A REVIEW OF PAUL REGAN

Thesis Statement: Heidegger's use of Language in his analysis of Being does get in the way of understanding Being since the use of language cannot help but worsen the comprehension of being.

Thesis Development

Heidegger, being influenced by the phenomenological descriptive method of his teacher Husserl, finds the accepted interpretation of Aristotle's category of Being, questionable, empty and misunderstood. And so he sets out to make a deeper analysis of being. He sees the need for choosing hermeneutic phenomenology as a methodology because of a human's subjective capacity to understand the meaning of experience through language and thought. Heidegger suggests that we may know what Being alludes but we do not know what the meaning of Being actually is. Human life is known and experienced before language has the capacity to make sense of it. In attempting to explain the question of Being, Heidegger relates it to our state of forgetfulness, stating that we are both aware and yet unaware of it because we are busy with our daily lives. This typifies a Being "thrown" into the world and eventually it finds itself in the struggle to make sense of it while in a pre-reflective awareness and what he refers to as our ‘average everydayness'.

Seeing it appropriate to analyse a new frame of reference, Heidegger referred to an enquiry of being as "da-sein" with "da" meaning "there" and "sein" meaning "to be" or "being there". The search for an objective understanding of Being itself as a critical consideration of the objectification of dasein is facilitated by being ahead of oneself. This is so since humans have first and foremost, the awareness of Being alive and then attempt to make sense of life in thought and language.

Heidegger's question about Being has the interpretation of time as a primordial horizon for understanding Being. Regan asserts that a clearer definition for an understanding about why the word "primordial" is fundamental to the question of Being is that it constitutes the "what" some "thing" in itself develops from. This something is both temporal and ontological.

Regan finds Heidegger's use of language to analyse Being very implausible; having the tendency of turning commonly known terms to signify complex and philosophical issues. According to Regan, Heidegger in his attempt to analyse Being using language risked further concealing dasein within technical neologisms. Literally, Being means existence, but Heidegger's overuse of dasein results in losing its essence and led to confusion and inadequate clarity. Thus, Regan argues that analysing dasein may be considered a futile exercise especially if dasein has difficulty meeting the basic needs of life. Even the question of the meaning of dasein is difficult to articulate, then trying to put it into language may confuse what we already know as tacit knowledge.  We have a unique complexity, which means we are not like other entities and so the idea of studying Being becomes nullified by the name game which reduces human to a named entity. Again, language intervenes to obscure ontological analysis.

Gadamer affirms that language inevitably conceals something that is pre-linguistic language cannot keep up with the advance of communication technology. Language has an inadequacy to keep up with changes in the world and has an inadequacy of understanding what is primordial, ancient and distant in time. Hence, we see language having less significance since it cannot signify all aspect of life.

Question

Language has been somewhat acclaimed to be the vehicle of thought, if we accept that there is an inadequacy of language to conceptualize Being, how then can we understand Being? Is Being unknowable? Or rather is it such that Being is knowable but not communicable since language cannot permeate its very essence?

Conclusion    

What became clear to Heidegger afterward was the problem of language when preparing the question of Being and that he had gone too far too soon. It seems that this primordial Being appears to withdraw from us when applying language to make sense of it.

It is very challenging and somewhat a hair-splitting exercise to venture into the analysis and comprehension of Being without language. Language is seemingly the only tool to understanding Being but when it shows great inadequacy in its methodology, we may be bereft of any plausible means to further into the analysis of being.