seen something in the entirety of its essence. The essence of language does not submit to our circumspection, inasmuch as we—we who can say only by reiterating the saying—ourselves belong within the saying. The monological character of the essence of language has its well-joined structure in the rift-design of the saying. The rift-design does not and cannot coincide with the Monologue that Novalis was thinking of, because he represents language dialectically in terms of subjectivity and within the purview of absolute idealism.
Yet language is monologue. This now says something twofold: it is language alone that properly speaks; and it speaks in solitude. Yet only one who is not alone can be solitary; not alone, that is to say, not in separation and isolation, not devoid of all kinship. On the contrary, precisely in the solitary [Im Einsamen] there unfolds essentially the lack of what is in common [der Fehl des Gemeinsamen], as the most binding relation to what is in common. The suffix -sam is the Gothic sama, the Greek ἅμα. Einsam suggests the selfsame, in the unifying of things that belong to one another. The saying that shows opens the way for language to the speech of human beings. The saying needs to resound in the word. Yet man can speak only by listening to the saying, belonging to it; only by means of reiteration is he able to say a word. Such needing and reiterating rest on that lack mentioned above, which is neither a mere shortcoming nor anything negative at all.
We human beings, in order to be who we are, remain within the essence of language to which we have been granted entry. We can therefore never step outside it in order to look it over circumspectly from some alternative position. Because of this, we catch a glimpse of the essence of language only to the extent that we ourselves are envisaged by it, remanded to it. That we cannot know the essence of language—according to the traditional concept of knowledge, defined in terms of cognition as representation—is certainly not a defect; it is rather the advantage by which we advance to an exceptional realm, the realm in which we dwell as the mortals, those who are needed and used for the speaking of language.