just as little does this consideration thereby transcend the initial determination of language in which language is posited, indeterminately enough, in relation to beings and in relation to the human being. There has hardly been an attempt, out of this relation to language and on the basis of language, to grasp more originally the essence of the human being and the stance of this being toward beings, as well as the reverse. For that would already require language to be posited, as it were, free of all relation. But then in what is language supposed to be grounded, since language as something objectively present in itself manifestly runs counter to all experience?
Moreover, if we reflect that language "in general" never exists but that it can be only as unhistorical (the "language" of people in a so-called state of nature) and as historical, and if we also fathom how obscure to us is the essence of history, despite the clear findings of historiology, then likewise all attempts to grasp the "essence" of language will seem confused at the outset. All historiological compilations of previous views of language may be informative, but they could never take us beyond the entrenched metaphysical approach of relating language to the human being and to beings. Yet this is indeed the first real question: as regards the interpretation of language on the basis of λόγος, an interpretation that is even necessary historically and inceptually and that pre delineates an incorporation into the metaphysical approach of relating language—did not this interpretation restrict the possibility of a determination of the essence of language to the sphere of metaphysical reflection? Yet if we now recognize metaphysics itself and its questioning in their essential restriction to the question of beingness, and if we achieve the insight that this metaphysical questioning of beings as a whole can nevertheless not ask about everything that is and certainly not about the most essential, namely, beyng itself and its truth, then another prospect opens up here: beyng and nothing less than its most proper essential occurrence could indeed constitute that ground of language whereby language would draw the capacity to first determine out of itself that in relation to which language is metaphysically explained.
The first real question, which at once brings to naught all philosophy of language as such (i.e., as metaphysics of language and consequently as psychology of language, etc.), is the question of the relation of language to beyng, a question which in this form admittedly does not yet reach what is in question. But this relation can be clarified on a path that at the same time keeps in sight the particular domain that always guided the previous consideration of language.