300 music, philosophy, and modernitylinguistics or analytical philosophy, is regarded instead primarily as a
means of carrying information, doesn’t that mean that the results of
any investigation are just determined by this initial assumption, so that
something essential about language may be obscured by investigating
it in this way? The latter investigation would belong to metaphysics 1 ,
whereas Heidegger’s assertions about the ‘house of being’, which are
not primarily concerned with language as information, would belong
to metaphysics 2.
The difference in question relates to the difference between ana-
lytical and hermeneutic approaches to language (see Wellmer 2004 ).
As we have seen, Heidegger comes to equate metaphysics 1 with mod-
ern natural science, which is the culmination of the objectification of
the world that begins with the emergence of Western philosophy. With
respect to language,Being and Timecan, as Lafont argues, be regarded
as still seeking a version of metaphysics 1 , which tries to transcend the
world-disclosure of particular languages in the direction of a philosoph-
ical account of ‘the basic forms of a possible articulation (‘Gliederung’)
of the meaning of all that can be understood’. In contrast, Besseler’s
more pragmatic approach, via music, to ways of being in the world does
not need to demarcate ‘basic forms’ in this manner, and is open to dif-
fering ‘ways/melodies of human existence’ across history in differing
cultures. Lafont’s further claim is that Heidegger’s later work also relies
on a prioritisation of language as a semantic condition of possibility of
meaning over its pragmatic use in engaging with other language-users
and the world. All such engagements therefore take place within a hori-
zon of disclosedness which is ‘given’ by language, rather than produced
by interaction with the world and other speakers. The idea of such a
horizon makes the idea of metaphysics 2 in relation to the later Heideg-
ger problematic.
Heidegger insists, Lafont maintains, on a ‘strict separationbetween the
[ontic] “uncoveredness of entities” and the [ontological] “disclosed-
ness of their being”, or between inner-worldly experience and world-
disclosing context of meaning’ (Lafont 1994 : 255 ). The latter therefore
determines the former, and must be immune to correction by it.^22 In22 Lafont concludes that Heidegger therefore levels the distinction between ‘referential’
and ‘attributive’ use of language, between speaking of the ‘object as such’ and the ‘object
in the how of its manner of being given’ (Lafont 1994 : 321 ). Such a difference is present
in our everyday linguistic practice, but it is not clear how much follows from this. There
may be no clear ‘x’ in relation to which we may disagree about correct attributions. These
would seem to require the ‘as structure’ for what is at issue to emerge as anything distinct