A Conversation on Language

The excerpt below is from an extensive and absorbing dialogue–between a Japanese individual and an Inquirer–and it’s organic and ephemeral qualities allow the listener to feel as a guest who accidented upon a momentary conversation between unknown speakers in an unknown time and space. In fact, the conversation is from a collection of dialogues between Professor Tezuka (of the Imperial University in Tokyo) and Martin Heidegger in 1953 and 1954.

Inquirer: What danger are you thinking of?

Japanese: That we will let ourselves be led astray by the wealth of concepts which the spirit of the European languages has in store, and will look down upon what claims our existence, as on something that is vague and amorphous.

Inquirer: Yet a far greater danger threatens, It concerns both of us; it is all the more menacing just by being more inconspicuous.

Japanese: How?

Inquirer: The danger is threatening from a region where we do not suspect it, and which is yet precisely the region where we would have to experience it.

Japanese: You have, then, experienced it already; otherwise you could not point it out.

Inquirer: I am far from having experienced the danger in its full extent, but I have sensed it–in my dialogues with Count Kuki.

Japanese: Did you speak with him about it?

Inquirer: No the danger arose from the dialogues themselves, in that they were dialogues.

Japanese: I do not understand what you mean.

Inquirer: Our dialogues were not formal, scholarly discussions. Whenever that sort of thing seemed to be taking place, as in the seminars, Count Kuki remained silent. The dialogues of which I am thinking came about at my house, like spontaneous game. Count Kuki occasionally brought his wife along who then wore festive Japanese garments. They made the Eastasian world more luminously present and the danger of our dialogues became more clearly visible.

Japanese: I still do not understand what you mean.

Inquirer: The danger of our dialogues was hidden in language itself, not in what we discussed, nor in the way in which we tried to do so.

Japanese: But Count Kuki had uncommonly good command of German, and of French and English, did he not?

Inquirer: Of course. He could say in European languages whatever was under discussion, but we were discussing Iki; and here it was I to whom the spirit of the Japanese language remained closed–as it is to this day.

Japanese: The languages of the dialogue shifted everything into European.

Inquirer: Yet the dialogue tried to say the essential nature of Eastasian art and poetry.

Japanese: Now I am beginning to understand better where you smell the danger. The language of the dialogue constantly destroyed the possibility of saying what the dialogue was about.

Inquirer: Some time ago I called language, clumsily enough, the house of Being. If man by virtue of his language dwells within the claim and call of Being, then we Europeans presumably dwell in an entirely different house than Eastasian man.

Japanese: Assuming that the languages of the two are not merely different but are other in nature, and radically so.

Inquirer: And so, a dialogue from house to house remains nearly impossible.

(Heidegger 3-5)

This dialogue goes to the heart of my concerns as they relate to the perception of the message being communicated by the Zapatista movement, but also to my larger overarching concern about communication of ideas, thought, and beliefs between cultures.