["horen"] and "must feel" can perhaps hearken very well precisely for this reason. Just listening around is a privation of the hearing that understands. Discourse and listening are grounded in understanding. Understanding comes neither from a lot of talking, nor from busy listening around. Only one who already understands is able to listen.
Another essential possibility of discourse, keeping silent, has the same existential foundation. In talking with one another the person who is silent can "let something be understood," that is, one can develop an understanding more authentically than the person who never runs out of words. Speaking a lot about something does not in the least guarantee that understanding is thus furthered. On the contrary, talking at great length about something covers things over and brings what is understood into an illusory clarity, that is, the unintelligibility of the trivial. But to keep silent does not mean to be mute. On the contrary, one who is mute still has the tendency to "speak." Such a [165] person has not only not proved that he can keep silent, he even lacks the possibility of proving this. And the person who is by nature accustomed to speak little is no better able to show that he can be silent and keep silent. One who never says anything is also unable to keep silent at a given moment. Authentic silence is possible only in genuine discourse. In order to be silent, Dasein must have something to say* that is, must be in command of an authentic and rich disclosedness of itself. Then reticence makes manifest and puts down "idle talk." As a mode of discourse, reticence articulates the intelligibility of Dasein so primordially that it gives rise to a genuine potentiality for hearing and to a being-with-one-another that is transparent.
Since discourse is constitutive for the being of the there, that is, attunement and understanding, and since Dasein means being-in-the-world, Dasein as discoursing being-in has already expressed itself. Dasein has language. Is it a matter of chance that the Greeks, whose everyday existence lay predominantly in speaking with one another, and who at the same time ''had eyes" to see, determined the essence of human being as ζῷον λόγον ἔχον† in the pre-philosophical as well as in the philosophical interpretation of Dasein? The later interpretation of this definition of human being in the sense of animal rationale, "rational living being," is not "false," but it covers over the phenomenal basis from which this definition of Dasein is taken. The human being shows itself as a being who speaks. This does not mean that the possibility of vocal utterance belongs to it, but that this being is in the mode of discovering world and Dasein itself. The Greeks do not
* and what calls for saying [das Zu-sagende]? (beyng) [Seyn].
† Human beings as the "gatherers," gathering toward beyng [Seyn]-presencing in the openness [Offenheit] of beings (but with the latter in the background).