sie diese durch ihr Sagen zur Sprache bringen und in der Sprache aufbewahren.”

These famous sentences are often discussed, but it seems most of the people don’t take them quite literally as I would like to do here. But first, let’s translate them (even so we must bear in mind that we will talk about the translation and not about Heidegger’s text, which is a completely different thing): Language is the house of the Being. In its home man dwells. Those who think and those create with words are the guardians of this home. Their guardianship accomplishes the manifestation of Being insofar as they bring through their speaking the manifestation to language and maintain it in language through their speech.

It is quite astonishing that he addresses the language as a house where basically all our life happens. Which means exactly the opposite of the commonly assumed idea of language. The language is the fundament of all our life, we don’t have anywhere to live without the language, we can live only in the language, life without language does not exist. That is where we all live, we common people. On the other hand, people who think and create writing, philosophers and writers, guard the language, they protect ‘her’. (I am not a native English speaker, but it sounds odd to me to call the language by the neutral gender ‘it’. This might be due to the fact that in German the language is feminin. Or just think about ships which once in English were the only not living being getting assigned a female pronoun.) Not that language needs any doing of a human being, but I assume what Heidegger is saying is that philosophers and writers use language in a different way as common people do. Often our everyday language seems threatened by its own use and its own users, distorted, abused, simplified to an extend she can’t be recognized anymore. Philosophers and writers might reinvent her so that she does not die, through language they bring the world to life, creating language creates the world and not the other way round. We understand that easily when reading a book. A whole world stands up in front of our eyes just through the writer’s words, but eventually our whole life is created in the same way, like a fairytale, like a book, through language, only words can create that world, not the things we assume we find in the world and we have just to discover. They are literally not there.

In Heidegger’s last sentence, the double meaning of ‘zur Sprache bringen’ got lost in translation. Nowadays, it is very likely that we would take the non literal meaning of ‘ to bring something up’ which is probably not what Heidegger meant, hence the translation of the literal meaning into English. In the English translation this doubt has vanished, or even more, for a typical reader of the German text the literal meaning is quite difficult to perceive. For Heidegger this might have never occurred a problem, but for us now it is, at least, a possibility. Language has evolved, and so has our world. The same text, the same words, but a different meaning. What has changed? The language, and not the world, at least not in this regard.

Then Wittgenstein’s ‘Die Grenzen meiner Sprache bedeuten die Grenzen meiner Welt.’ (The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.)

At this point, I need a parenthesis. I am not sure what Wittgenstein wanted to say with this sentence, but that is not the point. I am actually not interested in what he wanted to say. It is futile to ponder about what an author could have meant. Once a text is written, the text is not the author’s anymore (that is what writers using a pseudonym have understood), but of everybody reading his or her text, it has become the reader’s text. Roland Barthes called this the “death of the author”. Have you ever experienced this situation that you read or hear something and you go, ‘Oh, that is exactly what I wanted to say, but I was not able to put it into words.’  He reads: “Linguistically, the author is never anything more than the man who writes, just as I is no more than the man who says I…. The Author is supposed to feed the book – that is, he pre-exists it, thinks, suffers, lives for it; he maintains with his work the same relation of antecedence a father maintains with his child. Quite the contrary, the modern writer (scriptor) is born simultaneously with his text; he is in no way supplied with a being which precedes or transcends his writing, he is in no way the subject of which his book is the predicate; there is no other time than that of the utterance, and every text is eternally written here and now … his (the author’s) hand, (…) borne by a pure gesture of inscription (and not of expression), traces a field without origin – or which, al least, has no other origin than language itself, that is, the very thing which ceaselessly questions any origin.” And then the point: “Once the author is gone, the claim to ‘decipher’ a text becomes quite useless. To give an Author to a text is to impose upon that text a stop clause, to furnish it with a final criticism, which can then take as its major task the discovery of the Author…. In a multiple writing, indeed, everything is to be distinguished, but nothing deciphered; structure can be followed, ‘threaded’ (like a stocking that has run) in all its recurrences and all its stages, but there is no underlying ground, the space of the writing is to be traversed, not penetrated: writing ceaselessly posits meaning but always in order to evaporate it: it proceeds to a systematic exemption of meaning.”

What I cannot talk about does not exist for me. This is not an objective fact. Some paragraphs later he explains the meaning of ‘my language’. That is the language that just I can understand, and in the same paragraph, ‘my’ in my world is stressed. So, this is all true for me, but for another person, it can be totally different. Yet, although the limits of the language are, for sure, different for every single person, the fact itself that language limits our world is the same for everybody.

Language shapes our world, gives the world a meaning it didn’t have before language existed. Maybe nobody understood this concept better than Lacan in his text ‘The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious’ by silently putting de Saussure’s concept of signifier and signified back on its feet. For de Saussure a sign, or let’s say a word, was a fraction where the numerator or signified was the concept or meaning (of course not the thing itself, but something the signifier refers to) and the denominator or signifier was the actual word as image, sound or even the pointing finger. The point is that for de Saussure the signified was the nominator, therefor was at the upper part of the fraction, where for Lacan the signifier shifts up occupying the upper part with the signified staying at the bottom. Furthermore, the signifier and the signified are not anymore directly connected or related to each other, but divided by a bar, and the signifier, or better the signifiers are constantly shifting, which means the meaning is created by the surrounding of the other signifiers in the chain of the utterance or text.

This swift of position reflects exactly the both ways of thinking, the first where the outside world comes first, and language is merely considered a way of talking about the existing world, whereas the latter is the opposite where the world has been created through language, where the most important relationship is not between the signified and its signifier, but rather between the many signifiers in the chain which create meaning. This is an understanding where a word alone has hardly a meaning itself, but only when it is put in a chain with other words. 

Three completely different writers, the first a philosopher, the second a linguist, the third a psychoanalyst, all three interested in totally different things, coming from completely different angles, but bearing the same thing in mind: the importance of language to our species.

And then there is a fourth, Wole Soyinka, one of Africa’s most important intellectuals, Nobel price winner in literature. He comes from a more political point of view, when he stated: Language is part of the armory of human resistance (Does It Really Matter What People Call the So-Called Islamic State?, in: The Atlantic, 2016, 06) Actually, I would like to cite the whole article (by Uri Friedman), but will concentrate on some sentences of Wole Soyinka: “Rejection of the self-ascribed goals of an enemy is a critical part of the defense mechanism of the assaulted. Whenever an unconscionable claim is denied, rejected, openly derided, it erodes the very base of the aggressor’s self-esteem.” He talks about the IS or Islamic state: “we insist on respectfully referring to them as a state. Such proponents of spurious egalitarianism fail a crucial test of responsibility to truth and language. Yes, there’s freedom of expression, but there’s also freedom of choice of expression. And that does not cost much.” And one sentence that is always true, that reflects the fact that language does not merely represent the world how it is or, more precisely, how it looks to us, but that is shapes reality: “Language is hardly ever neutral. … [Journalists] have no choice but to make a choice.” So, he makes clear that this way of treating language is a moral obligation, and that language can change the world.