Langage et métaphysique chez Heidegger et chez Wittgenstein

Abstract

The object of this paper is to try a comparison between Wittgenstein's critique of metaphysical statements and Heidegger's project of a «phenomenological destruction of the history of ontology». It is at first necessary to recall that in Tractatus Wittgenstein establishes a transcendental difference between what can be said (meaningful statements) and what can only show itself and has to be passed over in silence (meaningless metaphysical statements). But this leads Wittgenstein to refuse metalanguage and to prohibit all questioning of his own position as a philosopher, that is to say to what could be named a «paradoxical transcendentalism». On the contrary, Heidegger, in bringing to light the ontological difference, which does not allow to define Being as a real predicate or to enunciate Being in the form of predicative statements, is led to question the antepredicative foundation of the propositional language or logos apophantikos, which is nothing else than the transcendence of Dasein. He thus gives an answer to Wittgenstein's parodoxy by showing that there is apophansis only on the basis of a more originary hermeneia. A comparison between Heidegger's «hermeneutics of facticity» and Wittgenstein's analysis of language games as life forms can then be performed, in so far as the hermeneutic dimension of understanding is not completely absent in Wittgenstein's Investigations, in spite of his instrumental conception of language.