Heidegger’s prime interest in discussing language here is to purport language’s elusively creative power, the play of multiple meanings that later writers like Derrida would attach themselves to. Though the factual utterances of what is and has been spoken may be aligned systematically, language as a preexisting phenomenon cannot be restrained or contained before it manifests itself in human consciousness. Such is the phenomenological component of Heidegger’s argument, which studies how Being is constructed by human consciousness, a path not far distanced from language’s ontology, or how language “is” language.

Heidegger’s thesis hinges on the idea that only language manifests the perceptible traits of things of the world, and embodies this in the term ereignis, translated here as “appropriation.” As he states repeatedly throughout the essay, language is the inaugural granting of things in human consciousness, and the ereignis is that original appearance; that which gives rise to the perception of things.

¶ 11:19 AM