Thought, language, and knowledge: does our use of language shape our view of things, and rationality?

What could be more obvious than that people carry over the way they comprehend things through statements onto the structure of things themselves? Yet this opinion, seemingly critical but in reality rash, has first to explain how the carry-over of the sentence structure onto things should be possible without things first having become visible. The issue as to what comes first and sets the rule, the build of the sentence or that of the thing, remains, to this day, undecided. It even remains doubtful whether the question in this form can even be decided.

Basically neither does sentence structure set the rule for the sketch of the build of things nor is the latter simply mirrored in the former. Both builds, of sentence and things, derive, in their natures and in their potential interrelatedness, from a common and more primordial source. In any case, this first of our interpretations of the essence of things – the thing as the bearer of its characteristics – is, in spite of its currency, not as natural as it seems. What presents itself to us as natural is presumably only the commonness of a long-established habit which has forgotten the unusual source from which it arose. And yet that unusual source once struck us as alien and brought our thinking to a sense of wonder.

The confidence in the customary interpretation of things is only seemingly justified. Moreover, this conception of things (the thing as the bearer of its characteristics) is valid not only for simple and actual things, but also for any being whatsoever. It can never help us, therefore, to distinguish beings which are things from those which are not. But more than any consideration: attending carefully to the environment of things already tells us that this concept of things does not meet their very essence, that in which they inhere and rest. From time to time we have the feeling that violence has long been done to this essence of things and that thinking has had something to do with this violence, which is why one swears off thinking instead of taking the trouble to make thinking more thoughtful. But what should a feeling, no matter how certain, do when it comes to tuning into the essence of things, if thinking alone may have leave to speak? Yet perhaps what, here and in similar cases, we call feeling or mood is more rational, namely more perceptive, because it is more open to Being than all “reason” that, having meanwhile become ratio, is misinterpreted as rational. The sidelong glance at the ir-rational, as the misconception of the rational in its thoughtlessness, renders a strange service. To be sure, the common concept of things fits every thing each and every time. Yet it does not grasp, in its grasping, the thing as it is; rather, it falls upon it.

Is it perhaps possible to avoid this seizure, and how? Indeed, only if we grant things as it were a free field, so that they might display their essence directly. Everything must first of all be set aside that, by way of concept and statement, might interpose itself between us and things. Only then do we let ourselves into the undistorted presence of things.

Martin Heidegger, The Origin of a Work of Art