Dasein - Monoskop

220 PART III
anything about them, we re-establish the parallel with Wittgenstein:
"Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent". 334 One is
also reminded here of Wittgenstein's doctrine that all logical (conceptual)
truths are so many tautologies.
Furthermore, in the case of both Heidegger and Wittgenstein
a tendency towards linguistic relativism follows from their belief in
language as the universal medium. Wittgenstein thinks that forms of
life cannot be compared 335 since the semantics of different language
games cannot be compared. Heidegger stresses that there are "different
houses of Being" between which communication is hardly possible.
Different languages—or language-families 336 —are informed by
different messages of Being, by different transcendental conditions of
language, hence they cannot be easily related to each other. However,
Heidegger does not elaborate on this point very much. In one
place we are told that "there is no translation in the sense that
the word of one language could ever be, or could be allowed to be,
brought to coincidence with the word of another language". 337 Unfortunately,
Heidegger does not tell us in this context why he holds this
view. The claim could naturally be justified by Heidegger's further
idea—mentioned above—according to which the semantical relation
between a word and the thing it names is ineffable.
The different messages of Being, which inform different languages,
are, when looked at with Heidegger's notion of truth, nothing
but different "illuminations". Since language is a universal medium
in and through which we live in a disclosed world, truth as correspondence
with a non-linguistic referent has to be rejected. Instead,
truth is the process of the disclosing of the world. And precisely because
world-disclosing is a process, it cannot be thought of without
an ever changing area of the undisclosed—parts of which might be
disclosed for another language.
Up to this point I have centered attention on the relation between
Heidegger's thought on language and his belief in language as
the universal medium. In what follows I shall suggest that this belief
also throws an interesting light on some peculiarities of his views on
art. To be sure, this hardly comes as a surprise. After all, for Heidegger
the linguistic work of art has a special status among the different
arts, in that the other forms of art are dependent upon the world-