Resumen de Being With and In Language
To grasp Ueda’s phenomenological conception of language, one must distinguish two approaches: The first takes language as the transcendental condition of all experience; the other assumes no words touch any contour of one’s experience or reality. Ueda’s approach to language sides neither with the former nor the latter, or, one might say, synthesizes aspects of both. For him, language is dynamic, always present, intentionally or unintentionally, and thus consciously or unconsciously. In this view, experience and language are not opposed or contradictory, but rather continuously complement and demand the other. Ueda’s concept of Urwort (“originary word,” kongengo 根源語), represents this dynamic act of language made visible. A discussion of Ueda’s phenomenology of language elucidates one of the most important concepts of his thought in general, that is the “openness” (hirake 開け), which shows itself as the undefinable border of one’s horizon of experience. In this paper, as an interpretation of Ueda’s approach, language is assumed to be a dynamic transformative movement between speech and speechlessness, based on a “limitless openness” (kagirinai hirake) whose contours can appear in the emergence of linguistic experience as Urwort.
