Failures of Understanding

This lecture is concerned with certain puzzles to which Heidegger’s approach to speech phenomena in Being and Time gives rise. More specifically, the discussion focuses on a central claim of Heidegger, the claim that understanding and speech are equally basic and mutually dependent in the constitution of our making sense of what there is. I argue that Heidegger cannot consistently establish this claim. The inquiry also shows something very significant about the finitude of understanding. There are two main parts or sides of the argument: a phenomenological discussion of listening to one another in a speech context, and a conceptual investigation concerning the relationship between understanding and speech.