Dasein - Monoskop

218 PART M
this attribution is easily forthcoming as we review some of the main
tenets of the two preceding sections.
Heidegger's pronouncement that language is the house of Being
clearly expresses his belief in the universality of language and
the inaccessibility of semantics. Being is the transcendental condition
of the possibility of there being beings for us; more precisely,
Being is the transcendental condition of the possibility of the disclosedness
of beings in and through language. This transcendental
condition cannot be turned into a being itself, it cannot be expressed
in language. As Karl-Otto Apel has aptly shown, in this sense Heidegger's
Being is similar to the logical form of language and world
in Wittgenstein. 328 Just as Wittgenstein thought that logical form
cannot be expressed in language, so also Heidegger claims that Being
qua Being cannot be treated as something we can talk about. However,
the difference between Wittgenstein and Heidegger lies in the
fact that whereas the early Wittgenstein believes that all speaking
about logical form—and thus the Tractatus itself—is strictly nonsense,
Heidegger believes that there are linguistic means to allude
to Being: these are poetic pictures and tautologies, oblique uses of
language that can at least point towards, or allude to, the inexpressible.
Wittgenstein's practice is nevertheless closer to Heidegger than
his theory. He wrote in the Tractatus a carefully structured work of
philosophy, using various literary and linguistic tools, even though
in the penultimate proposition of his work Wittgenstein had to ask
his reader to consider the entire presentation as so much nonsense.
Interestingly enough, Heidegger was very intrigued with Wittgenstein's
way of making this last-mentioned point, i.e., the metaphor
of the ladder that one has to throw away after having climbed up
(von Herrmann, pers. comm.). 329
For the early Wittgenstein as well as for Heidegger, the inaccessibility
of that transcendental condition is of course nothing but the
ineffability of semantical relations between language and the world.
That we cannot sidestep this transcendental condition means that
we cannot clarify the relation between language and its referent.
Wittgenstein puts this as follows:
In order to be able to represent the logical form, we should
have to be able to station ourselves with propositions somewhere