In this 1950 lecture, Heidegger attempts to give an account of the nature of language. He rejects the dominant view that language is an activity of human beings in which they express their feelings and thoughts. The distinctive character of language is that it speaks (Die Sprache spricht). To understand the nature of language, we must bring it to its place of beyng, that is, its own gathering unto Ereignis. Language spoken purely is poetry. Accordingly, Heidegger approaches language through a poem of Georg Trakl: A Winter Evening.
Language speaks, but what is “to speak” in this sense? A poem speaks when it names entities in their being. The naming calls and thus brings closer what it calls. The call brings the presencing of what was previously uncalled into a nearness. Yet, in calling it here, the call has already called out to what it calls. The calling calls into itself and therefore always calls here into presence and there into absence. When language calls, it bids things to come to presence as sheltered in absence. Bidding is inviting, and inviting invites things to gather to themselves sky and earth, mortals and divinities. Things called in this way let the fourfold stay with them. The gathering is the thinging of things, that is, the unfolding of world, in which things abide. Language bids things to come to world and world to come to things. The two modes of bidding are different but separated. World and things traverse a middle in which they are one. The intimacy is a difference. The intimacy of world and thing is present in the separation of the between, that is, the difference. The intimacy of the difference is the unifying element of the διαφορά. It carries out world in its worlding and things in their thinging. The difference of world and things discloses and appropriates things into bearing a world and world into the granting of things. In the bidding that calls things and world, what is really called is the difference.
The difference keeps world and things in repose. To keep in repose is to still. It is in the double stilling of the difference that stillness takes place. Language speaks as the ringing of stillness (das Geläut der Stille). Human beings are delivered or “owned over” to language as the reverberation of this stillness. Only because human beings as mortals belong within the ringing of stillness are mortals able to speak. Thus, the speech of mortals is also a calling that names, and a bidding that bids things and world to come. In its purest form, mortal speech is spoken in the poem. Human beings speak in that they respond to language. Responding is a speaking that listens to the stillness of the difference.
Translated in Poetry Language Thought.
Unterwegs zur Sprache (GA 12)