Facs
Transcript
communication, which use great words and deteriorize them.
Now I feel these things as blasphemy against something which has divine roots, namely the human possibility of encountering one's reality, including oneself, and expressing this in words in which ultimate concern is implied; and the use of this kind of creation for purposes in which the creativity is gone and the words are used, not in their power but in only one element of their meaning.
I said that there is much protest going on against all this by the poets and writers insofar as they are artistic. Prose or poetry, novel or drama, it is all the same: there we have the protest – the tremendous function about which I will speak more later – to try to save man's encounter with reality, and the expression of it in language, from this complete deteriorization and destruction. But the demonic situation – “demonic” meaning structures of destruction, against which one cannot resist so well – this situation (that the new words, used perhaps by a poet in order to open up a new level of reality which could not be seen or heard any more, because everything was abused), that this is then used just for that thing against which they are fighting: for advertising and the propagandist use of their language. So words which are newly born and are still [innocent(?)], become sick ... This is the tragedy of language.
As I said, creative language is born out of encounter with reality. Therefore the original creation of language shows different forms of ultimate concern in basic characteristics of the different languages. And I will give you a few examples for this.
It was always astonishing for me that the Greek language, before the philosophers came into the picture, produced the concept τὰ ὄντα, that which is being (meaning “things”), that which is, that which has, being. Even today it is difficult to communicate the meaning of these two Greek words, τὰ ὄντα (“the,” “beings”); but the Greek language produced these two words even before the philosophers used them to enter, through this door opened by the Greek language, into the fundamental problems of philosophy, namely the problems of being and non-being. In this way, one can say the greatest philosophy in Greece was the Greek language. Greek philosophy was created potentially in the moment in which the Greek language created words like “ta onta," or “eidos” (“idea”), later used by h.