fail to happen—that language will call to us from there and grant us its nature. We leave the speaking to language. We do not wish to. ground language in something else that is not language itself, nor do we wish to explain other things by means of language.
On the tenth of August, 1784, Hamann wrote to Herder (Hamanns Schriften, ed. Roth, VII, pp. 151 f.):*
If I were as eloquent as Demosthenes I would yet have to do nothing more than repeat a single word three times: reason is language, λόγος. I gnaw at this marrow-bone and will gnaw myself to death over it. There still remains a darkness, always, over this depth for me; I am still waiting for an apocalyptic angel with a key to this abyss.
For Hamann, this abyss consists in the fact that reason is language. Hamann returns to language in his attempt to say what reason is. His glance, aimed at reason, falls into the depths of an abyss. Does this abyss consist only in the fact that reason resides in language, or is language itself the abyss? We speak of an abyss where the ground falls away and a ground is lacking to us, where we seek the ground and set out to arrive at a ground, to get to the bottom of something. But we do not ask now what reason may be; here we reflect immediately on language and take as our main clue the curious statement; "Language is language." This statement does not lead us to something else in which language is grounded. Nor does it say anything about whether language itself may be a ground for something else. The sentence, "Language is language," leaves us to hover over an abyss as long as we endure what it says.
Language is—language, speech. Language speaks. If we let ourselves fall into the abyss denoted by this sentence, we do not go tumbling into emptiness. We fall upward, to a height. Its
*[Johann Georg Hamann. Schriften. Edited by F. Roth and G. A. Wiener. Berlin:
G. Reimer, 1821. 8 Parts, the last in 2 subdivisions, VIIIa and VIIIb. —TR.]