Becoming Literate: Heidegger, Language and the 'Forgetfulness of Being'

Abstract

This paper draws attention to the little studied area of what it means to be literate. It begins with a brief consideration of being an artist or a historian. The aim here is to open the discussion onto the idea of 'being literate', and of how I see significant problems with current definitions and of how individuals are positioned as language users. In arguing for a richer notion of being literate, the paper draws on the work of Martin Heidegger and his identification of a 'forgetfulness of being' in metaphysics and epistemology. In exploring aspects of Heidegger's work on language and the earlier work of American writers and philosophers, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, the paper identifies similarities in how humans undergo a thinking experience with language. This then leads into a consideration of Heidegger's existential frameworks of temporality, spatiality and mortality in relation to Emerson and Thoreau and of how these concepts relate to language and to the idea I am pursuing of being literate. The paper concludes that a relationship to language, expressed in an idea of what it means to be literate, is a basic existential structure in our lives and offers a more meaningful vision of being literate than current dominant definitions allow.