16
that I experience, in speaking, how the matter looks. Speaking is not a mere occurrence that occasionally takes place. This speaking about something with others is at the same time a self-expressing. These are inseparable structural aspects of the λόγος. Later we will have to consider this structure in order to show where that which is designated as speaking has its genuine home.
The expressed “lies fixed,” is a κείμενον. The κείμενα ὀνόματα, precisely as κείμενα, as “fixed,” are available to others; they are κοινά, they belong to each.18 When a word is expressed, it no longer belongs to me, and thus language is something that belongs to everyone; specifically, in such a way that a fundamental possibility of life itself is vitally given in precisely this common possession. Often the expressed is still only spoken—consumed in mere words without an explicit relationship to the matters spoken about. Therein lies an intelligibility that is common to all. In growing into a language, I grow into an intelligibility of the world, of language, that I have from out of myself insofar as I live in language. A common intelligibility is given, which has a peculiar character of averageness. It no longer has the character of belonging to an individual. It is worn out, used, used up. Everything expressed harbors the possibility of being used up, of being shoved into the common intelligibility.
This speaking, then, that I have comprehensively determined here, is utilized by the Greeks in order to determine the being of the human being itself in its peculiarity, and not only in the explicit consideration of the life and the being-there of humanity as they are put forward in philosophy, but also in the natural view of them. The human being is determined as ζῷον λόγον ἔχον, a “living being,” though not in accordance with the modern biological concept. Life is a how, a category of being, and not something wild, profound, and mystical. It is characteristic of the “philosophy of life” that it never goes so far as to inquire into what is genuinely meant by the concept “life” as a category of being. Life is a being-in-a-world. Animals and humans are not at hand next to one another, but are with one another; and (in the case of humans) they express themselves reciprocally. Self-expressing as speaking about . . . is the basic mode of the being of life, namely, of being-in-a-world. Where there is no speaking, where speaking stops, where the living being no longer speaks, we speak of “death.” The being of life is to be generally understood, in its ultimate ground, through this basic possibility of life. Speaking, then, refers to the being-context of the life of a specific way of being.
Ἔχον is to be understood in the determination ζῷον λόγον ἔχον in a fully fundamental sense. Ἔχειν is determined in Book Δ, Chapter 23 of the Metaphysics as ἄγειν, “to conduct” a matter, to be in a way because of a “drive” that originates from this way of being.19 Language is possessed, is spoken, in such a way that speaking belongs to the genuine drive of being of the human being. Living, for the human being, means speaking. Thus this preliminary clarification
18. Met. Ζ 15, 1040 a 11: τὰ δὲ κείμενα κοινὰ πᾶσιν.
19. Met. Δ 23, 1023 a 8 sq.: τὸ ἄγειν κατὰ τὴν αὑτοῦ φύσιν ἢ κατὰ τὴν αὑτοῦ ὁρμήν.