like a conveying of experiences, for example, opinions and wishes, from the :inside of one subject to the :inside of another. Dasein-with is essentially already manifest in attunement-with and understanding-with. Being-with is "explicitly" shared in discourse, that is, it already is, only unshared as something not grasped and appropriated.
All discourse about ... which communicates in what it says has at the same time the character of expressing itself. In talking, Dasein expresses itself not because it has been initially cut off as "something internal" from something outside, but because as being-in-the-world it is already "outside" when it understands. What is expressed is precisely this being outside," that is, the actual mode of attunement (of mood) which we showed to pertain to the full disclosedness of being-in. Being-in and its attunement are made known in discourse and indicated in language by intonation, modulation, in the tempo of talk, "in the way of speaking." The communication of the existential possibilities of attunement, that is, the disclosing of existence, can become the true aim of "poetic" speech.
Discourse is the structuring of the attuned intelligibility of being-in-the-world. Its constitutive factors are: what discourse is about (what is discussed), what is said as such, communication, and making known. These are not properties which can be just empirically snatched from language, but are existential characteristics rooted in the constitution of being of Dasein which first make something like language ontologically [163] possible. Some of these factors can be lacking or remain unnoticed in the factical linguistic form of a particular discourse. The fact that they often are not "verbally'' expressed is only an indication of a particular kind of discourse which, :insofar as it is discourse, must always lie within the totality of these structures.
Attempts to grasp the "essence of language" have always taken their orientation toward a single one of these factors and have understood language guided by the idea of "expression," "symbolic forms," communication as "statement," "making known" experiences or the "form" of life. But nothing would be gained for a completely sufficient definition of language if we were to put these different fragmentary definitions together in a syncretistic way. What is decisive is to develop the ontological-existential totality of the structure of discourse beforehand on the basis of the analytic of Dasein.
The connection of discourse with understanding and intelligibility becomes clear through an existential possibility which belongs to discourse itself, listening. It is not a matter of chance that, when we have not heard "rightly," we say that we have not "understood." Listening is constitutive for discourse. And just as linguistic utterance is
* The there; being exposed as an open place.