defined in this way is fundamentally a questioning. At the close of a lecture called "The Question of Technology," given some time ago, I said: "Questioning is the piety of thinking." "Piety" is meant here in the ancient sense: obedient, or submissive, and in this case submitting to what thinking has to think about. One of the exciting experiences of thinking is that at times it does not fully comprehend the new insights it has just gained, and does not properly see them through. Such, too, is the case with the sentence just cited that questioning is the piety of thinking. The lecture ending with that sentence was already in the ambiance of the realization that the true stance of thinking cannot be to put questions, but must be to listen to that which our questioning vouchsafes—and all questioning begins to be a questioning only in virtue of pursuing its quest for essential being. Accordingly, the title of these lectures, even if we provide it with a question mark, does not thereby alone become the title for an experience of thinking. But there it is, waiting to be completed in terms of what we have just remarked concerning the true attitude of thinking. No matter how we put our questions to language about its nature, first of all it is needful that language vouchsafe itself to us. If it does, the nature of language becomes the grant of its essential being, that is, the being of language becomes the language of being.
Our title, "The Nature of Language," has now lost even its role as title. What it says is the echo of a thinking experience, the possibility of which we are trying to bring before us: the being of language—the language of being.
In the event that this statement—if that is what it is—represents not merely a contrived and hence vacuous inversion, the possibility may emerge that we shall at the proper time substitute another word for "language" as well as for "nature."
The whole that now addresses us—the being of language: the language of being—is not a title, let alone an answer to a question. It becomes a guide word, meant to guide us on our way. On that way of thinking, the poetic experience with the word which we heard at the beginning is to be our companion.