Ready to Mouth: Language and Givenness in Being and Time

Abstract

Heidegger’s conception of speech (Rede) in Being and Time remains a source of scholarly confusion and disagreement. This paper explains one part of that conception: what it is for the existential ontological foundation of language to determine disclosedness equiprimordially. I formulate a set of interpretative constraints to help us think about what it means to be the existential ontological foundation of anything, show how some dominant explanations of speech (Rede) fail to meet those constraints, and employ the constraints productively to identify the existential ontological foundation of language with the constitutive factors of speech in a way that renders speech equiprimordial with the fundamental structures of disclosedness. Accordingly, I demonstrate that we can hold on to the linguistic character of speech while regarding it as an internally consistent and unified phenomenon. A key part of the demonstration involves identifying a phenomenon, the ready to mouth, which is characteristic of non-discursively given beings but must be described with reference to language.