is even today still fundamentally obscure. Language—which every day grows and every day dissolves, which changes from generation to generation or lies dead for centuries—is still entirely unexplained, as is the peculiar being of language itself. In other words, basically the kind of being that pertains to this phenomenon which is the topic of all philology and linguistics is, in the final analysis, ontologically obscure. Nonetheless we are able to say something about the being of language, insofar as language is possible, only because of the human capacity to understand—that is, existence itself, to which the structure of understanding belongs. And because existence, as understanding and sensemaking, is intrinsically historical, so too the particular kind of being [152] of that manifold of words that we call our vocabulary as a whole, or language, is also historical.

Of course, this determination is still quite empty, but even so, it indicates that the phenomenon of language—taken now in the narrow sense of its linguistic form, separated somehow from the content of the meaning—this whole structural interrelation of linguistic forms can itself be understood only in terms of the historicity of existence.

At this point we shall not go into the phenomenon of language as such. We will mention the phenomenon only in terms of our focus on meaning, in which language is grounded. In keeping with this founding matrix of linguistic and verbal sounds bound up with understanding and sense-making, we must also keep separate some questions that one asks (usually in an erroneous way) about language. The question about how language began is fundamentally different from the question about the origin of meaning. The question about how a particular language (or language as such) began or developed—if it is a possible line of questioning and investigating—presupposes that one has already cleared up the question about the origin of meaning as such. So we begin to see the depths we are being led into by the task of understanding, in all its basic dimensions, something as simple as the spoken sentence: “This chalkboard is black.”

We now limit our specific investigation to a broad analysis of the as-structure and its function as the foundation of the statement. The question about the basic structure of λόγoς has led us beyond the phenomenon of the “as” and further down the path to the phenomenon of meaning, which is mentioned in the title of this section (§12). Our understanding of the as-structure itself stands or falls with the possibility of a more penetrating interpretation of sense-making and understanding.Our question now is not first of all about the origin of meaning. It is, rather: “What function does meaning or the [153] as-structure have as regards the possibility of those statements that have the distinguishing characteristic of being able to be true or false?”