I: And just now you mentioned the phrase "house of Being," which would suggest the essence of language.
J: Thus we have indeed stayed on the path of the dialogue.
I: Probably only because we, without quite knowing it, were obedient to what alone, according to your words, allows a dialogue to succeed.
J: It is that undefined defining something ...
I: ... which we leave in unimpaired possession of the voice of its promptings.
J: At the risk that this voice, in our case, is silence itself.
I: What are you thinking of now?
J: Of the Same as you have in mind, of the nature of language.
I: That is what is defining our dialogue. But even so we must not touch it.
J: Surely not, if by touching you mean grasping it in the sense of your European conceptualizations.
I: No, those conceptualizations art not what I have in mind. Even the phrase "house of Being"" does not provide a concept of the nature of language, to the great sorrow of the philosophers who in their disgruntlement see in such phrases no more than a decay of thinking.
J: I, too, find much food for thought in your phrase "house of Being"—but on different grounds. I feel that it touches upon the nature of language without doing it injury. For if it is necessary to leave the defining something in full possession of its voice, this does in no way mean that our thinking should not pursue the nature of language. Only the manner in which the attempt is made is decisive.
I: And so I now take courage to ask a question which has long troubled me, and which your visit now almost compels me to ask.