With it, we are for once simply establishing and coming to grips with something that has still not been thought through at all, something that we still have no place for, even if it seems as if it were an occurrence among us, we human beings, “in” us, as one likes to say.
One would like to treat the particular fact that Being for us is now just an empty word and an evanescent vapor as a case of the more general fact that many words—indeed, the essential words—are in the same situation, that language in general is used up and abused, that language is an indispensable but masterless, arbitrarily applicable means of communication, as indifferent as a means of public transportation, such as a streetcar, [39|54] which everyone gets on and off. Thus, everyone talks and writes unhindered and above all unendangered in language. That is certainly correct. Moreover, only a very few are still in a position to think through in its full scope this misrelation and unrelation of today’s Dasein to language.
But the emptiness of the word “Being,” the complete atrophy of its naming power, is not just a particular case of the general abuse of language—instead, the destroyed relation to Being as such is the real ground for our whole misrelation to language.
The organizations for purifying the language and defending it against its escalating mutilation deserve respect. Nevertheless, through such institutions one finally demonstrates only more clearly that one no longer knows what language is all about. Because the fate of language is grounded in the particular relation of a people to Being, the question about Being will be most intimately intertwined, for us, with the question about language. It is more than a superficial accident that now, as we make a start in laying out the above-mentioned fact of the vaporization of Being in all its scope, we find ourselves forced to proceed from linguistic considerations.