on pet words

Along with every great thinker having one great thought, perhaps every author in every genre has one great pet word that teaches us a lot about what is most important to them.

In Tool-Being I noted that Heidegger’s key pet word is definitely bloß, which is the German for “mere” or “merely.” I was aware of that little quirk of Heidegger’s even before I started on the Gesamtausgabe project, and hence I made a point of marking each and every case where he uses it. I think there must be several thousand of them.

In a way, you could even say that bloß is Heidegger’s key technical term. It appears whenever he wants to mock some “present-at-hand” answer to any question. So in Being and Time we have Heidegger saying that “things are not a mere sum of realia that serve to fill up a room.” When referring to Sophocles’ famous Antigone chorus, he alerts us that “polla ta deina does not refer to a mere present-at-hand piling up of uncanny things,” or something of that sort. And there are literally a few thousand more examples. Heidegger never tires of sneering at Vorhandenheit, and this is one of the factors that led me to put the tool-analysis at the center of my interpretation of him.

In Gibbon’s case, the pet word is “insensibly,” though I realized this too late to keep count. And for Gibbon as for Heidegger, the pet word gives great insight into his thinking as a whole. Gibbon always uses “insensibly” to refer to a complete turnabout in the character of a province, nation, or person, that happened so gradually that no one noticed while it was in progress. And of course, this is Gibbon’s basic point about the decline and fall of the Roman Empire in general: i.e., instead of blaming the fall of the Empire on this or that battle, this or that bad emperor, or this or that sacking of Rome, we should look instead at the gradual and therefore “insensible” decline of the Roman people from intrepid civic-minded soldiers into a race of soft and decadent pleasure-lovers who outsourced defense matters to barbarian auxiliaries.

This may be more universally the case, that every great author has one pet word that recurs precisely because it does a special and necessary theoretical labor for that author. The only other example I can think of at the moment is “eldritch” for Lovecraft, which also recurs continually at key moments.