According to the correctly understood and hitherto valid determination of the human being as animal rationale, language is given concomitantly with this being, so surely that the converse also holds: the human being is given only concomitantly with language. Language and the human being determine each other reciprocally. How does that become possible? Are they both in a certain respect the same, and in what respect are they so? In virtue of their belonging to beyng. What does it mean to belong to beyng? The human being, as a being, belongs among beings and so is subject to the most general determination according to which the human being is and is such and such. But this does not distinguish the human being as the human being; it merely makes this being, as a being, equal to all other beings. Yet the human being can belong to beyng (and not merely belong among beings) insofar as this being draws out of such belongingness, precisely out of it, the most originary human essence: the human being understands being (cf. Being and Time); the human being is the deputy of the projection of beyng, and the stewardship of the truth of beyng constitutes the essence of the human being as grasped out of beyng and "only" out of it. The human being belongs to beyng as the one appropriated by beyng itself for the sake of the grounding of its truth. As so appropriated, the human being is consigned to beyng, and such consignment indicates the preserving and grounding of this human essence in that which human beings themselves must first make their explicit property (with reference to which they must be more authentic and more inauthentic), i.e., in Dasein, which is itself the grounding of truth, the abyssal ground thrown out and borne by beyng (event).
But how does language relate to beyng? If we may not consider language something given and thus something whose essence is already fixed (since the task is first to "find" its essence), and if beyng itself is "more essential" than language (insofar as language is taken as something given, a being), then the question must be posed in a different way.
How does beyng relate to language? Yet in this formulation as well, the question may be misunderstood, inasmuch as it now merely reverses the earlier relationship and again takes language as something given, to which beyng establishes a relation. To ask how beyng relates to language is to pose the question, how does the essence of language originate in the essential occurrence of beyng? It would seem, however, that the answer is already presupposed thereby: language originates precisely out of beyng. But every genuinely essential question, as a projection, is determined on the basis of what is to be projected and so anticipates its own answer. The essence of language can indeed never be determined otherwise than by naming