pure arbitrariness here? If not, is it then perhaps only a question of linguistic convention? That is, perhaps everyone agrees to use certain words as signs for definite representations and to connect the word “table” with the representation of this particular thing. What is common is then only the sameness of the word “table,” used to denote any individual table. Furthermore, there is nothing like the unity and sameness of an essence corresponding to the one word “table”; the whole question of essence comes down to a matter of grammar. There are only individual tables, and beyond them there is no such thing as an “essence” table. What is called that way is, from a critical standpoint, only the sameness of the sign for naming individual tables, the only real ones.
But precisely that which characterizes the table as table—that which it is and distinguishes it in its whatness from the window—is in a certain manner independent of the word and the linguistic formations. For the word of another language is different phonetically and orthographically and yet it means the same thing, “table.” This “one and the same” first provides purpose and consistency to the agreement in linguistic usage. Accordingly, the essence must have already been posited in advance, in order to be signifiable and expressible as the same in the same word. Perhaps genuine naming and saying constitute an original positing of the essence, although certainly not by means of agreement and convention but through dominating speech, which provides the standard. At all events, the essence does not at all tolerate a subsequent deduction—neither from the agreement in linguistic usage nor from a comparison of individual cases.
§22. The search for the ground of the positing of the essence. Ordinariness of an acquaintance with the essence — enigma of a genuine knowledge of the essence (grasping of the essence) and its foundation.
We are seeking what gives the positing of the essence its ground and its legitimacy, in order to rescue it from arbitrariness. In all these reflections we encounter again and again the same thing: that a grasping of the essence (as well as a mere acquaintance with the essence) is already what provides legitimacy and a standard; accordingly,