Abstract

It is the purpose of this dissertation to show the importance of Heidegger's work on language to the rest of his thinking, and to show that in order to understand much of his work, we must take into account the work on language. If we read Heidegger backwards and forwards from On The Way to Language, a movement from the placing of the question of being, through a question of language, to a question of dwelling becomes evident. ;I begin, in Chapter I, by showing that Heidegger's work on the origins of metaphysics in early Greek thinking, and his attempt to open up the question of being in Being and Time, move thinking toward a question of language. As Heidegger moves toward and with the question of the nature of language, his thinking makes significant departures from traditional ways of thinking. In my second chapter, I make some specific suggestions regarding those things to which we need to be particularly attentive in order to follow what occurs. Chapters III and IV are devoted to reading and thinking through the text, with two primary foci: how are we to understand the nature of language and how are humans, human language, and the things of which language speaks held together? The final chapter discusses the way in which thinking through this question of language is crucial to the understanding of three of the central issues of Heidegger's work: the overcoming of metaphysics, the issues concerning technology, and Heidegger's emphasis on poetic language. These issues come together in the shape of a question of dwelling. ;To dwell is to experience a change in the way one thinks and the way one is with language and things. Dwelling leaves behind relations of dominance and subordination. The disclosive configuration of humans, language and beings becomes a disclosive configuration of mortals, language and things. To attend to and care for that disclosive configuration, as it both reveals and conceals things, is to dwell. To attend to that disclosive configuration as it comes to language is to think