Reading Heidegger's language

A few days ago I got an email from someone reading the blog here. It asked some general questions about reading Heidegger's "The Thing," saying the following:

I am a little handicapped with Heidegger (I think) because I do not speak German. "The Thing" is probably the easiest Heidegger essay to parody, especially since one spends so much time reading about the thingliness of the thing and the thing's thingness. So - here's what I am wondering. What are the connotations and the denotations to the words Heidegger uses in this essay in German? I am assuming that Heidegger is using "Sache" for "thing" as this is the most direct translation. But I wonder if Heidegger is using other words for "thing" in this essay that I don't know of because of my language barrier. FYI - I am reading the Albert Hofstadter translation in Poetry, Language, Thought.

Now, this I think is a series of great questions. Moreover the way they are asked outlines a particular orientation towards Heidegger that many people, I think, have (I certainly did): it is the orientation that prescribes really wondering what is going on with the words Heidegger is using and why they are so funny, in a way--one could generally say the "style" (but of course this is not how Heidegger would exactly put it), or perhaps the "approach" of Heidegger. Why is it so hard to make sense of? And--and here is the crucial question--does going back to the particular valences of the words he is using help? My answer was no: one really has to try and see the phenomenon Heidegger is getting at before one tries to look at the twists and turns of the language, and especially before one looks at connotations. This risks making a totally denotative Heidegger (I'd say Dreyfus is a bit too far in this direction, at least in his thinking and teaching Heidegger--not so much in his writing), but I would say that this is more profitable than a connotative Heidegger at the stage when you are getting to be familiar with him (reading texts for the first or second time), because the phenomenon is brought to light (especially in its structure) that way. Now, this does not mean the phenomenon is separable--by any means--from the words and their connotations: what usually happens is that there is a path of thought being pushed through by each sentence and word, and one has to respond by altering the phenomenon accordingly to bring it further and further to light.
The example of the jug in "The Thing" is a good one. Think of the jug first. Then bring it out bit by bit following the path of the words and their interrelation. Now, this does not mean "picture" a jug, and alter the picture. It means intending towards it, feeling yourself as you would feel about the jug if you were attending to it, that is, attuning oneself to the attending to the jug, and then look at the words and how they reflect this attending and bring out or separate the intention from it. "Reflect," here, of course, is the key word here: it is what makes this an approach focused more on denotation. One has to, in a sense, reduce Heidegger's language to reflection or mere representation of the phenomenon. That is, one has to reduce Heidegger's language to a discourse about the phenomenon. He warns against this himself in What is Called Thinking? where thinking itself is the phenomenon:

The question "What is called thinking?" can never be answered by proposing a definition of the concept thinking, and then diligently explaining what is contained in that definition. In what follows, we shall not think about what thinking is. We remain outside that mere reflection which makes thinking its object. Great thinkers, first Kant and and then Hegel, have understood the fruitlessness of such reflection. That is why they had to attempt to reflect their way out of such reflection.
-What is Called Thinking?, 21

I am recommending this against Heidegger, then. But I am also convinced that one can then correct this reduction of the language precisely by resubmerging it back into the path of thinking that the phenomenology (the alteration of the phenomenon in its exposition, from what is formally indicated to what is essential) demands. This, at least, is a good way to begin to approach Heidegger, I think, even though it risks setting up a dialectic of sorts. But I think it stays true to what Heidegger has to say about the path of thought:

When thinking attempts to go after a matter that has claimed it, it may happen that on the way it undergoes a wandering. It is advisable, therefore, in what follows to mind the path of thought rather than its content. To dwell properly upon the content would simply block the going-forward of the talk.
-"The Principle of Identity," in Identity and Difference, 23, translation heavily modified

In short, this means thinking on the "matter" (Sache) that gives thought. One can see that looking for connotations here doesn't and wouldn't add anything unless this is done beforehand. This was what I was trying to get at in my (impromptu) response, below: what "Sache" means and why it is what, in the thing, requires or asks for thinking. Here is what Heidegger has to say about this Sache in "The Onto-theo-logical Constitution of Metaphysics:"

This seminar [which this essay concluded] made an attempt to begin a conversation with Hegel. A conversation with a thinker can be concerned only with the matter of thinking. [...] The matter of thinking presses upon thinking in such a way that only thus does it bring thinking to the heart of the matter and from there to thinking itself.
-"The Onto-theo-logical Constitution of Metaphysics," (in the same volume as above), 42

The German is more interesting and more elucidating. Stambaugh, however, precisely because she thinks connotations mean too much here, does not translate the whole of it in the above passage (she thinks these connotations are untranslatable):

Dieses Seminar versuchte, ein Gespräch mit Hegel zu beginnen. Das Gespräch mit einem Denker kann nur von der Sache des Denkens handeln. "Sache" meint nach der gegebenen Bestimmung den Streitfall, das Strittige, das einzig für das Denken der Fall ist, der das Denken angeht. Der Streit aber dieses Strittigen wird keineswegs erst durch das Denken gleichsam vom Zaun gebrochen. Die sache des Denkens ist das in such Strittige eines Streites. Unser Word Streit (ahd. strit) meint vornehmlich nicht die Zwietracht sondern die Bedrängnis. Die Sache des Denkens bedrängt des Denken in der Weise, daß sie das Denken erst zu seiner Sache und von dieser her zu ihm selbst bringt.
-"Die Onto-theo-logische Verfassung der Metaphysik," 107

I'll see what I can do here to resist Stambaugh and bring it out, as it bears upon precisely what we mean by "matter:"

This seminar sought to begin a conversation with Hegel. A conversation with a thinker can be concerned only with the matter of thinking. "Matter" means according to the given determination of the point of contention--that contention that alone is, for thinking, the point that thinking tackles. The contending or contention however is not by any means only broken into by thinking, as it were, like picking a fight. The matter of thinking is the contention in a point of contention. Our word contending [Streit] (Old High German strit) means primarily not a confrontation [between two things] but a conflict. The matter of thinking makes thinking conflict in such a way that only thus does it bring thinking to the matter and from there to thinking itself.

Better translations are very possible. Bedrängnis is tough for me here and so I decided to play with the word "conflict" as both a noun and a verb (thus the "makes" in the last sentence--though that is way too causal for Heidegger): I hoped it thereby retains some of its affinity with "affliction." Regardless, the point (which I hope to be proving by example) is that if you got the phenomenon here, then the "play" on the words, their connotations, is more of the matter for the translator than the person who is thinking through and with Heidegger. And that the "Sache" itself is what is important: as this passage makes clear, it is what is at the essence of a point, what besets thinking and calls out for it (the Latin root of contention is contestare: to call out for a witness to testimony). It is that which does not make thinking stand over and against what is to be thought (another thinker's thought, for example), as if to confront it and struggle with it that way. It is that which is singular or one in any such engagement with what is to be thought: that which brings thinking to other thinking, that in which both have their being such that any confrontation between them is only possible in this one essential conflict. Insofar as language enters into this, it will be only to open up that essential conflict. That means that one doesn't really dispute with another thinker, for example, by quibbling over connotations--or at least this only happens after the essential has been touched.
In the end, it was interesting to even think again about the difference between Sache and Ding: I think if you were too immersed with Heidegger you wouldn't even think again about the fact that the two have serious affinity connotatively in German. I certainly was too immersed here--a bit too dogmatic as I say at the end. But you see that language here is precisely coming in for me when I already think I have a clear sense of the phenomenon. I guess this means that, in short, language in Heidegger should, ideally, act more as a corrective to the phenomenology than as something that communicates it. This would be true, then, for both newcomers and those to whom Heidegger is familiar. Anyway, here is the response:

To my knowledge, the word Heidegger is usually using is "das Ding" for thing, not "Sache." You're not wrong though: in German one can use either word for "thing." But for Heidegger, the reason it's not the latter is because "Sache" ususally means "the matter" or "the issue," not something more like an object, a stuff, an item, which is closer to what Ding means. Heidegger generally seperates the two because the first, in its more broad scope, is closer to what phenomenology tries to get at: "die Sachen selbst" is what Husserl says one has to go towards when looking at the phenomenon. In this sense, "Sachen" here means not what it is usually translated as ("the things themselves"), but something closer to "the matter at hand" or "for thought"--in short, and in Husserlian terms, the essence of whatever is concerning the phenomenologist, what it is as it is, that is, what it means for whatever to be what it is as such. This is different from it being a Ding--so different, in fact, that what Heidegger is doing in "The Thing" is precisely looking at das Ding so as to discern what about it makes it a Sachen for thinking, a matter for thinking or thought, that is, his type of phenomenology (different, of course, from Husserl's). In this sense, what is the Sachen here about the Ding is precisely its "thingliness," that is, what makes it, as a thing, be a thing--what makes it a thing as such. The odd words here--"thinghood" "thingliness"--are trying to refer to the thing in its being, that is, the thing in what makes it what it is, its as such, its essence (although one has to understand essence differently than with Husserl--but that's another issue somewhat).
The only other word Heidegger will be using repeatedly here for "thing" is Objekt: but this will only be translated as "object," never as "thing," precisely because, as you know, the essay is trying to get at the bottom of the difference between Ding and Objekt, and see the thing underneath, as it were, the object--the object being an ob-ject, what stands-apart-or-against us, as Heidegger says (taking ob- as the latin prefix for "standing-apart"). The point is to see the table, for example, or the jug, as something I can pick up and use, not as a set of points in Cartesian space--as I'm sure you know.
All this said, I don't think hunting around in the German is really worth your time: Hoftstader is usually pretty good at translating and Heidegger himself isn't usually trying to deceive you or play on words in a way that would repay this. What he does when he plays on words is groups together cognates, so as to show you an affinity between them: thus he'll gather together a whole bunch of words that start with über- or Ab-, or have -schick- in them (a word in itself meaning something, for Heidegger, like destination, which, if you grant Heidegger the affinities he is trying to piece together, makes up Geschehen, history, and Schicksal, fate, etc.)--but all of this is trying to work out the phenomenon, to show you certain things are part of its structure and are so because they are related to how we attend to them and other phenomena (which we might not expect the same attention to reside within). And if you haven't got a sense of this (for example, in "The Thing," the sense of a negative space inside the jug, that at once is and isn't space because it is meant only to contain, to lack, to hold in, and never to push out, like a wall would), you're going to be lost no matter how much German you look at. Frankly, my German isn't that good. You just pick up on the crucial distinctions (like that between Sache and Ding for Heidegger) by reading enough Heidegger--glancing at the German only occasionally when Heidegger draws attention to it or uses a phrase continually ("proximally and for the most part," for example, in Being and Time: the only reason I know the German is cause I got curious and was like, I wonder what the hell that phrase is after all! and looked it up.).
And, one more thing: Heidegger will always be easy to parody. Only when you got a sense of what he's getting at under his funny language does the drive to imitate him get serious--and often then, you're probably too serious about whatever Heidegger is talking about. If you want to look at the origin of that language and the necessity for its use, you really have to just ground Heidegger back in phenomenology. Otherwise he just looks ridiculous and obsessed with certain "intrinsic" aspects of German. And while this latter thing might be true, insisting on it doesn't get you anywhere when you are trying to understand him: it is said that Merleau-Ponty remarked that he didn't like the later Heidegger precisely because of this linguistic factor or obsession, and focused on his early work only for this reason. While Merleau-Ponty is on some level right (the workings of the language are a layer to phenomenality that is not exactly obvious or by any means traditional--though Husserl himself, it can be argued, insisted on similar things), it shouldn't just make you put down a bunch of the work: you have to keep yourself from doing that. I would say, though, that it is a healthy impulse, and it shouldn't be gotten rid of in principle: it's surprising how far Heidegger can take you away from what you are familiar with, even if you aren't suspecting him of anything, and you actually do feel repulsed at particular points by whatever he is saying. Keep that up: without it, you end up a little too dogmatic and you end up not understanding, I think, the operations of uncovering that Heidegger is really getting at.