again to that philosophical situation that we have already encountered: circularity. This circularity makes itself known now in that we are supposed to speak about keeping silent—and this is highly problematic. For whoever discourses about keeping silent is in danger of proving in the most immediate way that he neither knows nor understands keeping silent.
On the other hand, with the remark that one should not speak about keeping silent, one could sell oneself short all too cheaply and relegate keeping silent, as a dark and “mystical” thing, to the so-called emotional premonition and intimation of its essence. So long as we are engaged in philosophy, this must not be. But we also must not believe that with the help of a “definition” we have come to grips with keeping silent. What is at stake for us now is the minimally necessary clarification that will allow us further to unfold the question about the essence of truth.
The attempt to trace back the essential origin of language to keeping silent seems at first to run contrary to everything that we said at the start about human beings and language when we distinguished the human being from the animal. The animal cannot speak, because it does not have to speak. So the animal is in the happy position of being able to keep silent, and the facts show this quite evidently. Animals certainly do not talk; therefore, they keep silent—indeed, they are silent all the time. In fact, just as the human being, if not simply mute by birth, cannot keep silent at all, we must say, on the grounds of our conception of the ability to keep silent as the essential origin of language, that the animal is prepared for and capable of speaking to a much higher degree, because it can keep silent more—indeed, constantly.
The animal, according to our position, must really have a higher capacity for language than the human being. This is obviously not the case. So we arrive at a remarkable and absurd state of affairs: the entities that have the higher capacity for language are unable to speak, and those (human beings) that have the lesser capacity, because they can hardly keep as silent as the animals, are able to speak, indeed they are even able to construct the most elaborate languages. Human language arises from the inability to keep silent, and consequently from a lack of restraint. The miracle of language is therefore based on a failure. Something has gone wrong here! Let us reconsider!
We came to these remarkable results on the basis of the following assertions: (a) the ability to keep silent is the origin and ground of language; (b) animals are able to keep silent, because they do constantly keep silent—in contrast to human beings. But can animals really keep silent? A superfluous question: animals demonstrate that they can at any given moment. They simply don’t talk. But in order to keep silent, is it enough simply not to talk? Does the window somehow keep