[39] character; it signifies something. It is a combination of sounds or letters which signify a thing, or a relation of things, or an action of things--things, relations, actions. All this is directly signified by words, by sounds, or letters. UNDERSTANDING a word, either spoken or written, means combining this combination of sounds, or visual drawings on a paper, with a definite reality. I use the sound "DESK!", or I write the word "desk", and you understand in both cases that this thing, here, is meant. I call this "direct significatory." You can show directly, for the senses, for the external or in some cases internal experience, what is meant. This is non-symbolic. In all these cases, the words, the sounds, or letters are directly significatory. But there is one class of words which are not directly, but indir- ectly, significatory. But before going to them, let us see for a moment how these directly significatory words come into existence. They are derived from the technical dealing with reality, from handling reality. It was one of the important contributions of the philosopher Heidegger^a--whose name you all know in terms of his existentialism^b--that he described the human situation in such a way that our first relationship to reality is not a rela- tionship of looking at things for the sake of contemplation, but it is a relation of handling them, of using them, of making them into tools. The tool-relationship, as I said already in my first lecture, precedes the theoretical relationship. Of course, some element of theory is always implied in the using of a tool, but this is not developed for its OWN sake, before the rise of scientific or other forms of cognition. Therefore we can say our language is, first of all, designating things not as theoretical things, not as things in terms of theoretical description, but as things as tools. And our language shows this character, that it has been produced for the sake of USING the world which we encounter. I come back to this fully when we will speak of religion and the technical realm. But here I only relate it to language. Later, then, the theoretical develops, but also in terms of a direct significatory act. All directly significatory words point to things in time and space. They try to grasp realities as tools, and later on as independent things. Our whole language is created in this way. It includes, however, as I said before, not only things but also their relations and their actions. This produces a very special character of language^c, which we all