over beyond itself and the poet. This is for the time being an assertion. It entails the acknowledgment that something inceptual comes to pass [sich ereignet] in the word.
We have ventured something. Are we also those who wait? We have to be if we want to hear the word of the poetizing. For only the poetizing itself can make known to us whether and to what extent it is of such an essence as the assertion claims. In this, both the essence of the word and of language in general must come to light for us. Yet here, too, we, for our part, can in turn contribute a few things, if right at the beginning we attend more precisely to a routine phenomenon of “language” and of the word, namely, the “polysemy” of every word.
Most of the time we regard such multiplicity of meaning as a deficiency, since it readily gives rise to misunderstandings and becomes a means whereby we are led astray. For this reason, we endeavor to eliminate the deficiency that resides within such multiplicity of meaning. What is demanded is lack of ambiguity in discourse and accuracy of the word. When language is made into a vehicle of communication it has to conform to being a means of transportation and conform to traffic regulation. In order to save time and increase the force of its impact, the word is abbreviated and appears as a compressed amalgam of letters. The word becomes a traffic sign like the arrow, the circle with a line through it, or the triangle.
Yet for a long time now, namely, since the very emergence of metaphysics in Plato’s thinking, there has existed a special academic discipline in which one can supposedly learn, among other things, the production of univocal word-meanings and “concepts.” This discipline is still today called “Logic.”
§6. The univocity of “logic” and the wealth of the genuine word out of the inexhaustibility of the commencement
That “Logic” demands univocity from word-meanings, and that likewise the practical, technical, and scientific use of language as a means of transportation drives in quite different ways toward what is unambiguous––all this attests only to how decisively the word and its telling, taken on its own terms, is multiple in meaning. This multiplicity of meaning, and what we name as such, does not originarily rest upon a negligence in the use of words but is rather the already-misconstrued reflection of the word’s essential wealth. As soon as we regard language in terms of “univocity” and “polysemy,” we are already conceiving the word according to the standards of “Logic.”