Deep Thoughts: Heidegger on the world disclosing itself via language

Dr Temple Grandin, the autistic animal expert who designs humane slaughterhouses, says she thinks in pictures, not in language. I was thinking of this when I read the bit below about what Heidegger said, according to Nikolas Kompridis.

Heidegger says that the world is disclosed in language itself, and isn't something which is first disclosed independently of language. To Dr. Grandin, the world is disclosed in pictures, and that seems to me a more primordial disclosure than language. Pictures are closer to the world than language, which is an abstracted code, whereas pictures spring from the world itself. Dr. Grandin says the fact that she thinks in pictures makes her closer to animals than us unautistic folks can get, because she believes animals think in pictures, too. Perhaps Heidegger's view accords best with how blind people see the world; perhaps for them the world discloses itself in language, because language is all sound to blind people, as the world is all sound, too.

'In his later philosophy, Heidegger's account of world-disclosure takes a "linguistic turn" -- or, rather, makes this turn in an ontological rather than in a semantic-logical direction. Breaking with the conception of language in Being and Time, where language (Rede) opens up or uncovers in a different light something which has already been disclosed independently of language (through concerned involvement with what we encounter in the world), the later Heidegger attributes to language a "primordial" (ürsprunglich) world-disclosing function. It is language which first discloses the horizons of meaning in terms of which we make sense of ourselves and the world. Although the notion of linguistic world-disclosure has been traced back to Herder's and Humboldt's theories of language, and is certainly implicit in Nietzsche, the challenge contained in this notion is first formulated in its most original and radical terms by Heidegger. Heidegger not only lingustifies disclosure, he historicizes it as well, making possible accounts of the formation and transformation of historical epochs by tracking changes in ontologies (changes in the "understanding of being").'