human Dasein. The supreme happiness of the first, creative telling is at the same time the deepest pain of loss, for first-born are sacrificed. The language that originarily grounds beyng stands within the fateful necessity of a decline, becoming leveled off into worn-out idle talk that nothing is able to escape, precisely because it gives rise to the semblance that in its manner of saying—if only it were a saying—beings would be reached and grasped. To say an essential word intrinsically entails also already delivering this word to the realm of misinterpretation, of misuse and deception—to the dangerousness of the most direct and contrary repercussions of its determination. Each—the purest and most concealed as well as the most commonplace and shallow— can become caught up in a clichéd way of talking.
The dangerousness of language is thus essentially double, and each of these dangers is fundamentally different: On the one hand, there is the danger of supreme proximity to the gods and thereby to being annihilated by their excessive character; at the same time, however, there is the danger of the most shallow turning away and of becoming entangled in worn-out idle talk and the semblance that goes with it. The manner in which these two conflicting dangers—the danger belonging to the essence of language, an essence difficult to endure, and that belonging to the playful corruption of its essence—intimately accompany one another heightens the dangerousness of language to the extreme. The dangerousness of language is the most originary determination of its essence. Its purest essence unfolds itself from the commencement in poetizing. Poetizing is the originary language of a people (cf. p. 198f.). Poetic saying, however, falls into decline and becomes genuine and then bad ‘prose,’ which eventually becomes idle talk. It is from this everyday use of words, this fallen version, therefore, that scientific reflection on language and the philosophy of language proceed, which then view ‘poetry’ as an exception to the rule. In this manner, everything gets turned upside down. Even when one conceives of language as a means of artistic creation, one remains fundamentally wedded to an instrumental view of language as expression. To conceive of language in this way is a well-established custom, because it seems plausible. Those aspects of language that appear to be most readily graspable, sound and letter, are a sign indicative of meaning, and meaning is a sign indicative of the matter. Thus one might regard it as an almost hopeless prospect ever to accomplish an essential transformation in the experience of the essence of language within the historical Dasein of a people. And yet this is what must occur if indeed a transformation of such Dasein back into the primordial realms of beyng is to be effected at all.
Certainly, the corrupted essence of language can never be eliminated. Yet it can be expressly acknowledged in its necessary domination.