Here’s Martin Heidegger speaking about the state of our relationship with language.
Transcript
In the present age, due to the haste and ordinariness of everyday speech and writing, another relation to language dominates ever more decisively. That is to say, we take language, like everything we deal with daily, as an instrument — namely, the instrument for communication and information.
This notion of language is so familiar to us that we hardly notice its uncanny power. The notion of language as an instrument of information is today driven to extremes. The relation of man to language is undergoing a transformation the consequences of which have not been grasped. The course of this transformation can't be stopped by direct intervention. Moreover, it goes on in the most profound silence.
Certainly, we must admit that language appears in daily life as a means of communication, and as such a means, is used in the ordinary relations of life. But there are still other relations than the ordinary ones. Goethe calls these other relations the deeper ones and says of language: "In normal life, we make do with impoverished language because we only signify superficial relations. As soon as the talk is of deeper relations, there immediately enters another kind of language — the poetic."
What is it then that we, and especially we of today, have to appreciate as worthy of urgent questioning? What is worthy of question is that which has meanwhile intensified into something immeasurable and impenetrable, and is sweeping away our age to we know not where.
What is worthy of question is that for which we today don't yet even know the right name: that the technologically dominable nature of science and the natural nature of the familiar and likewise historically determined dwelling of man are set against one another as two alien domains, and with a constant acceleration, are racing further and further apart.
What is worthy of question is that the controllable nature as the supposedly true world seizes upon all reflection and aspiration of man, changing and hardening man's imagination into merely a kind of calculative thinking.
What is worthy of question is that the natural nature is degraded into the nullity of a mere creation of our fancy, and no longer even addresses the poets. What is worthy of question is that poetry itself no longer serves as a decisive form of truth.
(Transcribed from the subtitles in the video above with minor edits. Note to my German-speaking subscribers: I welcome feedback on the quality of this translation.)
