Dasein - Monoskop

HEIDEGGER'S ONTOLOGY AND LANGUAGE AS THE UNIVERSAL MEDIUM 219 SI
outside logic, that is to say, outside the world. 330
Replacing 'Being' for 'logical form', and 'language' for 'logic', we
obtain a Heideggerian equivalent to Wittgenstein's pronouncement.
We should also remember that one consequence of the inexpressibility
of logical form in Wittgenstein's Tractatus is the ineffability of the
relation between names and their objects. 331 Heidegger praises the
poet precisely as the person who renounces the relation between word
and object: "The poet's renunciation ... touch[es] ... the relation of
word to thing ..."
It is important to stress here that Heidegger's vindication of the
poet also flows from his belief in language as the universal medium.
From the way Heidegger characterizes poetry (and his "thinking")
it is obvious that the poet is the human being who adopts the stand
that "language is a bad servant, but a good master"—to use Jaakko
Hintikka's happy phrase. The poet is the one who listens to language,
who by his very profession cannot even want to take a stand
beyond language, whose products are untranslatable, who does not
raise claims to correspondence with an independent reality, and who
does not make metalinguistic theoretical claims. At least in this last
respect the Heideggerian thinker-poet closely resembles the writer
of the Philosophical Investigations who equally believes that philosophy
cannot take a stand in which metastatements about language
are possible. 332 For both Wittgenstein and Heidegger metalanguage
is an abuse of language.
However, Wittgenstein does not go so far as to say, like Heidegger,
that philosophical thinking should be thinking in terms of
tautologies. Yet this idea in Heidegger is naturally seen as yet another
consequence of his belief in language as a universal medium.
The reason why the world worlds, the time times, the space spaces,
and the language speaks (die Sprache spricht), is that predicating
anything else of the world, time, space, or language would lead us
to the temptation of turning them into something in toto accessible,
to the temptation of turning them into something we can—without
circularity—speak about. Precisely because the world, time, space,
and language, are universal media, all we can say about them are
tautologies. 333 Since tautological sentences of the kind provided by
Heidegger are attempts to allude to the idea that we cannot say