Quotation
Last reviewed:
“Language is the house of being.”
Martin Heidegger · Phenomenology · Modern · 1947
What does it mean?
Language, he writes in the Letter on Humanism, is the house of being. Being comes to word there. Language is not a tool we pick up to label a world already finished. A rival reading hears a mystic slogan, impossible to cash, or a claim that changing words is the whole of politics. The sentence rules out a purely instrumental theory of language. It does not tell you which house a given vocabulary is.
Did Martin Heidegger really say this?
The library’s label is Paraphrase or translation. Standard English of die Sprache ist das Haus des Seins. In the letter, human beings dwell in that house, and thinkers and poets are its guardians. The sentence is his.
Where it comes from
Letter on Humanism (1947)
Approximate date: 1947.
How to use it
Treat the words you live in, the names for work, for neighbours, for what is wrong on a street in Swansea, as a house you inhabit rather than as stickers. Changing the words is not nothing. It is not everything. The sentence does not say which of those you are doing this week.
A mindset reading
If you cannot say what the sentence rules out, you do not yet have a use for it. Repeating 'house of being' is easy. Saying what a purely instrumental theory would have claimed, and why he refuses it, is the actual reading.
Understand the philosophy
The letter answers French existentialism and distances him from a humanist slogan of 'man'. Thinkers and poets, he says, are guardians of the house. That guardianship is not a compliment you can detach from the politics of the man who claimed it.
- meaning
- knowledge
- mind
FAQ
What does it mean?
Language, he writes in the Letter on Humanism, is the house of being. Being comes to word there. Language is not a tool we pick up to label a world already finished. A rival reading hears a mystic slogan, impossible to cash, or a claim that changing words is the whole of politics. The sentence rules out a purely instrumental theory of language. It does not tell you which house a given vocabulary is.
Did Martin Heidegger really say this?
Paraphrase or translation. Standard English of die Sprache ist das Haus des Seins. In the letter, human beings dwell in that house, and thinkers and poets are its guardians. The sentence is his.
Which work is it in?
Letter on Humanism (1947) Approximate date: 1947.