Reality in itself, in its stupid existence, is never intolerable: it is language, its symbolisation, which makes it such. So precisely when we are dealing with the scene of a furious crowd, attacking and burning buildings and cars, lynching people, etc., we should never forget the placards they are carrying and the words which sustain and justify their acts. It was Heidegger who elaborated this feature at the formal-ontological level when, in his reading of "essence or Wesen" as a verb ("essencing"), he provided a de-essencialised notion of essence. Traditionally, "essence" refers to a stale core that guarantees the identity of a thing. For Heidegger, "essence" is something that depends on the historical context, on the epochal disclosure of being that occurs in and through language. He calls this the "house of being." His expression "Wesen der Sprache" does not mean "the essence of language," but the "essencing," the making of essences, that is the work of language:

[...]language bringing things into their essence, language ‘moving us’ so that things matter to us in a particular kind of way, so that paths are made within which we can move among entities, and so that entities can bear on each other as the entities they are... We share an originary language when the world is articulated in the same style for us, when we "listen to language," when we "let it say its saying to us."[Pp. 94-95]

Let's unravel this a little. For a medieval Christian, the "essence" of gold resides in its incorruptibility and divine sheen which make it a "divine" metal. For us, it is either a flexible resource to be used for industrial purposes or a material appropriate for aesthetic purposes. Another example: the castrato voice was once the very voice of angels prior to the Fall; for us today, it is a monstrous creation. This change in our sensitivity is sustained by language; it hinges on the shift in our symbolic universe. A fundamental violence exists in this "essencing" ability of language: our world is given a partial twist, it loses its balanced innocence, one partial color gives the tome of the whole.

Pp. 67-68

¶ 9:25 PM