But we know that this doing violence is what is most uncanny. For the sake of τόλμα, daring,77 humanity necessarily meets with the wretched as well as with the valiant and noble. When language speaks as gathering that needs to use violence, as the taming of the overwhelming, and as preservation, then and only then is there necessarily also loss and lack of discipline. Hence language as happening is always also chatter: instead of the opening up of Being, it is its covering up; instead of gathering to structure and fittingness, it is dispersion into unfittingness. Logos as language does not come about automatically. Λέγειν is needful: χρὴ τὸ λέγειν, needful is the gathering apprehending of the Being of the being <Sein des Seiend>. [From where does the urgent need urge?]78
On 3. Because the essence of language is found in the gathering of the gatheredness of Being, language as everyday discourse comes to its truth only when saying and hearing are related to logos as gatheredness, in the sense of Being. For in Being and its structure, what is, is originally and definitively already a legomenon, as it were: something gathered, said, spoken in advance and spoken out. Now we first grasp the full context for that saying of Parmenides according to which apprehending happens for the sake of Being.
The passage runs (fragment 8, lines 34–36):
“In themselves, apprehending and that for the sake of which apprehending happens belong together. For not without the being <das Seiend>, in which it (Being <das Sein>) is already spoken, will you find (reach) apprehending.”79 The relation to λόγος as φύσις makes λέγειν into the gathering that apprehends,
77. Antigone, line 371.
78. In parentheses in the 1953 edition.
79. Conventional translation: “For thinking and that for the sake of which thinking happens are the same. For not without being will you find thinking.” For Heidegger’s earlier translation of this fragment, see p. 154.