72 music, philosophy, and modernity
makes something intelligible, but rather the perception’s becoming a
signifier, which moves it away from the immediacy of the perception
into the web of language. Herder actually says something similar, but
regards it as part of the loss of immediacy. In backing up his asser-
tions concerning Herder’s failure, Heidegger claims that Herder has
a ‘very broad conception of language’, because animal ‘sounding in
sensations’ counts as language (ibid.: 160 ), although Herder also says
that human beings are the only ‘linguistic creatures’.
An essential issue emerges, Heidegger argues, when the move is
made from how a word relates to something, like the sheep, which
makes a sound, to how the sound of a word is able to relate at all to
something which does not make a sound. Note how the same ques-
tion can be asked in relation to music: how do perceptible external
sounds relate to ‘internal’, non-sounding emotions? The question is
then ‘how inner and outer word, meaning and sound (‘Laut’), whose
way of being is so different, can be connected’ (ibid.: 201 ). This is a
version of the question of being, of how it is that things are intelligible at
all. Herder’s failure to explain the connection leads, Heidegger main-
tains, to the situation in subsequent theories of language, like that of
Jacob Grimm, where ‘thesound-constitution (‘Lautgefuge ̈ ’) of language
comes to the forefront of observation while meaningfulness in words
moves into the background as somehow already understood’ (ibid.:
209 ). Heidegger’s point is that characteristics are already intelligible
as such in relation to whatever sense they are apprehended by, before
they become ‘sounding’ characteristics. The formation of characteris-
tics is the general answer in metaphysics to what reason is, and this is
precisely what links the study of language to the rest of the sciences, to
metaphysics 1.
Heidegger makes a distinction between two conceptions of the
‘origin’ of language. The first is concerned with the ‘derivation of one
entity from another’, the second with ‘the essential basis which carries
an entity’ (ibid.: 208 ). The conceptions correspond to metaphysics 1
and to his version of metaphysics 2 .Inorder to avoid the former, he
insists that the essence and origin of language are not to be investi-
gated ‘in the sense of another theory’ (ibid.: 215 ), but rather in some
other way which is not specified, because the lecture course ends at
this point. The idea, to be considered in chapter 8 , will be that poetry
reveals this essence precisely because it does not primarily designate
entities. Although Herder’s idea of the mediating role of hearing sug-
gests that he appreciates the issue involved in the second conception,