Koto ba

Heidegger's late book, On the Way to Language (1959), opens with a philosophical dialogue on the nature of language, between Heidegger himself, identified only as 'Inquirer' (though explicit reference is made to Heidegger's academic life and previous works), and an unnamed Japanese interlocutor, apparently based on Tomio Tezuka, who met Heidegger in 1954. Their conversation overtly centres on one of Heidegger's old students, Count Kuki Shuzo, who died in 1941, and his analysis of iki. In the middle of this dialogue comes the following exchange:

I: What is the Japanese word for “language”?

J: (after further hesitation) It is “Koto ba.”

I: And what does that say?

J: ba means leaves, including and especially the leaves of a blossom-petals [sic]. Think of cherry-blossoms or plum blossoms.

I: And what does Koto say?

J: This is the question most difficult to answer. But it is easier now to attempt an answer because we have ventured to explain Iki: the pure delight of the beckoning stillness. The breath of stillness that makes this beckoning delight come into its own is the reign under which that delight is made to come. But Koto always also names that which in the event gives delight, itself, that which uniquely in each unrepeatable moment comes to radiance in the fullness of its grace.

I: Koto, then, would be the appropriating occurrence of the lightening message of grace [das Ereignis der lichtenden Botschaft der Anmut].

J: Beautifully said!

My bullshit-detectors were, at this point, raging out of control. (I concede the possibility—certainly not the likelihood—of this passage being less stercorine in the original German.) So I pulled out the resources of my address-book and asked Gawain and Steve Languagehat (who in turn asked his friend Matt, of the excellent Japanese-studies blog No-Sword) if there was any validity to the claims Heidegger here makes about koto ba. I was relieved to discover, first of all, that koto ba (or kotoba) is in fact one of the Japanese expressions for language. It's a start! Kotoba seems to be the everyday word, with a semantic range from 'word' and 'speech' through to 'language' itself; it contrasts with the more technical term gengo, used in linguistics. Steve and Gawain were unanimous on this point.

But what is the origin and analysis of kotoba? Matt writes that 'in an earlier period, there were two phrases: "koto-no-ha" (言の葉,"leaves of words/speech") and "koto-ba" (事端, "tips of speech")'. The former referred to 'refined, artistic things like poetry', the latter to 'regular speech'. However, the two words were so similar that they 'proceeded to merge into one'. For this theory, he helpfully cites a number of sources: an 1835 book called Meigentsu, Ōtsuki Fumihiko's Daigenkai (1932-37), and Ōno Susumu's dictionary of Old Japanese (2004 edition). (Can you imagine Heidegger being this pragmatic and concrete?) Matt notes the older theory, that kotoba itself (and not koto-no-ha) means 'word-leaves', but observes that the latest source for this is the 18th-century Wakun no Shiori, and that it has since been discredited. Despite this, Matt thinks it remains a popular etymology, given the superficial identity of ba ('leaves') and the ending of kotoba: 'If you asked the average Japanese speaker (native or otherwise), they would probably give the "word-leaves" definition'. By contrast, Chris Drake, on this 1998 thread, writes that 'even if you personally interviewed 130 million Japanese, very few of them. . . would give 'word leaves' as the primary meaning or consider kotoba vegetative, although more people may have made the association during the period nationalism of the 30s and 40s'.

Gawain gives us some different information. He writes that 'in oldest Japanese (pre-Nara times), as far as we know, koto meaning "business" or "affairs" or "Things" was used interchangeably with the koto meaning speech or words'. [Incidentally, it fascinates me that koto should exhibit the same semantic development of affair to thing as English thing (cf. Old Norse Thing, German Ding) and Latin causa (case, affair) > French chose, Italian cosa.] So we a dichotomy between koto (thing) and koto (word). In fact, Tomio Tezuka himself recalls part of his conversation with Heidegger about the word kotoba, thus (cited by Drake):

I think that the koto is connected with koto [meaning "matter"] of kotogara [meaning "event" or "affair"]. . . the koto of "language" and the koto of "matter" are two sides of the same coin: things happen and become language (kotoba).

Drake adds that this connection of the two kotos 'isn't accepted by any historical linguist I know of; it resembles more of a pun'. Gawain, likewise, remarks that

there is no reason to think that "koto" meaning things and "koto" meaning words are actually the same word; they are written with the same ideogram, but ideograms have sometimes been used purely phonetically.

Perhaps Heidegger would praise Tezuka's remarks, in his own words, as 'playful thinking that is more compelling than the rigor of science'. Gawain also draws a similar distinction to Matt's, between koto ['meaning somehow important speech (sayings, teachings, possibly also magical formulas?)'] and kotoba ['meaning "stuff you said"']. Gawain, like Chris Drake, admits that he doesn't know when kotoba came to mean 'language' in general, although Drake speculates:

Up until 1868, a variety of characters were used, although kotoba was often simply written in hiragana or katakana phonetic scripts. A wild guess would be that the 'word-leaves' combination was chosen to become the official standard because of its elegant courtly heritage by Japanese modernizers and supporters of the imperial system sometime between 1868, when Japan definitively began to "modernize," and the end of the 1880s, when mass literacy (and universal conscription) and a "rationalization" of the language were in full swing.

So this is where Heidegger got his account of ba as 'leaves'. But where does this leave us with regard to the 'appropriating occurrence of the lightening message of grace'? Not very far. Gawain was sceptical from the outset: 'if it's Heidegger, then it is almost certainly mumbo-jumbo'. When I gave him the koto definition, he quipped that it 'sounds like a Chinese menu in Phoenix, AZ'. (He is referring to this sort of thing.) Steve, meanwhile, called the koto definition 'what you call a load of bollocks over there on your side of the Channel'. Matt, finally, admits:

it sounds like nonsense to me. I suppose it depends on if he's already set up definitions for "appropriating", "lightening", "message of grace", etc. If they're all in place, then it might make sense on its own terms, but then it would mostly be about his definitions rather than the Japanese itself.

Heidegger's project, in this book, and this dialogue, is to come to terms with (or at least address) the alterity of Japanese thinking, and consequently of its language. This was a hot topic in the mid-century, when Whorf was still all the rage, and not yet dismissed as a charlatan. It is still a hot topic, and psychological experiments are still being performed, as you can read in Nisbett's The Geography of Thought (2003). But Heidegger's real project is to make strange even Western thinking and language. He has not set up, in any serious way, definitions for the terms listed by Matt. And so we are left with the result that Heidegger's gloss on a supposedly arcane Japanese word is far more arcane, or, less charitably, far less coherent and meaningful, than the word itself. When it comes to Japanese words that few of his readers are likely to know, and still fewer likely to know the history of, Heidegger is apparently quite happy with any old 'playful thinking'.

Heidegger here defines iki as 'the pure delight of the beckoning stillness'. Wikipedia articulates the word's meanings with the adjectives 'simple, improvised, straight, restrained, temporary, romantic, ephemeral, original, refined, inconspicuous'. One can only conclude that there are few minds less iki than that of Martin Heidegger.

(With thanks to my contributors, Gawain, Steve and Matt.)

Update: Gawain has more to say about koto ba. Steve links, requesting more information on the mysterious Sei Shonagon and her putative rivalries. I admit to being much delighted by Steve's description of the Varieties as a 'philosophitorium'—first Google hit! I like to think that he reserves this on-blog approach to words for references to me, but that is probably unsupported by the data. The Laughing Bone links, and tells a cannibal joke.

Update 26/07/08: Peony links, refuting me. To others, my use of the word stercorine seems to be causing problems. One commenter on del.ici.ous wonders what it means; another glosses it with '[sic: better, stercorous]'. I like this! That 'better' is the language of the editor or lexicographer, for instance the OED, which glosses acheilous with 'better achilous'. As for stercorine, the OED doesn't have it, though it does have stercorous, stercoreous, and stercoraceous. For me, the suffix of stercorine has the pejorative connotation of a saccharine, a bovine, or even an anodyne. So I invented it.